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Remember the days when unlimited Internet connections were just that? Unlimited? I'm not talking about a generational gap here—it seems like but a few years ago, that $40, or $60, or $80 you shuffled away to your favorite Internet service provider each month got you true unlimited Internet. You could download Linux distros until your router exploded; stream movies until your eyes exploded; play Counter-Strike until your… well, OK, Counter-Strike never really did use up that much bandwidth.
We live in different times now. Each bit and byte of data you transmit has an effective price tag: You're paying for unlimited service so long as you, like many others, ignore the fine print that specifically tells you just how much unlimited service you're going to get until your ISP gets pissy. Look, we can both agree that this practice is a complete joke, and it's just one more way for your data providers to slowly squeeze the noose until we're all paying $10 per picture we download on our mobile phones.
But is it really that bad?
It goes without saying that America's Internet infrastructure (and pricing models) can vary wildly from those found in the rest of the world. But let's not end the comparison with just a throwaway statement like that: How do American ISPs fare against their cross-cultural brethren? Does it get much worse than this… or better?
The United States
AT&T is one of the latest companies to impose bandwidth restrictions on its user base, with the second-largest subscriber count in the country behind behemoth Comcast. As of May 2, AT&T users on the company's DSL service—capping out at a $20/mo cost—only get 150 gigabytes of downloaded data per month. U-Verse download limits cap out at around 250 gigabytes for a monthly cost of anywhere from $35 to $65, depending on the speed of one's connection. Going over the monthly limits on either plan summons forth a $10-per-50GB surcharge.
Enter, the giant. Comcast was one of the first, and largest, of the American ISPs to launch a bandwidth-capping initiative overtop its previously marketed "unlimited" Internet service. The company's cap for its cable Internet packages sits at 250 gigabytes of downloaded or uploaded data per month, a limit hit by "less than 1%" of the company's user base, it claims. On the plus side, pushing over this monthly limit doesn't incur a fee from Comcast: You merely make yourself eligible for a warning phone call. Exceed the monthly data cap again within six months of this call, and Comcast might pull the plug on your account for a year. The company's high-speed Internet starts at $35 monthly.
This might sound like a broken record by now, but high-speed Internet service from Cox Communications follows Comcast and AT&T's footsteps with bandwidth limits. Regardless of which Internet plan you sign up for—the cheapest plan starts at $35 monthly for 3 Mbps download speeds–Cox limits its high-speed users to 250 combined gigabytes of use per month. There's no specific mention of penalties or fees against those who push past the limit, save for the following line found in the company's Acceptable Use Policy: "Cox may suspend the Service or require you to upgrade the Service to a higher package and/or pay additional fees."
United Kingdom
Jumping up to a TalkTalk Plus package, however, unlocks the Holy Grail: Unlimited broadband use. And as far as we can tell, that's not unlimited as in, "We'll think of a bandwidth cap later." It truly looks like one can download everything under the sun… so long as a user doesn't mind paying approximately $44 per month to do so. TalkTalk doesn't give a raw speed estimate for the service, instead suggesting that, "We'll give you the fastest broadband we can provide; and that will depend on how close you live to the exchange, what your wiring is like and how good your line is."
UK Service provider BT has three main tiers of service for its various broadband plans. The lowest, offering a scant 10 gigabytes per month of access, gives users a 20-megabit download speed and only night and weekend phone calls bundled into the service for a cost of around $21 per month. Next up the ladder is a service plan that offers anywhere from 20-megabit to 40-megabit download speeds and a usage allowance of forty total gigabytes per month—to a monthly cost of around $29. Finally, BT lets loose its unlimited data plans for a total of $45 per month.
However, don't just think that you can flick on the BitTorrent and be done with it. According to BT's policy documents, the company says it reserves the right to manage speeds for "non-critical" applications during peak usage times—typically between four p.m. and midnight during weekdays and 9 a.m. to midnight on weekends. But, hey, the data's unlimited, right?
Virgin Media's the last of the big UK service providers we're taking a look at, but they certainly aren't least. Each of the company's broadband packages comes with the promise of unlimited downloads. That's it. End of story, right?
Were it only that easy. First off, you're paying between around $34 to $73 a month, at maximum, for the broadband service—the rates vary depending on the speeds you elect to sign up for. Second, Virgin Media slaps a big ol' asterisk next to the word "unlimited." While you're free to download as much as you want, the ISP specifically (or rather, not-so-specifically) prohibits the download of illegal or unlawful items, as well as downloading practices that are "inconveniencing other Internet users." And, like BT, Virgin Media throttles users download and upload speeds: This includes standard traffic and P2P traffic, depending on the service tier you've purchased.
As far as we can tell, Japanese service provider ASAHI Net offers no bandwidth limitations for users of its DSL services—including download speeds of up to 50 Mbps and upload speeds of up to 5 Mbps for anywhere from $32 to $48 monthly.
For a mere $80 monthly, Australian ISP Optus offers DSL with a maximum theoretical speed of 20 Mbps across the board. The difference in pricing between the company's many plans directly relates to the amount of bandwidth you're able to consume within a month: $80 gets you 250 gigabytes of peak and off-peak bandwidth, with any overages in the "off-peak" hours being taken out of one's peak time. Should you exceed your limit, you have one of two options: Upgrade to the company's $129 plan which gives you broadband, phone service, and a terabyte of monthly use, or enjoy a super-slow connection (throttled by Optus) down to 64 Kbps or 256 Kbps until your monthly limit resets.
New Zealand
As it turns out, those spreading FUD are sort of right. New Zealand's WorldNet charges anywhere from $31 to $45 (price varies by length of contract requested) for a mighty one gigabyte of monthly use—that's right. One gigabyte. But should you need to download more than just your email, you can always bump up to one of the company's higher service tiers. A whopping 50 gigabytes per month will set you back anywhere from $56 to $70, and unleashing the full powers of the Internet into your home in an unlimited capacity costs between $99 and $109.
On the plus side, WorldNet does give its subscribers two different options for when they go over service: They can either elect to have their speeds reduced to 64 Kbps and deal with it, or they can pay for additional Gigabytes in blocks (five gigabytes for $10 all the way to 200 gigabytes for $165) or a la carte, which comes in at $2 per gigabyte used.
The ISP Kinect has a wide range of available service options, including the ability for you to create your own package from the company's offerings. You start by picking a speed option—either 256/128 KBps for $30 per month or the company's "Full Speed" offering for $41 per month. Then add on the data! This ranges from half a gigabyte of data, which sets you back an extra $2 per month, to 10 gigabytes of data, which costs an extra $15 per month.
For more data, Kinect does offer a Full Speed 100-gigabytes-per-month option. That'll set you back $149 every 30 days. And the company does offer an unlimited, Full Speed data plan option. For whatever reason, it's priced at $105 monthly—cheaper than the 100-gigabyte plan, but it does come with the caveat that Kinect manages traffic to prioritize email and web browsing at certain times for its unlimited customers. Sorry, BitTorrenters: Unlimited might be unlimited, but it ain't fast.
Bits, Bytes and the Brighter Side
Think about it: Would you rather be paying more money for the ability to download things faster, or the ability to download more things? We're no fans of keeping track of Internet use over some crappy web form or annoying software utility. If what AT&T and Comcast say is true, in that very few of its users will ever reach the 250GB monthly download limits, then we'd rather spend our paychecks kicking up our speeds. Here's hoping we never have to start considering Internet use in terms of "prices per gigabyte, per month."
And here's hoping we never have to move to New Zealand.
Maximum PC brings you the latest in PC news, reviews, and how-tos.


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Skyrim crashes whenever I try to save during the second half of the Waking Nightmare quest in the Nightcaller Temple. Is there anything I can do about this?
I encountered this bug recently as well, and in fact you do not need to complete the quest without saving (and good thing too, I was pretty underlevelled for it).
All you need to do is make your way outside and save there. This seems to clear out whatever it is that was causing the game to crash, and allows you to complete the quest with quicksaves:
Update: This issue has been fixed by the v1.9 patch.
From the UESP wiki's "Waking Nightmare - Bugs" article:
Nothing worked for me. Finally I found working solution! You just need to keep pressing F5 (quicksaving until crash). After load you can save without problems. Here is quote how to do that:

subset: commoncrawl


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Thursday, Nov. 15, 2012
HAPPY BIRTHDAY for Thursday, Nov. 15, 2012:
This year emotional extremes mark your year. Know that whatever your mood might be it could be subject to change. You could gain financially through a partner, the lottery or even the IRS. Manage these moments well, and you will be just fine. If you are single, you could meet a foreigner or someone unusual who piques your interest. Spend some time getting to know this person. If you are attached, take a workshop or go on a trip that you have been talking about. SAGITTARIUS can be provocative.
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22 Feb 2012 3:23 AM #1
What is the file size limit?
What is the file size limit of file which i pass to src.sencha.io?
When i trying to resize my photo (jpg ~1.5mb and more) i got 404 error. With smaller sizes all is ok.
22 Feb 2012 1:57 PM #2
- Join Date
- Mar 2007
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- Gainesville, FL
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Are you trying to use the base64 encoding option?Mitchell Simoens @LikelyMitch
Sencha Inc, Senior Software Engineer
Check out my GitHub, lots of nice things for Ext JS 4 and Sencha Touch 2
Think my support is good? Get more personalized support via a support subscription. https://www.sencha.com/store/
Need more help with your app? Hire Sencha Services firstname.lastname@example.com
Want to learn Sencha Touch 2? Check out Sencha Touch in Action that is in print!
When posting code, please use BBCode's CODE tags.
22 Feb 2012 10:08 PM #3
mitchellsimoens, no.
This is image on rghost.net http://tau.rghost.ru/36662029.image
This is sencha.io link http://src.sencha.io/320/200/http://...36662029.image
And it doesn't work.
23 Feb 2012 10:26 AM #4
No. This link:
image: rghost.ru/36674508/image.png
sencha: src.sencha.io/320/200/http://rghost.ru/36674508/image.png
Other image hostings do the same results with this file.
19 Apr 2012 4:35 AM #5
13 Aug 2012 9:33 PM #6
There was no previously documented upsteam image size limit. There was however silent failures when the upstream image was "too large" to process without timing out. With the migration to the new implementation in process, we have put in place an upstream image size limit of 20M and proper error handling for larger images.


