Fox News is the second-most trusted network, but also the most distrusted one, with 42 percent trusting it and 46 percent not trusting it. That’s as compared to the 43 percent who said they didn’t trust CNN, CBS or ABC. But Fox News was one of only two networks that saw its distrust levels increase from last year’s study. Last year, 37 percent of respondents said they didn’t trust Fox–a nine-point difference from the 2011 poll.

via Fox News Most Distrusted Name In News: Poll.

The vertical distance between two block boxes is controlled by the margin-bottom property of the first box and the margin-top property of the second box (you’ve seen how to manipulate these earlier in the course). For boxes in the normal flow, ie boxes that aren’t floated or absolutely positioned, the vertical margins between two adjacent block boxes will collapse—overlap—so that the net result is not the sum of the two margins, but the greater of the two, as seen in Figure 1 below.

via 36: CSS static and relative positioning – Dev.Opera.

And, to think, I was sure I knew everything.

jQuery fires events of type “ajaxStart” and “ajaxStop” to indicate the start and stop of Ajax-related network activity. When jQuery is not performing any Ajax requests and a new request is initiated, it fires an “ajaxStart” event. If other requests begin before this first one ends, those new requests do not cause a new “ajaxStart” event. The “ajaxStop” event is triggered when the last pending Ajax request is completed and jQuery is no longer performing any network activity. This pair of events can be useful to show and hide a “Loading…” animation or network activity icon. For example:

$("#loading_animation").bind({
    ajaxStart: function() { $(this).show(); },
    ajaxStop: function() { $(this).hide(); }
});

These “ajaxStart” and “ajaxStop” event handlers can be bound to any document element: jQuery triggers them globally rather than on any one particular element.

To answer your initial question and to provide a condensed explanation for the reason behind your compile problem.

From the point of view of the compiler, templates are not normal functions or classes. They are compiled on demand, meaning that the code of a template function is not compiled until an instantiation with specific template arguments is required. At that moment, when an instantiation is required, the compiler generates a function specifically for those arguments from the template.

When projects grow it is usual to split the code of a program in different source code files. In these cases, the interface and implementation are generally separated. Taking a library of functions as example, the interface generally consists of declarations of the prototypes of all the functions that can be called. These are generally declared in a "header file" with a .h extension, and the implementation (the definition of these functions) is in an independent file with c++ code.

Because templates are compiled when required, this forces a restriction for multi-file projects: the implementation (definition) of a template class or function must be in the same file as its declaration. That means that we cannot separate the interface in a separate header file, and that we must include both interface and implementation in any file that uses the templates.

Since no code is generated until a template is instantiated when required, compilers are prepared to allow the inclusion more than once of the same template file with both declarations and definitions in a project without generating linkage errors.

Thanks saige

Another truly interesting domain in which the brain confuses the literal and metaphorical is cleanliness. In a remarkable study, Chen-Bo Zhong of the University of Toronto and Katie Liljenquist of Northwestern University demonstrated how the brain has trouble distinguishing between being a dirty scoundrel and being in need of a bath. Volunteers were asked to recall either a moral or immoral act in their past. Afterward, as a token of appreciation, Zhong and Liljenquist offered the volunteers a choice between the gift of a pencil or of a package of antiseptic wipes. And the folks who had just wallowed in their ethical failures were more likely to go for the wipes. In the next study, volunteers were told to recall an immoral act of theirs. Afterward, subjects either did or did not have the opportunity to clean their hands. Those who were able to wash were less likely to respond to a request for help that the experimenters had set up that came shortly afterward. Apparently, Lady Macbeth and Pontius Pilate weren’t the only ones to metaphorically absolve their sins by washing their hands.

via This Is Your Brain on Metaphors – NYTimes.com.

GAE Unit

Unit testing within the google app engine is not as easy as unit testing with bare python.  I stumbled on GAE Unit a few months back and have found it to be a huge help when testing functions/classes that interact with the data store.  The great thing about it: it automatically creates a temporary data store for the test you’re running so your local dev datastore is unaffected by tests.

http://code.google.com/p/gaeunit/

Jinja2

This template engine is the best I’ve used (I’ve used Smarty for PHP and Django templates for Python).   Remarkably powerful and seemingly pretty fast, I started using this engine a year ago and haven’t looked back.  Purists who want no logic at all in the presentation layer will not get much out of this engine but I happen to appreciate the power – recognizing, of course, that with great power comes great responsibility.

Jinja2 Documentation

DateUtil

Anyone that has to work with dates extensively will appreciate the power in this library.  Extensive support for date arithmetic and natural language date parsing, this library will go a long way in simplifying your date life.

Homepage

Economists are still measuring how stimulative the tax cut was. But the hard-to-notice part has succeeded wildly. In a recent interview, President Obama said that structuring the tax cuts so that a little more money showed up regularly in people’s paychecks “was the right thing to do economically, but politically it meant that nobody knew that they were getting a tax cut.”

This blurb from an article in the New York Times (From Obama, the Tax Cut Nobody Heard Of – NYTimes.com) talks about how no one seemed to notice that most of us got tax cuts last year.

Not only that, but not knowing that a tax cut was had was part of the reason that it was effective.  So in a political system where politicians are salesman, what are they to do when the best thing for the electorate is to not know what the best thing is for the electorate?

The answer says a lot about why politicians are often reviled in modern society.  The good ones are mostly selected out as they come to realize that the political machine is nearly impossible to control since effective policy is based on nuanced,detailed information that the public is mostly unaware of (and shouldn’t need to be aware of).  At the same time, you have the Fox News’ of the world and other huge corporations muddying the waters of reality with “information” designed to further their own agenda.

Is it any wonder we get questionable personalities in the senate and house of reps?

The internet does it again.

Khan Academy.