I am trying to find the title of a book that I read in the late 90s early 00s.  I think the book was part of a trilogy. This is what I can remember about the story, a teenage boy leads a normal life until a man comes to him in a van. The man is an alien and and the van is a space craft. The vans name is Bes (I think). And it travels from USA to Africa in minutes. The man can change his disguise he turns his skin colour but before doing so the boy sees his real skin, I think he has horns or lumps on his face.   There is a war between this alien race and another and the boy plays an important role in it. They travel from earth to a mother ship called Tyson Grip (or something). And the alien home world is called Priam 5 (or something).   Another thing I remember, the boy is hit and falls on the floor of the van and the carpet starts to shape around him become extremely comfortable for him.
I am trying to remember the title of a children's SF book I once read, maybe 20 to 25 odd years ago.   I don't have a great number of details (and some of what I recall may be completely wrong), but the details (such as they are):   A war between two alien groups ended, and some technology that should have been destroyed was instead imprinted into a human baby. A few years later, both groups find this out and attempt to retrieve it. The main characters are the child, and an alien that I believe was called "Yacob" (or similar) who was sent to protect the child/retrieve the technology, and the antagonists were the other group of aliens that had previously lost the war and were trying to get the technology to start it up again (again, I don't remember the exact details, but I think it was a fairly simple black &amp; white/good vs. bad scenario, being a children's book and all). There was a scene in which Yacob/the alien gives the child blue food, who complains that it's blue, and the alien states "close your eyes and it's just food". The alien had a space shuttle/some other piece of tech disguised as a van. I vaguely recall a scene in which it is under attack and it flies or something.
How to create a generic array in Java? After a few days of operation on my new ec2 build, the following happens:   I log into SSH, everything is fine, I do my coding I return the next day, and log into SSH I cannot type a lower cased e anymore--I get the error ding when I type it I try to ssh from a different computer, same problem I reboot the server, same problem I open nano or vi and e works fine, just not in bash or sh I terminate the server, create a new one, install from scratch, a few days later it happens again   This is baffling! Where do I even start to troubleshoot?  My Local Machine Setup(s):   windows XP or 7 putty (latest) or cygwin/openssh   The EC2 setup   Amazon Linux (default options) node.js iptables forwarding port 80 to node on port 8003 emacs, npm, and openssl-devel no other mods       Output of stty -a while I can't type an e  sh-4.1$ stty -a speed 38400 baud; rows 30; columns 95; line = 0; intr = ^C; quit = ^\; erase = ^?; kill = ^U; eof = ^D; eol = &lt;undef&gt;; eol2 = &lt;undef&gt;; swtch = &lt;undef&gt;; start = ^Q; stop = ^S; susp = ^Z; rprnt = ^R; werase = ^W; lnext = ^V; flush = ^O; min = 1; time = 0; -parenb -parodd cs8 -hupcl -cstopb cread -clocal -crtscts -cdtrdsr -ignbrk -brkint -ignpar -parmrk -inpck -istrip -inlcr -igncr icrnl ixon -ixoff -iuclc -ixany -imaxbel -iutf8 opost -olcuc -ocrnl onlcr -onocr -onlret -ofill -ofdel nl0 cr0 tab0 bs0 vt0 ff0 isig icanon iexten echo echoe echok -echonl -noflsh -xcase -tostop -echoprt echoctl echoke   In case it helps someone else with a similar issue, I created a script (called sub) to convert upper-cased E to lower-cased, then echo the command back. Then I run it in backticks to get an e on the command line::  #!/bin/sh echo ${@//E/e}  &gt; `sub Emacs /Etc/profilE`   UPDATES   This breaks for all users In bash only (csh works fine) In emacs edit mode only   I've created  and hone in the solution. Copy Physics To Multiple Objects For example:  "Last week, I found out that NASA stands for 'National Aeronautics and Space Administration.'"  or  "Last week, I found out that NASA stood for 'National Aeronautics and Space Administration.'" Connection pooling in PHP How can I safely move a module to another folder? I created a module through Drupal Console, unfortunately it wasn't placed in a folder of its own, rather straight into /modules/custom. Before I noticed where it had gone, I enabled the module.   In Drupal 6/7, this was easy to fix - I could literally just put the files into the correct path, clear the cache (maybe rebuild the registry, it wasn't an exact science), and all was well.  The same isn't true for Drupal 8; I moved the files into a subfolder, rebuilt cache, and all requests tell me that Drupal is failing to include a required file. The particular file is a block class, and the path Drupal is trying to find it is where it used to be, not where I've moved it to.  The bit of code objecting is in Symfony's ApcClassLoader, so I guess I need to clear something that's slightly above Drupal's head to get this path reference updated.  How can I do that?  Uninstalling and re-installing the module does work, but once there's important data stored that's not going to be an option.  I was wrong, uninstalling and re-installing is not a viable option. After uninstalling and reinstalling, Drupal can no longer pick up the custom blocks the module defines. I'm guessing that reference is cached somewhere that isn't cleared when the module is uninstalled. Just need to find out where that is and how to clear it... Which is correct: "he don't" or "he doesn't"? How do I create files using the lines in a .txt file? For example I have a file called fileNames.txt.  cat &gt;fileNames returns  abet  able  abacus   How do I use fileNames to create abet, able, and abacus as .txt files?  I tried using pipes with cat and touch. A person who speaks kindly. Sometimes she might be hard, but fair.   What is an adjective to describe such person? has a weird case of the mono, while .  