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(CNN) - The Barack Obama campaign was armed with actress Sarah Jessica Parker in its first national ad of the 2012 general election campaign.
The 30-second commercial ran Sunday night during the MTV Movie Awards and featured a fundraising pitch from the "Sex and the City" star.
"The guy who ended the war in Iraq, the guy who says you should be able to marry anyone you want, the guy who created four million new jobs. That guy – President Obama – and his wife Michelle are coming to my house for dinner on June 14th," Parker said in the spot.
Parker went on to encourage supporters to enter a contest, for a price, to win a spot at the dinner table "because we need him and he needs us."
Vogue editor-in-chief Anna Wintour, a bundler for Obama, is co-hosting the event at Parker's home and starred in a campaign video last week.
"Sarah Jessica and I have our own reasons for supporting President Obama, and we want to hear yours, so please join us," Wintour, sporting an Obama 2012 scarf around her neck, said in the spot.
Actor George Clooney hosted a similar fundraising effort at his Los Angeles home last month, which raised millions, according to the campaign.
But on Monday, the Republican National Committee capitalized on the Wintour video as evidence the president's priorities are off.
"There couldn't be a better demonstration of this president's misplaced priorities than a glitzy fundraising video release on the same day that marked more unemployed Americans," RNC Chairman Reince Priebus said in a statement.
The national group released a web video on Monday that played the Wintour video alongside economic figures, including the unemployment rate among women, Hispanics, African Americans and young people.
"Obama's focused on keeping his job," text in the ad concluded. "But what about yours?"
The Obama campaign characterized the Republican criticism as "humorous," given that Romney hosted a fundraising dinner last week with real estate mogul and reality television star Donald Trump. Senior Campaign Strategist David Axelrod also pointed to Romney's support from musicians Kid Rock and Ted Nugent, who both support the former Massachusetts governor.
"I don't think they have a whole lot of standing on this issue," Axelrod said Monday on a conference call with reporters.


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Are you prepared for the fiscal cliff? A guide to what it is and how it can affect you
Back when the Bush tax cuts took effect, the only way the Bush administration could get them through Congress was to promise that those tax cuts would expire. December 31, 2012 is the deadline. If lawmakers can't come to an agreement before then, it means higher taxes for you in 2013 and a good chance the U.S. economy will drop into another recession...
Read the whole story here.
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It's a $500 million swing reports, not a $900 million swing. So $400 million growth would go to -$100 million, not -$500 million.
- 9:02 a.m. Dec. 6, 2012
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I've heard it is more accurate to describe this as a fiscal "curb",
but "cliff" sells more newspapers.
I hate to sound like a conspiracy nut, but I imagine "the deal" is already done, and all we see now is the theatrics. Boehnner knew tax hikes would be in the deal; Obama knew that entitlement cuts would be in the deal. We will see a couple of carefully scripted moments of feigned outrage by both sides so that Boehner can appear to still be anti-tax hike and Obama can appear to have defended entitlements as best he could. But in the end, they will dust off the deal made at a White House beer garden summit in 2011... "if you win the election, this will be the deal. If Romney wins, this will be the deal."
- 9:51 a.m. Dec. 6, 2012
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An seventeen trillion dollar debt didn't just happen. It was planned.
- 10:06 a.m. Dec. 6, 2012
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Really? The Deseret News is using the Huffington Post as a reference on something as serious as the financial crisis caused by govermental overspending and ridiculous debt levels?
- 1:50 p.m. Dec. 6, 2012
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The government budget would be "slashed" by 109 billion dollars with this "fiscal cliff". More like shaved or slivered. The annual federal budget is about $3.8 trillion dollars or about $1.3 trillion more than they make. $109 billion is less than 3% on a budget that is 54% over budget. It is like having a monthly pay of $2000 but spending $3080 and "slashing" your spending by about $89 down to $2991. Something big needs to fix this problem of deficit spending and it needs to come with revenue and spending changes. People will get hurt along the way, but it will be much better than if we had to suddenly live within our means all in one big move; something the country needs to eventually do.
- 2:41 p.m. Dec. 6, 2012
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In school, students often were punished for what one, or two others did.
As a grownup, it's the same thing.
"Politicians Happen".
"Liberals Happen".
- 3:35 p.m. Dec. 6, 2012
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worf said "In school, students often were punished for what one, or two
others did. As a grownup, it's the same thing. "Politicians
I absolutely agree with you worf. We are being punished (with high debt) for believing President Bush when he said the diversion into Iraq would pay for itself. Looking back, its sad we were so easily fooled.
- 4:13 p.m. Dec. 6, 2012
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Moderate. Oh how I wish we were only in debt equal to the cost of the Iraq war. This continual blame on Bush for all the current ills only reflects the dumbing down of the American eloctorate.
- 7:29 p.m. Dec. 6, 2012
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Sixty percent of our national debt has come in the passed three and a half years. If Obama gets his additional 1.6 trillion dollar deficit spending, it'll be around eighty percent in four years.
Hmmm? The weapons of mass destruction have just shown up in Syria, and Iraq is still being destroyed with terrorist bombings. Maybe George was right, and Barry wrong with ending things to quickly, and wasting money spent.
Why has our commander sent billions of dollars to Corsi?
- 9:17 p.m. Dec. 6, 2012
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Can't wait until all these self-serving politicians are put in their
place...oh, it will come...after MUCH suffering on the part of the people!
Maybe a handful are worth saving in the end, they lying, cheating, secret works, they will all come forth in time.
- 10:13 p.m. Dec. 6, 2012
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The fools in Congress and the White House simply ignore the fact that the root
cause of their crisis is NOT a lack of taxes, but rather the incessant increases
in spending.
Arguing about raising taxes is a deliberate distraction away from solving the problem by making tough, unpopular choices about reducing spending to levels we can afford.
They want to buy more buckets to bail out a sinking boat, but never want to plug the holes that are causing it to sink.
However, Congress has addressed the pressing issue of removing the term "lunatic" from federal laws, while ignoring, posturing or lying about the spending and tax issues.
- 11:26 p.m. Dec. 6, 2012
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But I thought the economy was fixed! After all, Obama did say that if he
didn't have it fixed, then he deserved to be a one-term president.
People who voted for Obama have no room to complain. This is what they voted for, and now we will all have to suffer the consequences. Polls showed that most people thought the economy was the number one issue, and most people believed that Romney would be better at handling the economy. So why did Obama win? I guess this is what most people want.
I'll tell you that I certainly didn't want this. It looks like we'll have to spend the next four years or so budgeting like crazy (if we budget like Obama budget, then we're in serious trouble) until this guy is out of office. Years from now people will look back and ask "How on earth did that guy win re-election?"
- 12:53 a.m. Dec. 7, 2012
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Wonder if Mitt and Anne are counting their blessings that they don't have to wake up every morning constantly hearing that this and all others things are somehow his fault.
- 8:58 a.m. Dec. 7, 2012
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I think the Democrats want to go over the fiscal cliff... Then they can blame Republicans and judging by the last election....most Americans will believe it.
- 8:59 a.m. Dec. 7, 2012
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Slide 7 is a little ironic. "The president said he would consider lowering
rates for the top 2 percent of earners next year as part of a broader tax
overhaul effort that closes loopholes, limits deductions and finds other sources
of revenue."
Doesn't that sound a lot like Romney's tax plan? You know, the plan President Obama said just didn't add up? The plan all the Democrats said would never work? The plan based on broadening the base and lowering the rates?
- 9:02 a.m. Dec. 7, 2012
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Wow! National deficit increased sixty percent in just three and a half years,
and now we weaken the military.
Why can defense take a cut, but not entitlements?
May our liberal friends get what they voted for.
- 9:04 a.m. Dec. 7, 2012
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Moderate your comments show you have not grasped the problem.
- 6:22 p.m. Dec. 9, 2012
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Everything is going to be fine. Just fine. We know we elected the most qualified man for President. The one who has a track record of solving problems and working with both parties. Everything will be great because our President has a handle on this whole thing. And it just the rich who are going to feel this and they deserve it anyway. But thankfully we have a President who is serious about cutting the deficit and solving the problem. Right? Right? If we just raise taxes on the rich, the problem with be drastically reduced. Right?
- 10:46 p.m. Dec. 9, 2012
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Incompetent House; incompetent senate; incompetent president. We got who we elected. Now we all have to live with it. Greed, pride, immorality, selfishness, deceit--at the top and trickling down through our whole society. Who will be around to pick up the pieces?
- 11:22 p.m. Dec. 9, 2012
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Sometimes I wish the disaster would really happen, just to prove the soothsayers and phony prophets wrong.
- 9:18 a.m. Dec. 10, 2012
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Here's my take. President Obama wants us to go over the fiscal cliff. That is what he is hoping for because then he can swoop in with his magic and fix things with HUGE government programs thus addicting even more people to the government nipple. At that point, no one will want to work for anything because it will be handed to them, therefore, I believe the Republican party will cease to exist as we know it. Everyone will vote Democratic so they can have their handout to barely survive. Do not be fooled by this President, he is smart and calculating.
- 10:07 a.m. Dec. 10, 2012
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"I think the Democrats want to go over the fiscal cliff... Then they can blame Republicans and judging by the last election....most Americans will believe it."
Exactly - and that fact is rather horriying
- 11:10 a.m. Dec. 10, 2012
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My mother is Jewish but my father is Christian and I was raised in the Christian church, but I still have a lot of respect for my Jewish heritage. Would it be wrong to wear a Star of David necklace, or would that offend people?
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Thank you for your sensitivity in asking this question.
As pointed out in comments, you are actually Jewish (whether you follow Judaism or not). But as you say in your question, you've been raised with Christianity and it doesn't appear that you've rejected that. You see Judaism as part of your cultural background, if I'm reading you correctly, the way Christians see some events in the Hebrew Bible as historically important but not personally, religiously relevant. (That is, things like the lives of the patriarchs, the slavery in and exodus from Egypt, the 40 years in the wilderness, and most especially the laws given by God are not generally seen as part of one's core and personally binding; they are part of the background of Judaism from which Christianity formed.)
You should therefore consider the context in which you wear the necklace. In your day-to-day life, are you mainly in secular settings and religion doesn't tend to come up? Sure, I doubt anybody's going to object to that. Be prepared for the occasional person to ask you if you're Jewish. Inoffensive answers there would include "my family is" or "it's part of my background" or "not really, but I like the necklace". While saying "yes" is halachically correct (you are, because your mother is), I would advise against saying that in a setting where people would interpret that as a statement of belief. If you don't follow the Jewish religion, you may confuse people.
I would advise against wearing it in an overly-religious setting, such as when attending church. That's bound to confuse some people, and since some Christian denominations are supersessionist, claiming that their religion replaces God's covenant at Sinai, you could be inadvertantly making a theo-political statement. If you don't mean to it's confusing; if you do mean to, to Jews who know about it, it's somewhat offensive. See also this related question about a necklace containing both a star of David and a cross; some of those issues could apply when wearing a (plain) star of David in a Christian setting.
That must sound like a complicated and long-winded answer to what you may have thought was a simple question. Sorry about that. My bottom-line advice is: consider the message your wearing it might send in the place where you're wearing it, and then decide whether to wear it at that time. I don't want to discourage you from being proud of your Jewish heritage, and I hope that you'll decide to learn more about it over time.
(I don't have any sources. This advice is based on many interactions, and some longer-term relationships, with both interfaith families and converts in training. Figuring out the "identity" part of Judaism, and symbols that convey this identity, can be pretty confusing sometimes.)
The only thing that would be offensive is if you posed as accepting the Jewish faith and then went around telling everyone that they have to believe in Jesus.


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What specific advantages and disadvantages of each way to working on a programming language grammar?
Why/When should I roll my own? Why/When should I use a generator?
What specific advantages and disadvantages of each way to working on a programming language grammar?
Why/When should I roll my own? Why/When should I use a generator?
There are three options really, all three of them preferable in different situations.
Option 1: parser generators, or 'you need to parse some language and you just want to get it working, dammit'
Say, you're asked to build a parser for some ancient data format NOW. Or you need your parser to be fast. Or you need your parser to be easily maintainable.
In these cases, you're probably best off using a parser generator. You don't have to fiddle around with the details, you don't have to get lots of complicated code to work properly, you just write out the grammar the input will adhere to, write some handling code and presto: instant parser.
The advantages are clear:
There's one thing you have to be careful of with parser-generators: the can sometimes reject your grammars. For an overview of the different types of parsers and how they can bite you, you may want to start here. Here you can find an overview of a lot of implementations and the types of grammars they accept.
Option 2: hand-written parsers, or 'you want to build your own parser, and you care about being user-friendly'
Parser generators are nice, but they aren't very user (the end-user, not you) friendly. You typically can't give good error messages, nor can you provide error recovery. Perhaps your language is very weird and parsers reject your grammar or you need more control than the generator gives you.
In these cases, using a hand-written recursive-descent parser is probably the best. While getting it right may be complicated, you have complete control over your parser so you can do all kinds of nice stuff you can't do with parser generators, like error messages and even error recovery (try removing all the semicolons from a C# file: the C# compiler will complain, but will detect most other errors anyway regardless of the presence of semicolons).
Hand-written parsers also usually perform better than generated ones, assuming the quality of the parser is high enough. On the other hand, if you don't manage to write a good parser - usually due to (a combination of) lack of experience, knowledge or design - then performance is usually slower. For lexers the opposite is true though: generally generated lexers use table lookups, making them faster than (most) hand-written ones.
Education-wise, writing your own parser will teach you more than using a generator. You have to write more and more complicated code after all, plus you have to understand exactly how you parse a language. On the other hand, if you want to learn how to create your own language (so, get experience at language design), either option 1 or option 3 is preferable: if you're developing a language, it will probably change a lot, and option 1 and 3 give you an easier time with that.
Option 3: hand written parser generators, or 'you're trying to learn a lot from this project and you wouldn't mind ending up with a nifty piece of code you can re-use a lot'
This is the path I'm currently walking down: you write your own parser generator. While highly nontrivial, doing this will probably teach you the most.
To give you an idea what doing a project like this involves I'll tell you about my own progress.
The lexer generator
I created my own lexer generator first. I usually design software starting with how the code will be used, so I thought about how I wanted to be able to use my code and wrote this piece of code (it's in C#):
The input string-token pairs are converted into a corresponding recursive structure describing the regular expressions they represent using the ideas of an arithmetic stack. This is then converted into a NFA (nondeterministic finite automaton), which is in turn converted into a DFA (deterministic finite automaton). You can then match strings against the DFA.
This way, you get a good idea how exactly lexers work. In addition, if you do it the right way the results from your lexer generator can be roughly as fast as professional implementations. You also don't lose any expressiveness compared to option 2, and not much expressiveness compared to option 1.
I implemented my lexer generator in just over 1600 lines of code. This code makes the above work, but it still generates the lexer on the fly every time you start the program: I'm going to add code to write it to disk at some point.
If you want to know how to write your own lexer, this is a good place to start.
The parser generator
You then write your parser generator. I refer to here again for an overview on the different kinds of parsers - as a rule of thumb, the more they can parse, the slower they are.
Speed not being an issue for me, I chose to implement an Earley parser. Advanced implementations of an Earley parser have been shown to be about twice as slow as other parser types.
In return for that speed hit, you get the ability to parse any kind of grammar, even ambiguous ones. This means you never need to worry about whether your parser has any left-recursion in it, or what a shift-reduce conflict is. You can also define grammars more easily using ambiguous grammars if it doesn't matter which parse tree is the result, such as that it doesn't matter whether you parse 1+2+3 as (1+2)+3 or as 1+(2+3).
This is what a piece of code using my parser generator can look like:
(Note that IntWrapper is simply an Int32, except that C# requires it to be a class, hence I had to introduce a wrapper class)
I hope you see that the code above is very powerful: any grammar you can come up with can be parsed. You can add arbitrary bits of code in the grammar capable of performing lots of tasks. If you manage to get this all working, you can re-use the resulting code to do a lot of tasks very easily: just imagine building a command-line interpreter using this piece of code.
If you have never, ever written a parser I would recommend you do it. It is fun, and you learn how things work, and you learn to appreciate the effort that parser and lexer generators save you from doing the next time you need a parser.
I would also suggest you try reading http://compilers.iecc.com/crenshaw/ as it has a very down-to-earth attitude towards how to do it.
The advantage of writing your own recursive descent parser is that you can generate high-quality error messages on syntax errors. Using parser generators, you can make error productions and add custom error messages at certain points, but parser generators just don't match the power of having complete control over the parsing.
Another advantage of writing your own is that it is easier to parse to a simpler representation that doesn't have a one to one correspondence to your grammar.
If your grammar is fixed, and error messages are important, consider rolling your own, or at least using a parser generator that gives you the error messages you need. If your grammar is constantly changing, you should consider using parser generators instead.
Bjarne Stroustrup talks about how he used YACC for the first implementation of C++ (see The Design and Evolution of C++). In that first case, he wished he wrote his own recursive descent parser instead!
Option 3: Neither (Roll your own parser generator)
Just because there's a reason not to use ANTLR, bison, Coco/R, Grammatica, JavaCC, Lemon, Parboiled, SableCC, Quex, etc - that doesn't mean you should instantly roll your own parser+lexer.
Identify why all these tools are not good enough - why don't they let you achieve your goal?
Unless you're certain that the oddities in the grammar you're dealing with are unique, you shouldn't just create a single custom parser+lexer for it. Instead, create a tool that will create what you want, but can also be used to fulfil future needs, then release it as Free Software to prevent other people having the same problem as you.
Rolling your own parser forces you to think directly about the complexity of your language. If the language is hard to parse, it is probably going to be hard to understand.
There was a lot of interest in parser generators in the early days, motivated by highly-complicated (some would say "tortured") language syntax. JOVIAL was a particularly-bad example: it required two symbol lookahead, at a time when everything else required at most one symbol. This made generating the parser for a JOVIAL compiler more difficult than expected (as General Dynamics / Fort Worth Division learned the hard way when they procured JOVIAL compilers for the F-16 program).
Today, recursive descent is universally the preferred method, because it is easier for compiler writers. Recursive descent compilers strongly reward simple, clean language design, in that it is a lot easier to write a recursive-descent parser for a simple, clean language than for a convoluted, messy one.
Finally: Have you considered embedding your language in LISP, and letting a LISP interpreter do the heavy lifting for you? AutoCAD did that, and found it made their life a lot easier. There are quite a few lightweight LISP interpreters out there, some embeddable.
I've written a parser for commercial application once and I used yacc. There was a competing prototype where a developer wrote the whole thing by hand in C++ and it worked about five times slower.
As for the lexer for this parser, I wrote it entirely by hand. It took -- sorry, it was almost 10 years ago, so I don't remember it precisely -- about 1000 lines in C.
The reason why I wrote the lexer by hand was the parser's input grammar. It was a requirement, something my parser implementation had to comply with, as opposed to something I designed. (Of course I would have designed it differently. And better!) The grammar was severely context-dependent and even lexing depended on semantics in some places. For example a semicolon could be part of a token in one place, but a separator in a different place -- based on a semantical interpretation of some element that was parsed out before. So, I "buried" such semantical dependencies in the hand-written lexer and that left me with a fairly straightforward BNF that was easy to implement in yacc.
ADDED in response to Macneil: yacc provides a very powerful abstraction that lets the programmer think in terms of terminals, non-terminals, productions and stuff like that. Also, when implementing
ALSO WANT TO ADD: this is not a recipe for writing parsers in general, just an example of how it worked in one particular situation.
That depends entirely on what you need to parse. Can you roll your own faster than you could hit the learning curve of a lexer? Is the stuff to be parsed static enough that you won't regret the decision later? Do you find existing implementations overly complex? If so, have fun rolling your own, but only if you aren't ducking a learning curve.
Lately, I've come to really like the lemon parser, which is arguably the simplest and easiest that I've ever used. For the sake of making things easy to maintain, I just use that for most needs. SQLite uses it as well as some other notable projects.
But, I'm not at all interested in lexers, beyond them not getting in my way when I need to use one (hence, lemon). You might be, and if so, why not make one? I have a feeling you'll come back to using one that exists, but scratch the itch if you must :)
Have you considered Martin Fowlers language workbench approach? Quoting from the article
Reading that, I would say that the days of writing your own parser are over and it's better to use one of the libraries that are available. Once you've mastered the library then all DSLs that you create in the future benefit from that knowledge. Also, others don't have to learn your approach to parsing.
Edit to cover comment (and revised question)
Advantages of rolling your own
So in short, you should roll your own when you want to really hack deep into the bowels of a seriously difficult problem that you feel strongly motivated to master.
Advantages of using someone else's library
Therefore, if you want a quick end result use someone else's library.
Overall, this comes down to a choice of how much you want to own the problem, and thus the solution. If you want it all then roll your own.
It depends on what your goal is.
Are you trying to learn how parsers/compilers work? Then write your own from scratch. Thats the only way you'd really learn to appreciate all the ins and outs of what they are doing. I've been writing one the past couple months, and its been an interesting and valuable experience, escpecially the 'ah, so thats why language X does this...' moments.
Do you need to put something together quickly for an application on a deadline? Then perhaps use a parser tool.
Do you need something that you'll want to expand upon over the next 10, 20, maybe even 30 years? Write your own, and take your time. It'll be well worth it.
"Should I use this tried-and-tested 'wheel' or reinvent it?"
The big advantage to writing your own is that you'll know how to write your own. The big advantage to using a tool like yacc is that you'll know how to use the tool. I'm a fan of treetop for initial exploration.
Why not fork an open-source parser generator and make it your own? If you don't use parser generators, you code will be very hard to maintain, if you made big changes the syntax of your language.
In my parsers, I used regular expressions (I mean, Perl-style) to tokenize, and use some convenience functions to increase code readability. However, a parser-generated code can be faster by making state tables and long
Here are two example of my custom-written parsers:
https://github.com/SHiNKiROU/DesignScript - a BASIC dialect, because I was too lazy to write lookaheads in array notation, I sacrificed error message quality https://github.com/SHiNKiROU/ExprParser - A formula calculator. Notice the weird metaprogramming tricks


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AUSTIN (November 7, 2012)—Former University of Texas football coach Darrell Royal, who won two national championships and a share of a third, has died at the age of 88.
Royal suffered from Alzheimer's disease and recently fell at an assisted living center where he was receiving care.
Royal coached Texas from 1957-1976, posted a 167-47-5 record, won 11 Southwest Conference titles and introduced an innovation known as the wishbone offense to major college football in 1968.
He led the Longhorns to two national championships in 1963 and 1969, plus a share of a third in 1970.
Darrell K Royal-Texas Memorial Stadium is named in his honor.
On Saturday, the Longhorns will honor Royal at their home game against Iowa State by wearing "DKR" stickers on their helmets and by lining up in the wishbone formation, which Royal used to such great success, for their first offensive snap.
A public memorial ceremony is scheduled for noon Tuesday at the Frank Erwin Center basketball arena.
Royal will be buried at the Texas State Cemetery in Austin, an honor typically reserved for the state's military and political leaders.
UT head coach Mack Brown called it "a very sad day."
"I lost a wonderful friend, a mentor, a confidant and my hero. College football lost maybe its best ever and the world lost a great man. I can hardly put in words how much Coach Royal means to me and all that he has done for me and my family," he said.
"Coach gave so much more to the State of Texas and college football than he took away. He forgot more football than most of us will ever know, including me. His impact on the game, the coaches and players, the community and the millions of lives he touched, is insurmountable. He will be missed in so many ways," he said.
"I lost my Dad when I was 54, and Coach filled a real void in my life and treated me like family. Sally and I gained a lot coming to Texas and being a part of this tremendous program but no more than our relationship with Coach and Edith. They were our closest of friends. Our heart pours out to Edith and the family and our thoughts and prayers are with her and the family. We will always be there to lend any and all support that we can as she and Coach always did for us," he said.
Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst issued a brief statement in which he called Royal, "a true Texas legend and a great friend who will be dearly missed."
"In his memory, we must continue his fight to find a cure for Alzheimer's disease and put an end to this devastating illness that affects hundreds of thousands of Texans," Dewhurst said.


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FK Zemun - Mid Season 2015/16
Club Info ~ Facilities ~ League Fixture List
Table 2nd-16
Well I am very surprised by this. Only a few adjustments to the team (not as many as I would have liked) and we were propelled to 2nd. I guess I was right about the gulf in class between the two division not being that big. However, If I cam to complete this challenge in Serbia then I will need a herculean effort to topple Partizan. They run away with the league every year yet never do it in Europe. To win this challenge I am going to have to dominate Serbia for quite some time, and at the moment I don't see that happening unless we get the same kind of sponsorship deals and income that Partizan gets. I am aiming for mid-table now, with relegation out of sight now. With the way things are going, Serbias 2nd team Red Star are doing badly and the rest don't seem to be doing well I might hold onto 2nd but I don't expect to.
Key Players
Koffi Moumouni... well where can I start. At the start of the season, with a year left on his contract, I offered a new contract - but he wouldn't even go into negotiations with me. I then faced a stiff decision, do I sell the person that could propel me to the top half of the table or do I let him go for free at halfway? I chose the latter, selling him for a cool £3m... with a cheeky 45% next sale bonus too!
Vladimir Urzikic is my new Moumouni. Top scorer, MOTM assists, exact type of player to Moumouni but even better.
I keep getting news reports Marcao, my Brazilian 21 year old CB, stating that he needs match time fulfill his potential, I have a feeling I will have a Moumouni moment on him. I can't lose this guy whatever I do, he is absolutely solid.
A very bright young talent, Douglas yet to dominate any games but has so much potential I could cry.
Serbian Cup
Not great, lost on penalties in the 2nd round, was hoping for a repeat of the antics from last year but the team was complacent.
Thanks to the cash in from Moumouni, my youth facilities are being upgraded.


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Litter on wheels
Stray shopping carts have blighted Torrington's image for years, and things haven't improved of late. In recent weeks, the Republican-American and Sunday Republican have chronicled work done by Spirits of '76, a local activist group, to round up stray carts and return them to their owners. In one day, the group discovered three dozen carts across the city.
"They're constantly everywhere, and it really does stick out like a sore thumb, especially with the shopping carts in the (Naugatuck) river," group co-founder Keith Farrell told reporter Kevin Litten.
Read more of this story and more!
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FREEPRESS wrote on Sep 10, 2012 6:12 AM:
" As always, punish the owner of the cart and not the person who removed it (stole it) from the store's lot. Hard to believe this is coming from a Republican! "
3rd GenT wrote on Sep 10, 2012 9:22 AM:
" Am I reading this correctly – we're going to punish businesses and the taxpayers for the people who move these carts all over town? And the people who are responsible just go about their daily routine of bleeding the system or vandalizing business property without punishment? If this is true, it's just more of the same and maybe it's time the Major and City Council read "Fixing Broken Windows: Restoring Order and Reducing Crime in Our Communities" by George L. Kelling and Catharine Coles. Fix some of the real problems and we won't have to wonder why the downtown can't attract new merchants. "
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In SWTOR, if you enter a PvP Warzone and are below level 50, your character is automatically "Scaled" to level 50 with a buff called Bolster - but how does that work numbers wise? Are you base stats set to level 50 base stats but the equipment doesn't effect it? Do your stats get multipled in a formula, something like newStat = currentStat*(50/currentLevel)? Anyone have the specifics?
Pre-release the best formula thrown around was roughly described as follows:
Link for this is here: http://www.swtor-life.com/humor/under-the-hood-the-forumulas-behind-the-mayhem/2268/
I would imagine the actual formula is much more complex to take gear into account, however, practice seems to show that "twinked" 50s gear allows a huge advantage, so, the formula, when it comes to light, is not one for the mind-bending math junkies.
Bolster has changed dramatically in Game Update 2.0. Now:
Unfortunately, it is quite difficult to produce anything resembling real numbers because you'd have to test in a huge variety of gear against various opponents in a huge variety of gear, and then repeat for every level combination! However, there is also no need for numbers. You will see a small boost at higher levels due to better skills and the ability to develop a proper rotation and manage your resources (which is why the lowbie PvP brackets are now 1-29 and 30-54) but the intent is for that effect to be minimal, with the real difference coming from personal skill and the Expertise stat.
Expertise has also been completely re-worked. It now has no diminishing returns and is completely linear (your last point is as helpful as the first). All endgame PvP gear has the same amount of Expertise and only differs in the amount of other stats. As noted at the link in my first bullet above:


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5 Photos That Shatter Your Image of Horror Movie Locations
On some level, we know that Saw is happening on a dilapidated soundstage instead of in a dilapidated bathroom, but we pretend not to so that it stays a scary movie instead of devolving into a meditation on how unkind the years have been to Cary Elwes. But sometimes seeing where these horror movies were filmed is so jarring that it makes it impossible to think of them the same way. So at the risk of ruining the horror classics for you, let's point out that ...
#6. The Texas Chainsaw Massacre Farmhouse Is Now a Family Restaurant
While Leatherface is the most famous thing to come out of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, the real star of the movie is the cannibalistic family's freaky house. The plot basically follows different teenagers as they are drawn into a large, dilapidated farmhouse one by one and face various horrors (most of which involve meat hooks). So it's natural to expect that the interior of the building was built on a soundstage, because something so grisly and horrific could never exist in real life, right?
Nope -- turns out that the machinations of fate have seen fit to fashion the home of the most notorious family of cannibals in cinema history into a family restaurant.
Lionsgate, Austex at en.wikipedia
No word on if they kept the original management's policy on dine-and-ditchers.
It's currently the home of the Grand Central Cafe, and they even have a collection of Texas Chainsaw Massacre memorabilia on the second floor, because looking at images of grisly cannibalism is exactly the kind of thing you want to do before eating.
Lionsgate, The A.V. Club
Lionsgate, facebook.com/GrandCentralCafe
"Uh, I'll have the salad."
The weirdest part is that, paradoxically, no one else seems to think this is weird -- some people who've run the place appear to have been comfortable living there at one point, and the news article describing the whole thing makes bland reference to the fact that the "beautiful polished stairway" was of "great significance in the Chainsaw movie" with the kind of charming ignorance you normally only get from a grandmother.
Lionsgate, The A.V. Club
He let her go after she promised a positive Yelp review.
Oh, well. Texans, right?
#5. The Halloween House Became a Chiropractor's Office
Dimension Films
Since Michael Myers (or "The Shape") has the advantage of being an undead mercenary or a living nightmare, he's always needed to rely on atmosphere a little more than his slasher film brethren, which is probably why his home is such an iconic part of the series. It's where he commits his first murder, and he's found an excuse to return there in five of the six sequels he's appeared in. So naturally, the real building must be some kind of haunted nightmare, right? You can't see that much fictional killing without absorbing some terror into your wall paint.
Well, no. Actually, the building is currently home to a chiropractor's office.
Dimension Films, Brent Hoyler
So technically, people are still getting crippled there.
But horror movie fans love their pilgrimages (you're not a true fan until you can stand right in the spot where Michael got shot and flew off the balcony!), and they'll cling to any semblance of terror any way they can, like this video some fans posted on YouTube:
Yes, they're at the house that is now a chiropractor's office, recreating the iconic nighttime POV opening of the first film in broad daylight, with a camcorder, while mysterious women creep into frame with the eerie mystique of someone who just blew their paycheck getting de-subluxated.
Dimension Films, getoffhurt
And with this, the house has fallen behind The Love Guru on the Horrific Myers Things rankings.
Just watch how defanged that opening scene feels now that you know that the room where Michael stabs his sister to death is currently populated by people with lower back pain reading People magazine.
#4. Friday the 13th's Camp Crystal Lake Is a Boy Scout Retreat
Paramount Pictures
If you've seen Friday the 13th, you know that Camp Crystal Lake, the setting of most of the movies that don't inexplicably go into space, is a dirty cesspool of moral compromise. At Camp Crystal Lake, you're more likely to get drunk, have sex, and then put on a hockey mask and get macheted to death than you are to go swimming or make an ashtray out of clay. So of course the real location is now a goddamned Boy Scout camp.
Paramount Pictures, Brett McBean
The scariest thing is their choice in logo font.
Actually, it was a Boy Scout camp first -- a retreat called Camp No-Be-Bo-Sco. All the most iconic scenes were filmed in the same buildings where Cub Scouts were earning merit badges for landscape architecture.
Paramount Pictures, pbase.com
And watching people drown, apparently.
And remember what we said about how horror fans can't resist swarming iconic movie settings so they can show their friends back home? You can get a sense of the camp's frustration by the sheer number of times the Camp No-Be-Bo-Sco website begs die-hard Friday fans to please stay away. They're probably worried about sweaty nerds re-enacting inappropriately violent film scenes while Cub Scouts look on in pants-shitting terror -- because, back in 2011 when they held the first BSA-sanctioned tour, that's exactly what happened.
Paramount Pictures, fridaythe13thfranchise.com
"We've made a huge mistake."
The rules for the hypothetical future tour have some oddly specific caveats, like "Do not call the camp with any tour-related questions" and "Please do not arrive in costume," although that second one is probably for the tourists' sake, since the only thing more embarrassing than realizing you're the 25th person in a 25-person group to decide to dress as Jason Voorhees is having to sheepishly carry your rubber machete around for the rest of the five-hour tour.


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I want to use SPSiteDataQuery to query from one SP farm to another. Both farms exist on the same active directory. What would be the most suitable approach? A custom web service might do it? An ideas will be appreciated
I would suggest creating a web service, and querying the web service from the other farm. I don't think you'll be able to use the SPSiteDataQuery object itself across the farm boundary.
If you want to query across farms, the best way I think is Search. If you efficiently use keyword and full text queries, you can fine tune your search results similar to SPSiteDataQuery (or even better) across many farms without compromising on performance
Taking the step forward, If you have the powerful FAST search you can find almost anything!


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1979 Chevy Impala Body Makeover - Extreme Makeover: Sportsman EditionWritten by on May 1, 2009 Contributors: Jerry Criswell We Take An '84 Impala And Bring It Into The 21st Century
Here's a quick quiz question for you. What's the largest, in terms of numbers of participants, short-track racing division in the country? If you said Street Stock (or Sportsman or Super Stock for that matter) you're right on target. Pound for pound, there are more Street Stocks around the country than any other type of oval-track race car.
The backbone of many a short track's back gate, the venerable Sportsman division is an entry level to intermediate class of race car that has everyone from 16 to 60 years old competing. Cars in these divisions run the gamut, from early '70s 116-inch wheelbase cars to late '80s 108-inch metric chassis and beyond. Those chassis and their squared off, boxy shaped bodies are the staple at both dirt and paved tracks from California to New York. But rarely, do you see a sleek-bodied race car show up in this division. That's about to change thanks to the guys at ARP Bodies.
For years, Jerry Criswell, President of ARP Bodies, wanted to design a body that would fit the 108-inch high rollcage stock-type chassis common in Sportsman divisions everywhere. "We wanted to do a body that looked different from the basic Late Model bodies available and one that might also be more durable and easier to use than the stock steel bodies out there," explains Criswell. The stock chassis-type cars typically have a straighter, longer, and higher (50 inches or more) style rollcage along with a 12-13 inch engine crank height which makes the installation of a current late model body almost impossible. "At best it usually looks bad," he says.
The Problem Most Late Model bodies have a 'cage height of 45 inches or less. They're also generally set back farther on the chassis with the 'cage being laid back as well. Plus, the dry sump engines that most Late Model touring series run are as much as 3 to 4 inches lower than those found in a Sportsman. In the past, if you ever tried to update your sportsman by installing a Late Model body on your stock metric or Impala chassis, you ran into a whole host of problems. In addition to the roof being too small to fit the larger Sportsman-type 'cage, the roof and quarter-panels wouldn't line up, leaving a 3 to 4 inch gap. If you could get the roof to fit, then the wheel openings wouldn't match, largely because a Late Model body is designed to fit a 101 to 105 inch wheelbase chassis. Not to mention the fact that the height of the Sportsman motor will prevent the hood from fitting correctly. The list of problems with this type of body swap goes on and on.
The Solution Enter ARP, taking the concept of an updated Sportsman/Street Stock race car, it designed its NGB Sportsman Body to be versatile enough to fit everything from a 108-inch wheelbase car, up to 118.
Introduced at the Performance Racing Industry trade show in Orlando, Florida, in December 2008, the NGB Body was originally designed to fit the rules of the Mid American Racing Series, the Midwest sanction that runs mostly on - to -mile tracks, but also throws in stops at Road America and the Milwaukee Mile for good measure.
The versatility of the body can be seen in the special trim panels which allow you to fit the quarter-panel wheel openings to your specific wheelbase. The body is also designed to accommodate the taller wet sump-type engines that have to conform to a 13 inch crank height rule. The NGB body has molded-in side flairs that make the fender side taller and allows the fender top to be higher for added carburetor/air cleaner clearance.
Designed to fit a metric chassis with a 62 to 63 inch tread width using the proper 8 inch wheels and tires, the NGB Body's plastic parts come in seven different colors along with complete front and rear window mounting ledges as well as quarter window ledges. You can choose from the Pontiac G8, Cadillac CTS, Chevy Malibu, Dodge Charger, or Lincoln MKS. But enough of the stats, let's get to the transformation.
The Subject Our victim is a '79 Chevrolet Impala sporting an '84 Impala body that was purchased at an end-of-the-year swap meet at Beech Bend Raceway in Bowling Green, KY. This 116-inch wheelbase car was most recently used in figure eight racing, so it had a massive push bar mounted out in front of the radiator. That would have to come off. Plus, as you can see from the photos, the car had neither a bumper nor a grille. The rollcage was also taller and wider than the Mid American car the NGB body was designed for, but as you're about to see, that wasn't a problem. The NGB is one versatile body as we simply mounted it a little higher and stretched the sides a little more.
The Fun Part Yes, we borrowed the name of this article from our friends in TV land. They say demolition is the fun part. Well, in building, or in our case re-skinning, a race car, tearing the body off may be fun, but it's also the time to make sure everything with the chassis is in good shape. Case in point, the entire car looked way better on the outside than it did on the inside once the body was removed. So, the boys at ARP decided it was best to clean it up before mounting the new body.
Flip back to page 56 and you can see the progression of the extreme makeover. It's quite a transformation and we've got a lot more pictures along with the in-depth step-by-step process at www.circletrack.com. Plus, as a bonus, we've got the official Sportsman rollcage measurement and guidelines sheet available for download for free on the website. So, you too can make your Sportsman look this good. Now, don't you just want one of your own?
The Philosophy Behind ItFor the last several years, the older stock-type body panels have become extremely hard to find in salvage yards around the country. Couple their scarcity with the fact that in the past year junk-car prices skyrocketed, most salvage yards cashed in on the high prices of scrap and sold anything older than 10 years. Pre-1997 body panels and the like are getting harder and harder to find.
That in and of itself would be motivation enough for a company like ARP to set about bringing a body to the market, but Jerry Criswell and his team had a better idea.
"These Sportsman/Street Stock/Super Stock divisions are supposed to be the starter/intermediate-type divisions across most of the country," says Criswell. "The problem is that the Saturday night tracks have almost no new blood coming into the sport. I believe updating these cars by giving them a new look with an updated body design, that is easy to work on and easy to replace the components, is the way to help start attracting new blood into our industry."
I can see what Criswell means. My 10 year old thinks that an early '80s Caprice/Impala looks like a brick with wheels, but a Pontiac G8 or a Caddy CTS is a whole other story.
Criswell goes on to say that a car in these divisions that has a smart updated look stands a better chance of attracting a local sponsor. "Let's face it, who wants to sponsor a beat up '79 Caprice? Even the best looking one is basically an antique ... not a collector's item but an old car," he says. "Does the local auto body shop, parts store, eatery, pub, and so on really want to have that in front of their business? Probably not, but a slick looking updated body will not only look great but will easily bring in the crowds."
Sleek, updated bodies can also bolster these divisions at the track. Let's say the local track is having a problem attracting enough Late Models to pay the purse, Criswell says the Late Model-esque look of these new bodies could reinvent the Sportsman division. "How about adding a little to the Sportsman's purse? Let them update their bodies and run them every week as your new Late Models. Take your old Late Model class and run it every other week as your Pro Late Models." It sounds like a radical idea but in the face of dwindling car counts and rising costs in a typical Late Model division, it could be just the thing the short track industry needs.
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These window braces will be removed, along with other braces that were designed for the figure eight racing the previous owner enjoyed taking part in.Once the frame heights were set, the guys at ARP cut tubing and welded each side of the front clip to the steel rack to ensure that the clip didn't move as they cut and removed the front bumper and push bars. They also cut the front bay bars back some to ensure proper hood clearance. A removable bay support cross bar will be added later.Here, a plumb bob is dropped to the center of the front wedge bolt to accurately measure 12 inches forward along the top bay bar. This is the location where they decided to cut the bay bars. From this point, they will cut and notch 1 inch 0.095 tubing, placing it as the new down supports for the bay bar.Just a bit of sanding to knock off any burrs before putting in the Lexan window. ARP offers CNC-cut, pre-drilled, pre-chamfered, black-bordered Lexan windows. We thought it was cool that the black is screened on for an easy fit and durable finish that does not chip off like paint.Clamps will hold the panels together before riveting, but here you can see how easily they will fit together along with the installed window.Special trim panels allow you to fit the quarter-panel wheel openings to your specific wheel base and tread width, anywhere from 108 to 118 inch wheelbases and 62 to 63 inch tread width.


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Nuclear Talks Resume With Offer to Iranians
ALMATY, Kazakhstan—The first day of talks on Iran's nuclear program adjourned Tuesday evening after a 2½-hour session in which international powers presented a new proposal intended to persuade Tehran to scale back its nuclear activities.
The talks, convening Tuesday for the first time since June, were set to resume again on Wednesday when Iranian negotiators were expected to respond to the offer.
The revised offer to Tehran addressed "concerns on the exclusive peaceful nature of the Iranian nuclear program" but was also "responsive to Iranian ideas," said Michael Mann, spokesman for the EU's foreign-policy chief, Catherine Ashton. He didn't give details.
Iranian negotiators were prepared to respond with proposals based on ideas Tehran put forward at the last talks in Moscow, an Iranian official said. Those talks ended without progress.
U.S. officials said they hoped the new offer from representatives of the five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council and Germany, a group known as the P5+1, would lead to a stepped-up pace of talks and a follow-up expert-level meeting set for before the Iranian new year in mid-March. Talks were set to conclude Wednesday.
The Iranians broached issues about the P5+1 offer on Tuesday in bilateral talks with Russia, Britain and Germany, a Western diplomat said.
While Iran regularly holds nuclear talks with the European Union, Russia and China, Tuesday was the first time in nearly three years it has held bilateral discussions with Britain at nuclear talks. U.K.-Iranian relations soured after Iranians attacked and overran the British Embassy in Tehran in November 2011.
"Iran needs to understand that there is an urgent need to make concrete and tangible progress in the talks," Mr. Mann said. "I would say that from our perspective, the onus is very much on the Iranians," he said.
Mr. Mann called Tuesday's talks "useful." Discussions were set to continue Wednesday morning, when "we hope to get some more detailed feedback" from Iran, he said.
Many analysts remained skeptical that the negotiations would resolve the nuclear issue after years of on-and-off talks have made little progress.
"Direct dialogue with Iran can be helpful in managing our differences…but it's not going to resolve them," said Karim Sadjadpour, senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. "The U.S.-Iran conflict isn't a simple misunderstanding that can be resolved with direct talks, it's about a fundamental difference of opinion about how the world ought to be."
Washington and Brussels are pressing Iran to commit to a process to end its production of near weapons-grade fuel, officials involved in the diplomacy said. The U.S. and Europeans are willing, in turn, to ease some of the sanctions on Iran that have cut it off from the global financial system and driven down the value of its currency, the rial, officials said.
Write to Laurence Norman at email@example.com


