I think "a number of vendors are" is the right way, but "MS Word Grammar Check" suggested "a number of vendors is". I need a clarification on this.
Formally, is it correct to write:     A number of questions has been asked here.   or:     A number of questions have been asked here.   As a non-native speaker of English, I would prefer the former: the subject seems to be "number", therefore the verb ought to be singular, I'd say. However, the latter seems more common, and therefore I believe that my gut feeling is just plain wrong — but I would really like to have a definite answer.  Moreover, is it the same for "a myriad of", "a plethora of", and so on?
How do you pull first 100 characters of a string in PHP I am looking for a way to pull the first 100 characters from a string variable to put in another variable for printing.    Is there a function that can do this easily?  For example:  $string1 = "I am looking for a way to pull the first 100 characters from a string variable to put in another variable for printing."; $string2 = 100charfunction($string1); print $string2   To get:  I am looking for a way to pull the first 100 characters from a string vari Is there a way to use Dvorak keyboard layout, but with command keys mapped to qwerty? How to find architecture of my PC and Ubuntu? Front suspension or full suspension mountain bike How do I change how executable files are handled by the file manager? When I double click on text files, nautilus asks me what I would like to do with them. I find this to be intrusive, as I just want them to open.  How can I fix this?  Note: This question is a "canonical" question on the subject; edit if needed. Note 2: Text files can be HTML, CSS, TXT, and more. Why are my quotation marks causing an “unexpected token” error with this command? I need help with a specific command that I am using in a new game that I am creating inside of Minecraft. The command is:  /give @p sign 1 0 {BlockEntityTag:{Text1:"{"text":" [MF2]","color":"gold","clickEvent": {"action":"run_command","value":"tellraw @a [""{"text":"[MF2]  ","color":"gold"},{"selector":"@p","color":"dark_aqua"},{"text":" is now an admin of the server!","color":"white"}]"}}",Text3:"{"text":"Click to join Admin","color":"dark_aqua","clickEvent": {"action":"run_command","value":"scoreboard teams join admin @p"}}"},display: {Name:"Custom Sign"}}   If I take out the /tellraw command then the command works fine, but I need the command in there to announce to the game that a new admin has joined.  With the tellraw command, the error message is the following:  Data tag parsing failed: Unexpected token 't' at: text":" [MF2]","color":"gold","clickEvent":{"action":"run_command","value":"tellraw @a [""{"text":"[MF2] ","color":"gold"}, {"selector":"@p","color":"dark_aqua"},{"text":" is now an admin  of the server!","color":"white"}]"}}",Text3:"{"text":"Click to join Admin","color":"dark_aqua","clickEvent": {"action":"run_command","value":"scoreboard teams join admin @p"}}"   If anyone knows how to fix this, please let me know. What is the function __construct used for? I have been noticing __construct a lot with classes. I did a little reading and surfing the web, but I couldn't find an explanation I could understand. I am just beginning with OOP.  I was wondering if someone could give me a general idea of what it is, and then a simple example of how it is used with PHP? How to I deal with unwrapped UVs orientation?   Delete the default Cube. Add a Cylinder Edit mode and edge select the Top and the Bottom and a single connecting edge. Make them into seams UV Unwrap (standard Unwrap mode)   The unwrapped UV now shows two circles above a row of quads. I can save this and open it in an image editor and paint over those areas and get the texture to align on the cylinder back in blender.  But, the pattern(just happens to be text) that was inserted in place of the row of quads is now upside down on the model. Any attempt to flip or align just makes things worse, from upside down to mirrored or the Top/Bottom not aligning.  So my real question is how could I have known that the quads represented an upside down view of the world?  Do other blender users export UVs and mark them with arrows and colours just to see how they align on a model before actually painting for real?  I tried selecting the edges in step 3 in different orders before making them into seams and it made no difference.  I also looked at the Normals but they appear to be only Inside/Outside not Up/Down.  Blender 2.70 Beamer continue block in next column This happened when I updated MikTeX to the latest version (as of time of this post) and tried the  regarding adding pdf pages to RevTeX documents. Running the code below produced text rotated by 90 degrees while commenting out the line which includes the pdfpages packages produces regularly positioned text. Note that the page number was not rotated. Can anyone reproduce this and what is the cause of this?  \documentclass[english]{revtex4-1} \usepackage{pdfpages}  % Including PDF  \makeatother \usepackage{babel} \begin{document}  Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet...  \end{document} How to find and replace in linux on a large file? Oh, hi; So I've got this big json file and I'm trying to find and replace a few things but when I've used sed I get an error and I need a sed or awk string to find and replace it, without getting an error.  prajwal  Current: {&quot;telephone_numbers&quot;:[&quot;1-  Future: {&quot;telephone_numbers&quot;:[&quot;+1-  This is the command i tried and the error i got. sed -i 's/{&quot;telephone_numbers&quot;:[&quot;1-/{&quot;telephone_numbers&quot;:[&quot;+1-/g' output.json sed: -e expression #1, char 56: unterminated `s' command I noticed that sometimes my code gets highlighted in different colors when rendered.   What is syntax highlighting? How does it work? Why isn't my code being highlighted correctly? How do I report a bug or request a new language? How do I use syntax highlighting? What languages are currently available on Stack Exchange? Given the case I made two independent changes in one file: eg. added a new method and changed another method.  I often don't want to commit both changes as one commit, but as two independent commits.  On a git repository I would use the Interactive Mode of  to split the hunk into smaller ones:   git add --patch   What's the easiest way to do this with Subversion? (Maybe even using an Eclipse plug-in)  Update: In , Ryan calls it: “The Tangled Working Copy Problem.” Suppose we have a random variable $X \sim f(x|\theta)$. If $\theta_0$ were the true parameter, the the likelihood function should be maximized and the derivative equal to zero. This is the basic principle behind the maximum likelihood estimator.   As I understand it, Fisher information is defined as   $$I(\theta) = \Bbb E \Bigg[\left(\frac{\partial}{\partial \theta}f(X|\theta)\right)^2\Bigg ]$$  Thus, if $\theta_0$ is the true parameter, $I(\theta) = 0$. But if it $\theta_0$ is not the true parameter, then we will have a larger amount of Fisher information.   my questions    Does Fisher information measure the "error" of a given MLE? In other words, doesn't the existence of positive Fisher information imply my MLE can't be ideal?  How does this definition of "information" differ from that used by Shannon? Why do we call it information? What is the best indicator in finding out whether a database is utilized or accessed?  I tried index statistics and  based on I/O utilization but none seem to be a good indicator.   Problem: I have a lot of databases on a development environment and due to space issues we are trying to decommission those that are not used without actually messing with the ones that are really needed. If $\gcd(a,b)=1$ and $a$ and $b$ divide $c$, then so does $ab$ Could normal users have an easier way to flag for migration? Two "offtopic" flag reasons 1) "The book 'The Three Musketeers' is a wonderful example of..." Here we have a proper noun, a title that happens to end in a plural, and I have no sense that the verb should be plural. "Musketeers"/is seems proper/natural/correct, and 'are' not at all.   However, such certainty begins to wane in other examples: 2) "'The Heidi Chronicles' is a wonderful example of..." doesn't completely shake my confidence, but it moves the needle, at least a little bit. But, practically speaking, I wouldn't have a second thought about correcting a student who used 'are' instead of 'is'.  Here's the one that really bothers me: 3a) " 'The Basement Tapes' are a wonderful example of..." I don't think this sounds any less proper/natural/correct than 3b) " 'The Basement Tapes' is..." In fact, 3a seems less awkward than 3b.  Why? How to change the base of logarithmic-scale plots?