We'd like to know if it is possible to have a group account to answer questions specific to some technologies. The group can have many members and anyone of them can answer questions.  At the end we'd like to know how many questions are answered by individuals and their reputation points.  I don't want reputation as a group. Individuals will work for their own reputation.  The only thing I want that somehow the group of people be seen as coming from one technology background (grouped under one hashTag) and people can see them as part of a technology/organization group and a way to add/remove people from the group by an admin.  Individual profiles remain as they are.
I recently saw a question about a problem (or possible bug) with some product on Stack Overflow. At first, I wanted to suggest that the asker post his question to that product's support forum.  When searching for the URL of that forum, I noticed that the product developer closed its support forums and now advises users to post all their questions on Stack Overflow instead.  Is this within the intended use cases of Stack Overflow, or is this abuse?
Case-insensitive string comparison in C++ Do Americans remove the "t" in "wanted"? When you pronounce the phrase "I got a message you wanted to see me", is the "t" usually deleted in the word "wanted"? Thank you. I had posted a  last week about customizing a ToolValidator class and got some very good answers.  In working with the proposed solutions, I have created a custom module that performs queries on a db, and will be called by both the ToolValidator class (to provide values for the drop-down lists) and later in the geoprocessing script (to get other parameters based on items selected in drop-down lists).  However, I can't seem to actually call the custom module in the ToolValidator class.  I have been trying to append to path with no luck.  When I try to apply these changes to the script, I get a runtime error:  [Errno 9] Bad file descriptor.  If I comment out import line, no errors.  sys.path.append('my_custom_module_directory') import my_custom_module   Many of you may be asking why don't I just implement a custom tool with ArcObjects.  The reason is that my end users don't have the privleges necessary to register ANY dlls on their computer.  UPDATE:  This was happening to me in ArcGIS 10.  Interestingly enough, I was initially appending to the path inside of the initialiazeParameters function of the ToolValidator class.  If I do the append outside (i.e., on top of) of the ToolValidator class, everything works as expected.  sys.path.append('C:/Working/SomeFolder') import somescript --------&gt;THIS WORKS  class ToolValidator:   """Class for validating a tool's parameter values and controlling   the behavior of the tool's dialog."""    def __init__(self):     """Setup arcpy and the list of tool parameters."""     import arcpy     sys.path.append('C:/Working/SomeFolder')     import somescript -------&gt; THIS DOESNT WORK     self.params = arcpy.GetParameterInfo()   UPDATE 2:  I think I found the true cause of my problem.  In the code snippets in this post, I have been appending what appear to be real paths (ex C:/Working/SomeFolder) to the sys.path.  In my actual ToolValidator class, I was constructing a relative path using os.path.dirname(__file__) +"\my_special_folder...".  I was anticipating that os.path.dirname(__file__) would return the path of the toolbox, since that contains the ToolValidator class.  I have come to find this is not the case.  As far as I can tell, the ToolValidator class is never actually written to a .py file, and I speculate the the this code is passed to the python interpreter in memory, so __file__ is useless, or some temp script is persisted and then execfile(path_to_script) is called, again rendering __file__ useless.  I'm sure there are other reasons I am missing as well.    Long story short, if I use a hardcoded path, the sys.append works anywhere, relative paths don't work so well in the ToolValidator class. Android: textview hyperlink I have a C++ library that provides various classes for managing data.  I have the source code for the library.  I want to extend the C++ API to support C function calls so that the library can be used with C code and C++ code at the same time.  I'm using GNU tool chain (gcc, glibc, etc), so language and architecture support are not an issue.  Are there any reasons why this is technically not possible?  Are there any gotcha's that I need to watch out for?  Are there resources, example code and/or documentation available regarding this?    Some other things that I have found out:   Use the following to wrap your C++ headers that need to be used by C code.     #ifdef __cplusplus extern "C" {   #endif   //   // Code goes here ...   //   #ifdef __cplusplus   } // extern "C"   #endif    Keep "real" C++ interfaces in separate header files that are not included by C.  Think  here.  Using #ifndef __cplusplus #error stuff helps here to detect any craziness. Careful of C++ identifiers as names in C code Enums varying in size between C and C++ compilers.  Probably not an issue if you're using GNU tool chain, but still, be careful. For structs follow the following form so that C does not get confused.  typedef struct X { ... } X  Then use pointers for passing around C++ objects, they just have to be declared in C as struct X where X is the C++ object.   All of this is courtesy of a friend who's a wizard at C++. How do I create a list of Python lambdas (in a list comprehension/for loop)? I want to create a list of lambda objects from a list of constants in Python; for instance:  listOfNumbers = [1,2,3,4,5] square = lambda x: x * x listOfLambdas = [lambda: square(i) for i in listOfNumbers]   This will create a list of lambda objects, however, when I run them:  for f in listOfLambdas:     print f(),   I would expect that it would print  1 4 9 16 25   Instead, it prints:  25 25 25 25 25   It seems as though the lambdas have all been given the wrong parameter. Have I done something wrong, and is there a way to fix it? I'm in Python 2.4 I think.  EDIT: a bit more of trying things and such came up with this:  listOfLambdas = [] for num in listOfNumbers:     action = lambda: square(num)     listOfLambdas.append(action)     print action()   Prints the expected squares from 1 to 25, but then using the earlier print statement:  for f in listOfLambdas:     print f(),   still gives me all 25s. How did the existing lambda objects change between those two print calls?  