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Every time I check my stats I see that many of you are arriving here from typing 'How to surrender' into Google. So first up, I love you!
I believe that the moment we step up and ask for help, want to view things differently or even just be willing to try something new we have done half the work already.
If you like this post I now also run a 90 minute one on one Workshop and If you would like to learn with me how to put these ideas into practice in your life then perhaps you might be interested in this Surrender Session?
PLUS: Sign up to my mailing list to be one of the first to receive news about my NEW online course 'Surrender Forever' coming soon!
Now let's get to it!
I believe that i'm co creating my experience with an energy that that is part of me, that surrounds me and that is bigger than me. I like to most frequently refer to it as the Universe, but also it's God or my inner guide. It's my trust in a source of something to have faith in, and often that is just you having a trust in your inner self, your energy and personal power.
Now, when we are blocked in some way, it's usually because we are IN OUR OWN WAY! I resonate with this idea a lot, sometimes I swear I can see myself looming in front of me.
To allow ourselves to let things loosen a little we need to have a bit of an idea what we are giving it up to. Your faith is your unique thing and sometimes the coolest thing to have faith in is your own journey – we can all get behind that right?
I feel connected to my own feelings and totally trust the Universe has my back but can still struggle often to completely relinquish control.
The Ground Rules
Uncertainty is certain but right now in this tiny second there is no fear and everything is as it should be.
To accept flow we need to have an understanding of the present moment. If you'd like some tools to get grounded and present, check out this post!
What has happened in the past no longer exists. The future, whilst abundant with plans is completely fluid. The only thing we can be sure of is the present moment.
If we are obsessive and controlling we grip onto our life so hard that we stop the natural flow, life is much harder and opportunities less apparent.
This is your challenge word, and our task is – to 'let go', we hear it and see it everywhere. We tell ourselves or people tell us a number of things such as – 'Let go of things', 'Let go of control', 'Stop obsessing', 'Don't think about that' and so on.
It sounds so easy.. hey sure let's just let go, woo, great! Wait WHAT!? but doesn't the idea of 'letting go of control' associate with the opposite which would be being 'out of control'? this sounds so negative to me, the idea of being out of control, like we have no power over our lives at all, or that we are making 'crazy' choices, woah 'she's so out of control!'
It's not like that.
When I think of letting go, it is making a pact with my higher self that I will be open to being guided and take opportunities that are given to me, say yes more often, say no when I need to, be forgiving and forgive myself, it's working WITH my life and to experience more happiness and less stress.
This is the word that you need, this is the word to replace control. This is the word that is infinitely better than 'let go'.
I can tell you that 'I Surrender' is the most powerful mantra and thought process I have ever used. It is part of my daily practice. I have found an instant shift in many of my thought processes. I also teach this process to all my coaching clients and everyone gives it a resounding YES.
Why controlling thoughts stop us from moving forward
If we are in our own 'flow' and are listening to our intuition, life moves freely, we have less obstacles and our minds are clearer.
When we spend our time trying to control everything in our life it creates a blockage, we become static and removed from our journey and we blindfold our intuition .
Just writing that down rings so true to me, I can think of so many times in the past where I have put so much energy into trying to control aspects of my life and the outcomes have never been what I 'wanted' or the experience even been at all positive.
Some examples of how we use controlling thoughts negatively in our lives –
- In relationships – How many times have you been having a 'conversation' in your head (hello ego mind!) with your friend / partner / current crush / person you haven't even met yet and you are constructing the situation, what you might say, what they might say back, what might be the outcome and so forth. This is a great example of trying to control relationships and can take up SO much time and energy. When and if this conversation actually happens it's never as we 'planned' anyway, the time we have put into these thoughts was completely pointless
- Within the 'what if' situations – I have written about the 'what if' concept before in my post about procrastination. It can also become a controlling thought pattern, we think about a situation, perhaps at work and we start to get anxieties about it and a million 'what if's' suddenly appear and one by one we begin to try and form a type of control for the situation.
- With our health – It's a huge subject but the development of eating disorders can be largely down to control, because food is something we can control, it can't talk back to us, we can always decide what we eat or don't eat. Surrendering to my health and eating habits has been the most positive thing I have done in years and completely rid me of an eating disorder. I decided that instead of trying to control my weight I was going to instead CHOOSE my health. I used food as a thing to control when I felt like I was 'out of control' in other areas of my life and it only had negative consequences.
- In Love – Spending time obsessing over people who aren't currently in our lives, obsessing over past lovers, putting restrictions on our idea of love, all of these restrict our ability and flow to let love into our lives. We become blinded by our controlling thoughts and then are unable to see wonderful people and opportunities around us.
There are so many more examples, we are open to trying to inflict negative control patterns in ALL aspects of our lives. I'm sure you can think of ways in which you do it? We even use controlling thoughts to be negative about ourselves which restricts our confidence in achieving our dreams.
So, why 'Surrender'?
When I say 'I surrender' my intent is that I am surrendering my anxieties, ego thoughts, obsessions, problems up on a plate, I am surrendering TO allow things to move forward naturally and as they should. I am trusting that there is a flow to my life and that by surrendering my control over things I am making way for positive change and opportunities. I am stepping back into my present moment and not trying to force things into my life.
Surrendering frees me from the negative patterns that my ego mind creates.
From now on whenever you are in a wave of anxiety or stressful thinking, when you are planning a conversation three weeks in advance or beating yourself up about yesterday then just say it.
Even if for just one moment this pulls you back into the present and gives you the choice to choose to put your energy onto something more productive. As you practice it becomes more familiar and you need to use it less often because you are always surrendering!
A note on manifesting and visualisation – I have to mention visualising and manifesting here (a practice I fully believe in) The art of manifesting is that we decide what we want and we acknowledge it and then we release it (surrender!) into the Universe and into our energy, ALLOWING it to be. Manifesting is not deciding what we want, acknowledging it and then OBSESSING over it and trying to coerce it into being – See the difference?)
Have the intention
Take the Action
then SURRENDER
The practice of 'Surrendering'
I am currently using the word in two ways to help me and these are the ideas that I would love you to try.
- As a simple mantra – I feel that a quick way to stop a negative or obsessive control pattern is to just simple say (aloud or in your thoughts) 'I surrender'. By saying the words it is creating a simple shift in your thought pattern and allowing you to let go of the obsession and allow the situation to heal in it's natural flow. I have been using this for the past week and it has completely changed my way of thinking.
- As part of an affirmation about a situation – Staring the affirmation with 'I surrender' apply it to some of your challenges. Create an affirmation that rings true to you, and is purely positive. State the affirmation as if it is already true.Some affirmations using Surrender
Extend this mantra by forming your own positive sentences.
Shift by shift your thoughts calm down and oh there we go.. flow.
"I surrender this situation to flow as it should"
"Everything is perfect in this moment, I surrender."
"I surrender my obsessive thoughts about X"
"I surrender my anxieties about relationships and allow love to come into my life"
"I surrender my fears and allow success into my endeavors"
"I surrender my day to the Universe"
"I surrender all negative thoughts about myself"
"I surrender to the flow of the Universe"
"I surrender to my fears and allow love to guide me"
"I surrender my resistance to move forwards"
"I surrender with confidence to my life's path"
"To allow, I surrender"
"I surrender to sleep and am totally relaxed"
"I surrender my need for approval and I accept myself"
"I surrender to my creative flow"
The reason a surrender practice is so powerful is that you aren't suddenly spinning out of control and giving up the wheel, instead you are loosening your grip and consequently allowing flow back into your life. This practice of course comes with a little sprinkling of faith but work on this with me.
- Please find me on social media via the links below and let me know how your practice goes! – If you would like to come to one of my Surrender Workshops or have a Surrender session then let me know.
- Try my new Surrender Tarot spread here!
- PLUS: Sign up to my mailing list to be one of the first to receive news about my NEW online course SURRENDER FOREVER coming soon.


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1TB Portable Hard Drive - USB 3.0, Works w/ Mac and PC WD Elements WDBPCK0010BBK-NESN for $79.99 + free shipping
WD Elements WDBPCK0010BBK-NESN 1TB Portable Hard Drive - USB 3.0, Works w/ Mac and PC, Small, Lightweight
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Tempting, but I think I'll hold out for the $80 Seagate one at Best Buy on Black Friday.
These WD Elements drives are verified to work as an external hard drive for Dish DVRs. They can handle up to 2TB.
@stumpy91: BUT, Dish says the external hard drive needs an external power supply (wall-wart), and it appers like this drive does not have that, SO, to use this, you'd need to provide some additional USB power somehow.


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WEIRTON - The last two years have been good for Cindy's Fusion Fitness.
After initially opening its doors in Follansbee in 2011, the locally owned fitness studio opened a second location this month at 3133 Pennsylvania Ave. in Weirton.
"We're a group fitness studio," owner Cindy Petri explained. "We do personal training as well."
Petri noted there are more than 30 classes available at the new Weirton location each week. Classes are available beginning at 6 a.m. Monday through Friday, lasting until the late evenings most days. A more limited schedule of classes is available on the weekends, and Petri said any personal training can be scheduled depending on the needs of the individual.
The business has 12 instructors available for a variety of classes, including Zumba, yoga, pilates, cross fit, toning, line dancing and senior classes.
One of the most recent additions is Bokwa, which incorporates high-energy, unstructured exercise steps based on the shapes of letters and numbers.
"We're all certified in what we teach," Petri said, adding trainers also are certified in cardiopulmonary resuscitation.
For more information on Cindy's Fusion Fitness, contact them at (304) 559-7975 or visit their website at www.cindysfusionfitness.com.
(Howell can be contacted at firstname.lastname@example.com, and followed via Twitter @CHowellWDT)


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WHEELING - Sen. Joe Manchin and Rep. David B. McKinley, R-Wheeling, say they will fight any attempts by President Barack Obama to impose climate control legislation through executive order.
Manchin, a Democrat, and McKinley, both of West Virginia, held separate teleconferences with reporters Wednesday to discuss Obama's State of the Union address, delivered Tuesday. During his speech, Obama vowed if climate control legislation wasn't passed by Congress, he would seek to impose the measures through executive order.
"I'm totally in opposition to that approach," Manchin said. "Our founding fathers put a system together that has worked pretty well for us, and I think we should adhere to the system we have - the three branches of government, with responsibilities and powers invested in each. I would be very outspoken if that would come to pass and he would try to circumvent that."
During the last session of Congress, McKinley sponsored multiple measures seeking to stop the implementation of climate change legislation.
"It's more of a manifestation of how he's been doing for the past four years," McKinley said of Obama's vow to use executive order. "He's been treating Congress as if it's irrelevant, and he's going to be trying to through executive orders. Democrats and Republicans alike are not happy with that. We're going to have to see how that is going to play out."
He added there is probably a need for more bipartisan discussion this year on the issue of climate change.
"I may be naive, but we're going to see more of that this year ... ," McKinley said. "We have more discussion about climate change. But let's make sure we differentiate science from politics. Political figures want to use climate change as justification to shut down our coal power houses and our factories that are burning coal.
"Scientists are saying it may be slightly contributing to global warming, but at times ... it is clearly not having an effect," McKinley continued. "This is something that naturally occurs ... and we should expect warmer weather sometimes. It goes in cycles. So let's not push a cyclical change to push an ideology."
Manchin said there were many positives in Obama's speech, but he also noticed there was something missing from Obama's words.
"I was disappointed in his talk about energy that he didn't speak about coal," Manchin said. "We just fundamentally have an absolute disagreement on this. ... To deny that coal plays such an important part in the energy mix that is needed for this nation is wrong.
"When you talk about the climate, I'm all for doing what we can to strike a balance between the environment and the economy. But when you understand the United States burns less than one-eighth of the coal burned in the world, you have a much larger problem."
That problem is finding the technology needed to adequately clean the coal "not just for America, but for the world," Manchin added.


