Dammit Jim!

This is pretty basic knowledge but I’ve helped a few people out recently that had been using Unix/Linux for a while and didn’t know and it sure helped me out when I figured it out. If you had asked me how many quotation marks were on a keyboard before I started doing Bash stuff I would have said two. But I, and it seems most non-programmers, often forget the little ` on the same key as the tilde ~ (to the left of the numbers on standard keyboards). So there are actually three types of quotation marks and each one means something different to Unix:

I’ve been running into math and programming related comics for a while now and always wondered where they were coming from. Today I finally ran across the source. From the topics, it appears the guy is some sort of computer networking mathy type. Some of them are beyond me and I’ve actually learned a bit by googling the ones I didn’t understand like the Alice and Bob one. Anyway, here’s a few samples:

As a biologist, I’ve often thought “I could really use an instrument that did X”. Logging temperatures, locations, depth, light levels and other variables, controlling devices like cameras or servos, and communicating with a computer seem like a task for microcontrollers. So it’s been in my head for a while to try and learn a bit about them.

I’ve ran into a weird bug in Firefox. It seems to mess up p.test:first-letter{float:left;} when there are 2 or more <div> with float:right;clear:right;. Firefox seems to put the floating first letter at the bottom of the first div which seems incorrect to my inexpert judgement. I guess it’s not too common a problem but it’s a little annoying especially since Internet Explorer seems to handle it correctly. An example of the problem should be below. This is with p.test:first-letter {color:blue; float:left; font-size:500%;} in the css file since you can’t use first-letter inline (as far as I know).

I just found an interesting (that’s interesting in the ‘I just spent an hour debugging that?’ sense) characteristic in SAS. If you have a variable, x, and are using the lag of x, do NOT put the lag(x) inside a conditional statement. This can apparently cause some pretty strange results. It is probably easier to see through code than to explain: