I'm looking for a phrase, that can be applied to the situation when someone attempts to resolve a big problem or minimize damage by performing minor, insufficient actions, or is micromanaging instead of dealing with relevant bigger issues. It suggests the actions that are useful per se, but turn out to be in vain while there are way more serious steps to be taken to deal with a challenge. Like, when you're trying to prevent a waste of tap water while your ship is drowning, or turning on the humidifier when your house is on fire.  Is there an idiom in English, that fits such kind of situations? Here are some more examples to provide clarification for its possible usage:   An unprecedented drop of national economy was followed by the    government's decision to mark the products of local manufacturers    with conspicuous "wise choice!" labels. Our project is about to fail deadline, but Tom is busy with choosing    fonts for its Powerpoint presentation instead of helping us to speed up. After receiving divorce papers from Jane's lawyer, Steve bought her    flowers, hoping it will compensate the decade of neglecting his wife.
Imagine a situation in which the whole place is on fire, a bomb is about to explode, everyone is running for their lives and someone is checking his looks on the mirror... pretty inappropriate for the situation, don't you think? I'm looking for an idiom or colloquial/slang/informal expression to describe such an indifferent stance.
Creating polygon from hole in QGIS? I run windows 7. I run a Minecraft server, but I can only host around 9 players before lag appears.   I heard that Ubuntu can run a server with much better performance than Windows 7. I kind of like the whole idea of Ubuntu, but I don't want to change my OS to Unix or anything else.  Basically, my question is, does running a server (specifically and Minecraft server) run easier and faster on a Ubuntu server? On top of that, how would one set that up? Disable storage of invisible files "._" on my cfs or smb network storage I use OS X Mavericks and have some company storage drives mounted (using smb or cfs). (smb://username@address.path.toserver.com/directory/data). When I work with files on the drive or copy files to the drive, some hidden files are created. Most of these files start with dot-dash ._ and then the filename of the original file, like:  ._test001.png ._test002.png ._test003.png   And most of the times, the famous ._.DS_Store and .DS_Store are also there.  On my Mac, these . dot items are invisible, but my windows colleagues do see these files. How can I prevent OS X from making these strange invisible files?  On  (and other internet sources) you can find a 'defaults write' to disable the creation of .DS_Store files on your network drives. But this does not work in Mavericks:  defaults write com.apple.desktopservices DSDontWriteNetworkStores -bool true   For now I use this oneliner, but doing a rm -rf does feel wrong in this case.  find . -type f -name "._*" -exec rm "{}" \;   Edit: I don't want to delete the files or exclude them from copying. I want them not to be created in the first place.  Edit: I prefer a 'native' OS X solution over third party apps.  Edit: This questions has two answers, one for the ._ files and one for the .DS_Store files. The bounty is rewarded for dot_clean, this native command line app cleans all ._ files. Unfortunately is does not clear the .DS_Store files, this can effectively be done with Asepsis. Asepsis stores .DS_Stores in a fixed location, and not in the folder itself. Close and flag links do nothing on mobile site Minipage: 2 tables side by side isn't working I have the following code to layout two tables side by side:  \begin{minipage}{0.3\textwidth} \begin{tabular}{c | c | c | c | c | c | c} F &amp; D &amp; E &amp; G &amp; P &amp; A &amp; L\\ \hline C &amp; H &amp; I &amp; I &amp; U &amp; G &amp; F\\ \hline G &amp; Z &amp; G &amp; A &amp; F &amp; Z &amp; U\\ \hline F &amp; R &amp; \textbf{H} &amp; \textbf{A} &amp; \textbf{U} &amp; \textbf{S} &amp; Z\\ \hline R &amp; P &amp; L &amp; I &amp; N &amp; F &amp; H\\ \hline L &amp; U &amp; G &amp; I &amp; A &amp; C &amp; T\\ \hline A &amp; B &amp; D &amp; N &amp; E &amp; R &amp; Z\\ \end{tabular}  \end{minipage}  \begin{minipage}{0.3\textwidth} \begin{tabular}{c | c | c | c | c | c | c} F &amp; D &amp; E &amp; G &amp; P &amp; A &amp; L\\ \hline C &amp; H &amp; I &amp; I &amp; U &amp; G &amp; F\\ \hline G &amp; Z &amp; G &amp; A &amp; F &amp; Z &amp; U\\ \hline F &amp; R &amp; \textbf{H} &amp; \textbf{A} &amp; \textbf{U} &amp; \textbf{S} &amp; Z\\ \hline R &amp; P &amp; L &amp; I &amp; N &amp; F &amp; H\\ \hline L &amp; U &amp; G &amp; I &amp; A &amp; C &amp; T\\ \hline A &amp; B &amp; D &amp; N &amp; E &amp; R &amp; Z\\ \end{tabular}  \end{minipage}   But it doesn't work. The tables are one below the other. What am I doing wrong? Meaning of Sun Lamp Size? In Cycles, a sun lamp is treated as infinitely far away - only the angle matters, not the position. Other lamps have their sizes defined in blender units: a point lamp with size 1 emits light from a area with size of 1. But if a sun lamp at infinity had a size of 1 blender unit, the angular arc of that sun would be nonexistent.  