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Nunn Design Antique Copper-Plated Pewter Medium Rectangle Tag
This rectangle tag from Nunn Design™ can be embellished to match the theme of your designs. Featuring a hole at one end for attaching to designs, this plain rectangular tag is created from copper-plated pewter. The antique finish results in a weathered appearance that is perfect when a vintage or rustic look is desired. Try embellishing this tag with a transfer from the
Nunn Design™ Carta collection
and protecting it with a
. Feel free to browse for more inspiring components from
Nunn Design™
Customer Reviews for
Nunn Design Antique Copper-Plated Pewter Medium Rectangle Tag
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Let $S$ be the zero set in $\mathbb{R}^n$ of a polynomial with real coefficients. Let $B$ be the ring of polynomials, with INTEGER coefficients, that are bounded on $S$.
I would like to know how to get basic information about $B$: When is $B=\mathbb{Z}$? When is $B$ finitely generated? How do I find some comprehensible set of ring generators of $B$? Any suggestions or references would be appreciated.


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About our product
The bag is packing on the freshman 5 with a little extra padding to keep your small wave shred sled protected. Going green? So are we with a recycled top material on this bag. Need a sun tan? Use the highly reflective bottom material to keep your board cool while bronzing the bod. Need a place for your stash? Throw it in the secret pull out "storage" pocket. Don't worry about salted zips on this bag; all molded non-corrosive zippers will keep the movement smooth for the life of the bag.
Take a look at these


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The Kansas Highway Patrol says a Manhattan man died when the vehicle he was riding in ran off the interstate to avoid a car being chased by a patrol trooper.
The patrol says the accident Wednesday evening on Interstate 70 in Junction City killed 53-year-old Jake S. Black. He was a passenger in a car that went off the interstate to avoid a vehicle going west in the eastbound lanes of the interstate.
The Topeka Capital-Journal reports (http://bit.ly/17eX7Pl ) the driver of the wrong-way car was not injured and was arrested at the scene. The driver and another passenger in the car Black was in were taken to Geary Community Hospital for treatment.
Additional details weren't immediately available.
Location, ST | website.com


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Location: Netherlands
Lost Design Challenge entry
I found this old entry for a design challenge I wrote back in 2008 for another website. I thought it was a pretty cool idea, so I decided to post it here.
The challenge was to design an NPC for an MMORPG, I believe.
NPC Name: Mimicry Spectre
Appearance In-game: early to mid-game
Defeat Requirements: any attack, one hit. (Under certain circumstances; see below.)
The Mimicry Spectre will mimic the appearance of another player's avatar (NOT the avatar of the player himself). It only appears when there are currently no avatars other than the player's in the field of view. Its appearance is random, yet it does require that another player is nearby (although not in the field of view). It is preferred that the avatar to be mimicked was recently seen by the player.
The Spectre will look completely identical to the avatar being mimicked, including a mimicked name tag. Its true name will only be revealed when a specific term has been met with. (See below.) Its mimicry will even go as far as repeating the words that are uttered by the imitated avatar. This will oft look out of place, and as such is an important cue for players to realize this is no ordinary player avatar.
The behavior of the Spectre is inconspicuous at first, but will turn aggressive as the player gets close to the Spectre. As long as "the term" hasn't been met, the Spectre is invincible: all attacks (physical, magical or otherwise) will pass right through it. When the Spectre is within melee attack range of the player, it will deal a single strike (with no weapon in particular). When hit, the Spectre image will fade out, and will not re-appear. The hit deals massive damage to the player.
The only way for a Mimicry Spectre to be defeated, is to get the mimicked player into the field of view, together with the Spectre. (As our game is 2D, I expect there won't be a 3D camera, and the camera will simply be fixed or semi-fixed on the player avatar.) The Spectre will not typically follow the player for long stretches, so the preferred way to meet this term is to shout the mimicked players name (at that time the same name carried by the Spectre), and hope he or she will respond to the call. The moment both Spectre and mimicked player are in the players field of view, the Spectre will freeze, its motions halt and both a visual effect and the changing of his name (to Mimicry Spectre) further informs players of the deception. During this time, either player has a brief moment to deal a single defeating blow to the Spectre. Wait too long however, and the Spectre will fade, taking its spoils with it. Defeating the foe will leave behind spoils for both players, although slightly more for the player that delivered the coup de grace.
Mimicy Spectre can appear multiple times throughout the game and becomes less common as the game progresses.
Additional Comment
The Mimicry Spectre will encourage newer players to communicate with others, through experience and reward.
[COLOR="#000000"]My name is Louis. Hi![/COLOR]
[COLOR="#F5F5FF"]Uh oh! The princess is in another signature![/COLOR]
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Or, can the Windows machine burn a DVD? If so, and if you have a spare blank DVD/R or DVD/RW then you could just burn the Ubuntu ISO image to disk (using an app like ImgBurn) and then use that to boot the Dell and install Ubuntu.
Or, as you mentioned earlier, you could just buy a copy of the DVD here:


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Sun solutions help German systems vendor deliver affordable cloud computing
By chhandomay on Jun 26, 2009
Merkl IT was founded in 2007 as a traditional systems vendor offering IT services, hardware, software and support. The Munich-based systems vendor decided to pursue an idea for a cloud computing solution, which lead to the development of Virtual BackOffice, the company's core product.
(Image courtesy: Merkl IT)
BackOffice provides
with access to a virtual IT infrastructure that is highly scalable,
flexible, affordable, and available and gives them access to their
data and applications from almost any location with very little
required on-site hardware. To provide the scalability and fast
response time needed to deploy Virtual BackOffice, Merkl IT needed
new hardware and chose several Sun products for its solution.
For storage, Merkl IT uses Sun Storage Tek 2510 arrays with redundant iSCSI RAID controllers and 1 Gb/sec throughput. The SMI-S-compliant Sun StorageTek Common Array Manager software simplifies 2510 array storage management and allows Merkl IT to accelerate deployment and improve utilization. Citing Sun's "green IT" focus, Merkl IT chose Sun Blade 6000 servers with energy-saving features to virtualize and host Windows servers and desktops running Virtual BackOffice.
Merkl IT offers more than just hosting services, it also provides its customers with Sun Ray Thin Clients and software including Sun Virtual Desktop Infrastructure and Sun Secure Global Desktop software. Merkl IT stays one step ahead of the major cloud computing providers by integrating its customers' local servers and network infrastructure into Virtual BackOffice.
Julian Merkl, co-founder and managing director of Merkl IT notes "the Sun infrastructure allows us to operate the cloud-computing solution in an energy-efficient and stable manner, saving our customers money and helping the environment."
Check out the complete details here.


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Animal Hall of Fame: Biggest
6 of 7
Giant walking sticks can grow to about 20 inches length. They protect themselves from predators by using camouflage to blend into their environments.
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On Staying Open (Plus a Playlist)
I was reminded this weekend, whilst walking through town, about the magic of staying open. Two strangers openly greeted me with big smiles, and I am ashamed to say I was consciously taken aback. But once I acknowledged it was me they were smiling at, I responded by grinning with appreciation at them (possibly scaring them, apols about that!).
See, after I moved here, I often found myself talking (or rather, trying to talk) to strangers in the street, or at bus stops, or as I queued to pay for groceries. Despite my best efforts, the funny looks I often received in return took their toll, as I assumed they were a negative reaction towards my behavior. This eventually led to me becoming more shy and reserved, and less likely to try to connect with those I met.


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Cyst Symptoms and Causes
Medical Author: Melissa Conrad Stöppler, MD
Medical Editor: William C. Shiel Jr., MD, FACP, FACR
A cyst is a closed sac- or bladder-like structure that is not a normal part of the tissue where it is found. Cysts are common and can occur anywhere in the body in persons of any age. Cysts usually contain a gaseous, liquid, or semisolid substance. Cysts vary in size; they may be detectable only under a microscope or they can grow so large that they displace normal organs and tissues. The outer wall of a cyst is called the capsule.
Cysts can arise through a variety of processes in the body, including...