Related question: When should I use an em-dash, an en-dash, and a hyphen? I generally know how to use a hyphen, but when should I use an en-dash (–) instead of an em-dash, or when should I use a hyphen (-) instead of an em-dash (—)? Why can't Python's raw string literals end with a single backslash? Technically, any odd number of backslashes, as described in .  &gt;&gt;&gt; r'\'   File "&lt;stdin&gt;", line 1     r'\'        ^ SyntaxError: EOL while scanning string literal &gt;&gt;&gt; r'\\' '\\\\' &gt;&gt;&gt; r'\\\'   File "&lt;stdin&gt;", line 1     r'\\\'          ^ SyntaxError: EOL while scanning string literal   It seems like the parser could just treat backslashes in raw strings as regular characters (isn't that what raw strings are all about?), but I'm probably missing something obvious. XML attribute vs XML element At work we are being asked to create XML files to pass data to another offline application that will then create a second XML file to pass back in order to update some of our data. During the process we have been discussing with the team of the other application about the structure of the XML file.   The sample I came up with is essentially something like:  &lt;INVENTORY&gt;    &lt;ITEM serialNumber="something" location="something" barcode="something"&gt;       &lt;TYPE modelNumber="something" vendor="something"/&gt;     &lt;/ITEM&gt; &lt;/INVENTORY&gt;   The other team said that this was not industry standard and that attributes should only be used for meta data. They suggested:  &lt;INVENTORY&gt;    &lt;ITEM&gt;       &lt;SERIALNUMBER&gt;something&lt;/SERIALNUMBER&gt;       &lt;LOCATION&gt;something&lt;/LOCATION&gt;       &lt;BARCODE&gt;something&lt;/BARCODE&gt;       &lt;TYPE&gt;          &lt;MODELNUMBER&gt;something&lt;/MODELNUMBER&gt;          &lt;VENDOR&gt;something&lt;/VENDOR&gt;       &lt;/TYPE&gt;    &lt;/ITEM&gt; &lt;/INVENTORY&gt;   The reason I suggested the first is that the size of the file created is much smaller. There will be roughly 80000 items that will be in the file during transfer. Their suggestion in reality turns out to be three times larger than the one I suggested. I searched for the mysterious "Industry Standard" that was mentioned, but the closest I could find was that XML attributes should only be used for meta data, but said the debate was about what was actually meta data.  After the long winded explanation (sorry) how do you determine what is meta data, and when designing the structure of an XML document how should you decide when to use an attribute or an element? One of the ways I quickly rename files in Windows is   F2 &gt; Rename &gt; Tab (to next file) &gt; Rename ...   But in Ubuntu/Nautilus, I can't tab to next file. But being on Linux, I think there must be a command line alternative.  However, sometimes, I may want more control over how to rename specific files. In that case, perhaps its better to be able to tab to the next file What is the easiest way to resolve apt-get BADSIG GPG errors? "A/An" preceding a parenthetical statement When a/an precedes a parenthetical aside (sometimes seen in informal/conversational writing), should the vowel rule depend on the first word in parentheses, or the next word in the "regular" flow of the sentence?     I need a (memorable) idiom (preceding an m word; use a)   or     I need an (memorable) idiom (preceding an i word; use an) Integral of $ 1 \, / \, (1 + a \, \cos(x) )$ How can I count the number of records that have a unique value in a particular field in ROR? Unzipping geoprocessing package (GPK) file? I was under the impression that all ArcGIS package files could have their contents examined and potentially used by renaming them to *.zip and unzipping them.  This impression is supported for map package (*.mpk) files by  to  and I thought I had used it succesfully on geoprocessing package (*.gpk) files in the past.  However, today I am unable to use a  which I think is because it was created using ArcGIS Desktop 10.5.x when I am using 10.2.1.01. When I rename this *.gpk as *.zip and try to examine it in Windows Explorer I get:     Compressed (zipped) Folders Error      Windows cannot open the folder      The Compressed (zipped) Folder ....zip is invalid.     Is it possible to unzip a geoprocessing package (*.gpk) file to see whether it may contain some useful ArcPy code when that *.gpk cannot be unpacked to provide a usable toolbox? 'Drop us a line' - letter or phone call? According to , dropping someone a line means sending them a short message.  Is this correct? I always thought it meant phoning someone, the line referring to a telephone line. Stop Edit/Rollback Wars: Limit Number Of Edits/Rollbacks Per User Per Post Per Day I came up with an idea for how to begin putting an end to the edit/rollback wars and then the ensuing comments battle...   What if you are only allowed to edit a post (not the author) once a day. What if you are also only allowed to rollback one edit to your post a day. There would not be a overall limit on the users ability to edit other posts other than the one edit per post per day. There would also not be a limit on the number of times a single post could be edited or rolledback (multiple users), but each edit/rollback would trigger the 24 hour wait... There is currently some threshold in place that allows a post to be edited after it is posted without calling it an edit.  This same threshold could apply to the edit in case a mistake is made (fat fingered, mis-tagged, etc.) which would allow the editor a window of time to correct a mistake before getting locked out.     If either the editor or rollerbacker feel that the current state of the post is not acceptable and they are out of mods for the day, then a moderator can get flagged through the current process. How do I add PHP code/file to HTML(.html) files? How to completely uninstall gnome-shell and all extensions? How could it possible to factorise $x^8-1$ in product of irreducibles in the rings $(\mathbb{Z}/2\mathbb{Z})[x]$ and $(\mathbb{Z}/3\mathbb{Z})[x]$? How could it possible to factorize $x^8-1$ in product of irreducibles in the rings $(\mathbb{Z}/2\mathbb{Z})[x]$ and $(\mathbb{Z}/3\mathbb{Z})[x]$?  I'm having a hard time starting the problem. Could anyone help me at this point?