Clearly, when you change the size of a sun lamp, shadows get fuzzier or sharper. But what does that actually mean? What are you changing? Windows 8.1 dont have hyper-v - cant use Windows Phone Emulator Intersection of the $p$-sylow and $q$-sylow subgroups of group $G$ QGIS 2.0 - can't select items in Print Composer Number of ways to stack poker chips if two stacks that can be obtained from each other by reflection are considered to be equivalent? How to setup a restricted SFTP server on Ubuntu? Mathematical physics text with plenty of applications I'm looking for texts on mathematical physics. I've seen various other threads, but the texts recommended in those threads were mathematical methods of theoretical physics texts, that is to say those texts focused on the math methods useful for physicists and assumed the applications of those methods would be covered in some other text. What I'm looking for is a book which introduces some math and then looks at its applications (back and forth) rather than a text which just goes over some math. (Example of books which are NOT what I'm looking for: Mathematics for physicists by Dennery, Math methods for physicists by Weber and Arfken etc)  I've taken courses in multi-variable calc, linear algebra, real analysis, and I'm currently taking a course in abstract algebra. But so far I've only seen applications of multi-variable to physics. I'm looking for books which look at the applications of the other subjects mentioned above to physics, of course books which cover subjects beyond those mentioned are also welcome.   So far I'm liking the flavor of the text "A Course in Modern Mathematical Physics" by Szekeres, but I'd prefer a text which got to the physics side of things more quickly (in the Szekeres text the first eight chapters are strictly on pure math).   After some amazon searching it looks like Theoretical Physics by Joos, Mathematical Physics by Henzel, and Physical Mathematics by Cahill may be good bets? pure code formatting, to enhance a question, is impossible (without 2k rep) I've been using the Linksys USB6300 Adapter but when I switched to Ubuntu it stopped working since its only compatible with Windows. I've tried using ndiswrapper and although it says my windows driver is installed, my device isn't showing up. Anyone know how I could get this wireless network adapter working? Thanks.  lsusb  Bus 002 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0003 Linux Foundation 3.0 root hub Bus 001 Device 012: ID 05c6:6766 Qualcomm, Inc.  Bus 001 Device 006: ID 0bda:0153 Realtek Semiconductor Corp. Mass Storage Device Bus 001 Device 005: ID 05e3:0608 Genesys Logic, Inc. USB-2.0 4-Port HUB Bus 001 Device 004: ID 04ca:007d Lite-On Technology Corp.  Bus 001 Device 003: ID 04ca:008a Lite-On Technology Corp.  Bus 001 Device 010: ID 13b1:003f Linksys  Bus 001 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0002 Linux Foundation 2.0 root hub What potions actually grant fame or glory, or put a stopper in death? Are there any? ‘You are here to learn the subtle science and exact art of potionmaking,’ [Snape] began. He spoke in barely more than a whisper, but they caught every word – like Professor McGonagall, Snape had the gift of keeping a class silent without effort. ‘As there is little foolish wand-waving here, many of you will hardly believe this is magic. I don’t expect you will really understand the beauty of the softly simmering cauldron with its shimmering fumes, the delicate power of liquids that creep through human veins, bewitching the mind, ensnaring the senses ... I can teach you how to bottle fame, brew glory, even stopper death – if you aren’t as big a bunch of dunderheads as I usually have to teach.’&#185;   Philosopher's Stone - page 102 - Bloomsbury - chapter 8, The Potions Master   Are there any canon potions that actually grant fame or glory, or stopper death? I'm looking for specific canon-based answers from sources such as the Harry Potter books, interviews with J.K. Rowling, or information from Pottermore. Maybe because it's early I'm overlooking the obvious, but offhand I can't think of any canon potions that fit this criteria exactly.   &#185;I edited in the entire paragraph that I can teach you how to bottle fame, brew glory, even stopper death comes from for clarity. Hopefully this will be helpful and provide a better context for the comment in question. How can I determine whether a 2D Point is within a Polygon? I'm trying to create a fast 2D point inside polygon algorithm, for use in hit-testing (e.g. Polygon.contains(p:Point)). Suggestions for effective techniques would be appreciated. Error when clipping raster in QGIS: "'ascii' codec can't encode character"? I have done it many times (clipping a raster with a polygon layer or by extension) but today I got an error for the first time and I don't know how to solve it. I am always using the same type of raster layers. When running the clipping tool I got the following message:  gdal_translate -of GTiff -ot Byte -projwin 410282.185971 4694950.41162 410783.882475 4694524.96815 -co COMPRESS=DEFLATE -co PREDICTOR=1 -co ZLEVEL=6 -co TFW=YES "C:/Users/FERRAN ALA/Desktop/Justificació Fontanals/QGIS/Topo 1_5000/bt5mv20sd0f283077st1r031.sid" "C:/Users/FERRAN ALA/Desktop/Justificació Fontanals/QGIS/background/image.tif"   GDAL command output:     'ascii' codec can't encode character u'\xf3' in position 201: ordinal not in range(128) See log for more details   Does anybody know what that is? I have a burning desire to install RPMs onto my Ubuntu installation - is this possible? Can I use Yum - or another RPM Package Management tool? Object-oriented shell for *nix How to know if the system console is open? Can we know, with python, if the system console of blender is open? I know that we can open or close it with this function:  bpy.ops.wm.console_toggle()   But it doesn't return the 'state' of the system console like open or closed (True,False).  I want to be sure that the console is open when i execute one of my script.