Best way of converting date like "December 6, 2011" to pattern like "yyyy-MM-dd" ?
I need to be able to compare some month names I have in an array.  It would be nice if there were some direct way like:  Month.toInt("January") &gt; Month.toInt("May")   My Google searching seems to suggest the only way is to write your own method, but this seems like a common enough problem that I would think it would have been already implemented in .Net, anyone done this before?
I think it would be useful if we could join across databases in the data-explorer.  For example, I'd like to query up a list of questions that I had a hand in migrating away from SO, and see what percentage of them were subsequently closed or re-migrated.  I realise I could download the various data dumps and do this on my own machine, but it would be nice if it were allowed on the online version.  Is this possible/practical? There are two vectors called $\vec{a}$ and $\vec{b}$. Vector $\vec{c}$ is the bisector and it can be given as  $$\vec{c} = |b|\vec{a} + |a|\vec{b}$$  How to prove that? I have used the dot product method. But there I can't find the angle between them. Then I tried to do this by using unit vectors. Then I got an answer like in the given picture. . Can you help me to get the correct answer Does 'fight' involve combat? If $G$ is a group, show that $x^2ax=a^{-1}$ has a solution if and only if $a$ is a cube in $G$ I was checking my old set of homework problems that I found this one:     If $G$ is a group, show that $x^2ax=a^{-1}$ has a solution if and only   if $a$ is a cube in $G$.   One direction is easy. If $a$ is a cube in $G$ then there exists $y \in G$ such that $a=y^3$. Now with direct manipulations it is shown that $x=y^{-2}$ is a solution to $x^2ax=a^{-1}$.  The other direction is harder though. I first attempted to isolate $x$ and then somehow show that it's necessary for $a$ to be a cube. But since I had no idea how to isolate $x$ I gave up. Then I decided to prove the existence of $y \in G: a=y^3$ by showing that a particular map is bijective so I can come up with a nice variable change to conclude that $a$ must be a cube, but this attempt failed as well. I'm tired now, so I think I'm giving up. I'm looking for a hint or a complete solution if a hint is not possible at this stage. show that the interval of the form $[0,a)$ or $(a, 1]$ is open set in metric subspace $[0,1]$ but not open in $\mathbb R^1$ On the metric subspace $S = [0,1]$ of the Euclidean space $\mathbb R^1 $, every interval of the form $A = [0,a)$ or $(a, 1]$ where $0&lt;a&lt;1$ is open set in S. These sets are not open in $\mathbb R^1$   Here's what I attempted to show that $A$ is open in $S$. I have no idea how it is not open in $\mathbb R^1$.  Let $M = \mathbb R^1$, $x \in A  = [0,a)$ . If $x = 0$, $ r \leq \min \{a, 1-a\}, \\\  B_S(0; r) = B_M(0,r)\cap[0,1] = (-r, r) \cap[0,1] = [0,r) \subseteq A $  If $x \neq 0, r \leq \min \{x,|a-x|, 1-x\},  \\B_S(x; r) = B_M(x,r)\cap[0,1] = (x-r, x+r) \cap[0,1] \subset (0,x) \text{ or } (x, 1) \subset A$ How do I with ufw deny all outgoing ports excepting the ones I need? Continuity of function mapping connected set to connected set Work the Spring There's a book that I read several years ago that I'd like to find.  However, I cannot remember enough about it to find it myself.  Neither the title nor author remain in my mind, nor any keyword or phrase that's unique enough for the Grand Google to nail for me.  Hence my desperate plea here.  In the book, there is an interstellar civilization composed of several power blocks.  The entire civilization did not fill the galaxy, but it did span several stellar systems.  Maybe 10s or 100s.  I seem to remember that one of the civilizations was a decentralized group referred to as the Brotherhood and they seemed to have been keen on preserving old learning and political ideals.  A derelict alien spacecraft from outside all of this had been discovered and at least two of the power blocks sent ships to recover it.  I don't recall if they knew at the time about the power the alien ship had, but they must have had some clue since there was some urgency in capturing this ship.  One of the ships sent to capture the Alien craft was commanded by somebody who was rather shaken up, to say the least.  He had had some big trauma in his past (like... the last ship he captained was annihilated with all hands.) so he was kinda bummed out about things and wasn't really putting his heart into getting this done.  He was assisted by the ship's AI who had a lot of soul-to-soul chats with the captain, and at one point almost relieved him of command because he was just not getting the job done.  I think the ship's name was Boaz.  These were the "good guys".  There was at least one other ship sent from the "bad guys."  The alien craft had some remarkable powers.  The interior volume was apparently infinite and the operators could see and manipulate anything in the universe.  There might have been some example given where all the rats somewhere were found and disposed of.  