Also, that question is missing some content at the end: How to automatically create large number of columns in Excel 2013 I would like to start a new excel spreadsheet, create a column named Column1, and quickly fill in increments, (Column2, Column3 etc) up to Column500. Is there an easy way to do this?   Also is there an easy way to afterwards select all 500 columns and add 10 rows of data to all of them? Get current editor toolbar tab via Python? Which preposition in front of "line" — "on", "in", "at"? How to stop the Facebook app from updating itself automatically? I have the Facebook app installed on my Android 7 phone.   Auto-update is disabled for all applications on my Play Store account I have disabled installation from unknown sources   For some reason, whenever there is an update of the Facebook app, it automatically updates itself even though I disabled auto-updates for all applications.  How to stop the Facebook app from updating itself automatically? Solve the following equation in positive integers $x$ and $y$ I want to write applications for Ubuntu. I do not know much about programming but I want develop for Ubuntu. I am trying to learn Python right now. What do you think is the best way to develop apps for Ubuntu? Can you point me to some resources that can help me get started with developing for Ubuntu?  Related . A very easy probability problem but opinions diverge greatly. Need some help. The question itself is a very easy one:     Somebody has got two kids, one of whom is a girl. Then what's the probability that he's got at least one boy?   My answer is that, since he's already got a girl, then "he's got at least one boy" amounts to "the other kid is a boy", whose probability is apparently $\frac{1}{2}$. But my friends argue that the probability should be $\frac23$: they say this is a binomial distribution, all the possible cases are (girl,girl),(girl,boy),(boy,girl) which yields that the probability is two cases out of three and is thus $\frac23$. But I think this is totally unacceptable. I don't think it is a binomial distribution at all, at least not what my friends explained to me. However, I just can't disuade them of their opinion, nor can I prove that I am wrong. So what on earth is the probability? and why? Any help is appreciated. Thanks in advance. Esp. Can anybody show why my explanation is wrong? Isn't it that whether the other kid is a boy or a girl a 50/50 event?  EDIT: Thanks for all the help you provided for me, and special thanks will go to @HammyTheGreek and @KSmarts, who have made it clear to me that there is in fact some ambiguity in my statement in this problem. As is pointed in  ,two distinct interpretation of the statement "one of whom is a girl" that gives rise to ambiguity:     From all families with two children, at least one of whom is a boy, a family is chosen at random. This would yield the answer of 1/3.   From all families with two children, one child is selected at random, and the sex of that child is specified to be a boy. This would yield an answer of 1/2. I'm editing a book that includes about 25 papers written in LaTeX by different authors.  Since many of them use the same \label, to avoid collisions I redefined the \label command (and \ref and \pageref and \cite and \bibitem)  so that if the third paper has  \label{main_theorem} the aux file actually uses the tag "iii:main_theorem", and \ref{main_theorem} actually refers to the same tag.  I did a similar thing for \cite and \bibitem.  %*************** bib/cite hacks \let\TheReal@citex=\@citex \let\TheReal@bibitem=\@bibitem \let\TheReal@lbibitem=\@lbibitem \gdef\@lbibitem[#1]#2{\TheReal@lbibitem[{#1}]{#2\roman{chapter}}} \gdef\@bibitem#1{\TheReal@bibitem{#1\roman{chapter}}} \gdef\@citex[#1]#2{% \toks@={}\count@=0% \@for\@citec:=#2\do{% \advance\count@ 1 \ifnum\count@=1\edef\0{\the\toks@\expandafter\expandafter\noexpand\@citec\roman{chapter}}% \else\edef\0{\the\toks@,\expandafter\expandafter\noexpand\@citec\roman{chapter}} \fi% \toks@=\expandafter{\0}}% \TheReal@citex[#1]{\the\toks@}% } %************** label/ref/pageref hacks  %%%%%%%%%%%%% must be before ams pkgs \let\TheRealLabel=\label \let\TheRealRef=\ref \let\TheRealPageref=\pageref \gdef\label#1{\TheRealLabel{\roman{chapter}:#1}} \gdef\ref#1{\TheRealRef{\roman{chapter}:#1}} \gdef\pageref#1{\TheRealPageref{\roman{chapter}:#1}}   This all worked fine until I used hyperref, which seems to ignore the redefinition of \label, whether I load it before or after the above code.  Any suggestions?  It would be nice if the redefinition would work whether or not hyperref was loaded, so I don't want to just grab the defintion of \label out of the package and tweak it.  I'm also open to alternative methods.  Redefining \label and \ref just seemed the most straightforward (to me) solution.  Note that I also want to be able to refer to the inner labels from outside, as well.  For example, I might want to say "the main theorem of the third paper is  \ChapRef{iii}{main_theorem}  from within the introduction (a different chapter). Accessing private member variables from prototype-defined functions Is there any way to make “private” variables (those defined in the constructor), available to prototype-defined methods?  TestClass = function(){     var privateField = "hello";     this.nonProtoHello = function(){alert(privateField)}; }; TestClass.prototype.prototypeHello = function(){alert(privateField)};   This works:  t.nonProtoHello()   But this doesn’t:  t.prototypeHello()   I’m used to defining my methods inside the constructor, but am moving away from that for a couple reasons. Find files using ls and wildcards pwd : ../bin under bin I have a directory called datafiles.  Use meta characters and the ls -lL command (with lower and upper case L) to list all filenames under the datafiles directory that contain a dot . with the letter 'f' or 'u' anywhere after the dot.  I tried: ls -lL datafiles *.*f*u  ls -lL datafiles .[f*u]     Thank you for answering. Unfortunately, none of the solutions worked the way I wanted it.  By clarifying the question, /bin/datafiles/file.backup is the root to the directory. From the /bin directory, the command I used is ls -lL datafiles followed by meta characters.  I'm looking for file.backup that has a dot and followed by f or u, not directly followed by f or u (anywhere after the dot), and not ending by f or u.