I’ve learned something today. Apparently, there’s more than one way to round a number. There’s the easy, “common” method that everyone learns, where you simply look at the digits you want to zero-out, and if the first digit is >= 5 you round up, and <= 4 you round down.
And then there’s the number-nerd way [...]

Kelmanskiy and 125 other soldiers assigned to Fort Lewis’ newest Stryker Brigade Combat Team are part of a new program to teach soldiers rudimentary Arabic. The idea is that once deployed to Iraq, they’ll be able to communicate with local Iraqis to help their units better distinguish between allies and enemies.
Fort Lewis soldiers learn Arabic [...]

This may be old news for people more familiar with perl internals.

dpk@dpk1:~$ perl -version | head -2

This is perl, v5.8.8 built for i486-linux-gnu-thread-multi
dpk@dpk1:~$ cat test1.pl
#!/usr/bin/perl

use strict;

my $x = 0;
while ($x < 100)
{
&doit();
$x++;
}

sub doit() {
my $foo = ‘foobar’; my $x = 0; my $y = 0;
while ($x < [...]

One of the more annoying things to come about in the Linux/open source world is the use of “info” pages, replacing the old workhorse standard of “man” pages. In doing so, developers often ignore documenting crucial elements in a man page, instead leaving this gem at the end:
SEE ALSO
[...]

An educational update:
I finished spring quarter with some good grades, bringing my credit total to 20: 10 credits of math, 5 of English, and 5 of philosophy. I decided to take it easy in the summer quarter, and am taking two online classes, which means I am home for dinner every night (a big plus!).
One [...]