Whoever had control was tempted by the ole absolute power corrupts absolutely problem, but nobody but nobody could stop them because of their power.  They could eat and multiply within the ship and become real bad-asses.  But alas... (or hurray, depending upon which side you're one) everything fails eventually, and whoever controlled the ship would eventually succumb to some horrible end.  Whereupon the ship became derelict again until some other lucky race found it and repeated the cycle.  The ship had an AI that was real interested in taking the power for itself, but there was some mechanical, spring-loaded, mechanism outside of its control that needed to be worked in order to execute power.  The AI apparently never figured out how to "work the spring" and this made him crazy angry.  The ending is equally foggy for me.  I'm pretty sure the good guys got the ship.  They agonized over what to do with it.  Apparently it was indestructable and nobody wanted to taste the temptation of all that power.  In the end they dumped it on the surface of a neutron star.  There it sat forever more, probably with the crazy AI really pissed off about being there.  If you've read this book, you'll recognize it immediately from these clues.  I'm looking forward to finding out the name of this book.  Thanks! How do you make a script or app to run or stop running automatically when the system is booted, a user logs on, at a specific time, when a disk is attached, etc.? Do I need to enable the publishing features to change a Team Site's master page? When building a SharePoint 2010 site, we have a root Publishing site that has been branded up using a custom Master Page.  We'd now like to add some Team Sites below the publishing site, and have our branding and other look and feel changes applied there too, and for that we need to change the "System Master" setting of the Team Site.  The "Master page" options in the site settings are only available if I've enabled the Publishing features in the team site, but I'd rather not do this if I can avoid it.  Ideally, this should be enabled as soon as a new team site is created, without the site owner having to change the site settings. Templated check for the existence of a class member function? Is there any analytics information that moderators can access for individual questions? What is the practical difference between a differential and a derivative? I ask because, as a first-year calculus student, I am running into the fact that I didn't quite get this down when understanding the derivative:  So, a derivative is the rate of change of a function with respect to changes in its variable, this much I get.  Thing is, definitions of 'differential' tend to be in the form of defining the derivative and calling the differential 'an infinitesimally small change in x', which is fine as far it goes, but then why bother even defining it formally outside of needing it for derivatives?  And THEN, the bloody differential starts showing up as a function in integrals, where it appears to be ignored part of the time, then functioning as a variable the rest.  Why do I say 'practical'? Because when I asked for an explanation from other mathematician parties, I got one involving the graph of the function and how, given a right-angle triangle, a derivative is one of the other angles, where the differential is the line opposite the angle.   I'm sure that explanation is correct as far it goes, but it doesn't tell me what the differential DOES, or why it's useful, which are the two facts I need in order to really understand it.  Any assistance? Canonical vs. non-canonical terminal input If I open files I created in Windows, the lines all end with ^M. How do I delete these characters all at once? Which is better to do client side or server side validation?  In our situation we are using    jQuery and MVC.   JSON data to pass between our View and Controller.     A lot of the validation I do is validating data as users enter it. For example I use the the keypress event to prevent letters in a text box, set a max number of characters and that a number is with in a range.   I guess the better question would be, Are there any benefits to doing server side validation over client side?    Awesome answers everyone. The website that we have is password protected and for a small user base(&lt;50). If they are not running JavaScript we will send ninjas. But if we were designing a site for everyone one I'd agree to do validation on both sides. Why are there so many bottomless pits in Star Wars List View Visibility Is particle superposition reflected in the particle's gravitational footprint? I have a "term reference" field, in a form that uses an auto-complete widget. I want to limit user input to terms in the vocabulary only, and output a message when a user tries to enter a non existing term.  I found the  module. However this does not work with forms that contain a field collection or a field group.  There is also a contributed patch . But I was wondering whether there was a simpler/cleaner solution like a module or maybe I missed an already existing way of doing it with latest drupal and taxonomy versions.