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It's been a pretty busy month and a half since the last update. Summer is finally here!

After a bit of a dry spell, I was able to line up 2 dates since the last update. The first girl was a teacher at a high school. She had curly black hair and glasses - a combination that usually drive me wild. We met for some drinks after work one day, but it didn't go very well. She was a nice girl and all, but no chemistry at all. Actually, she really, really reminded me of a girl that I grew up with that was practically a sister, so it was a little weird. No second date on that one.

The other girl is 25 or 26 (can't remember), and we met in a local park for a first date. She is currently in school taking psychology, so is pretty poor. A tiny thing - blond, maybe 5'5" and slim. We chatted as we walked though the park (she is a talker, so mostly I listened...) and then I bought her a drink and we shared some appetizers.

I saw her again last night for a second date, and she made me chicken wings and stuffed potatoes for dinner. I was in charge of a salad, and my wife makes really, really good salad dressings. My wife made me a salad kit with dressing, fresh basil, and roasted nuts to bring for the salad. It was pretty awesome to have my wife help make my date special. My wife is pretty great!

We made dinner and after ended up cuddling on the couch and watching a couple TV shows. We had a great first kiss.

After the first date, I was a little on the fence about her, but after the last date, I definitely feel there could be something there. I'm a little scared to get my hopes up too much though after how things went the last time I like someone (the last one basically ditched me...), but I really hope to see her again.

My wife and I are still doing great. It's been almost a year since we opened our marriage up. I still feel that opening up has so far improved our relationship. She likes the extra confidence I have when things are working out, and picks me up when I am down when things aren't working out. I'm very thankful to have such an amazing woman in my life. I hope that when she starts looking for secondary relationships I can be as supportive to her as she has been for me.

-- Snow

I'm still using Firefox, and I have it on my (new) Android phone as well as my home Linux system.

A couple of days ago, Firefox updated itself on my phone, and now it renders pages differently, and less well, in my opinion. It may just be a coincidence. Maybe soylentews.org has changed?

Up until the upgrade, it used to render the main text area in stories and the comment threads below to fill the width of the screen automatically, and the text would wrap at the screen edges. I like this, because the (useful/interesting) text is automatically the most prominent and is given all the screen area. Also, zooming would make the text larger, and would still wrap it at the edges if the screen, so you could still read everything without scrolling left and right continually.

Now, the whole page takes the whole width of the screen, and you have to manually zoom to the text, and it doesn't wrap, because you're zooming the whole pages, borders, menus and all, not just the interesting stuff.

Have I missed something? Is there a setting in the browser?

In general in the last few years as shallow but wide screens have become the norm, we pages are generally designed to a certain fixed width. Gone are the days when you could resize your browser window and the text would reflow to fit your personal preference.

I read better in relatively narrow vertical columns. I was once told that this is most natural, and one of the reasons that traditional newspapers printed in columns. It's tiring and easy to get lost reading very long horizontal lines.

And those of us who like to use our window managers to have multiple windows tiled and overlapping on our multiple desktops do not like to have to maximise a browser window or to take up 80% of the screen just to render a fixed-width web page.

And web pages these days are all L A R G E F O N T S, W H I T E S P A C E , A N I M A T I O N S, V I D E O S A N D F L O A T I N G P O P O V E R M E N U S A N D C A N C E L B U T T O N S.

Bah!

Update: It appears that Firefox has an option to make the text larger which solves the immediate problem with rendering this site.

Disclaimer: I work as a PHP developer.
While browsing the upgrade notes of PHP 7 alpha 2, I found a few changes a bit concerning. (In order of appearance)

The func_get_arg() and func_get_args() functions will no longer return the original value that was passed to a parameter and will instead provide the current value (which might have been modified). For example

function foo($x) {
        $x++;
        var_dump(func_get_arg(0));
}
foo(1);

will now print "2" instead of "1".

While I never use func_get_args(), I know a lot of frameworks do, a quick search over an old project (symfony 1.4) results in 129 matches. Even worse, a few lines further down it says:

function foo($x) {
        $x = 42;
        throw new Exception;
}
foo("string");

    will now result in the stack trace

            Stack trace:
            #0 file.php(4): foo(42)
            #1 {main}

    while previously it was:

            Stack trace:
            #0 file.php(4): foo('string')
            #1 {main}

Why make debugging harder than it is already? I want to know what parameter was passed and caused the exception! Especially in long stack traces. Or am I completely misunderstanding something?
The next one should throw a warning at least:

Left bitwise shifts by a number of bits beyond the bit width of an integer will always result in 0:
var_dump(1 << 64); // int(0)

At least it is consistent for all CPU architectures.

There are now two exception classes: Exception and Error. Both classes implement a new interface Throwable. Type hints in exception handling code may need to be changed to account for this.

ARRGH!

Calling a method on a non-object no longer raises a fatal error; see also: https://wiki.php.net/rfc/catchable-call-to-member-of-non-object.

Really? I mean: WHAT? I hate that error like the next guy, but it *should* be fatal. I hate to see every little method call surrounded by a try-catch block.

Nevertheless, a lot of the other stuff that will change looks interesting to me, e.g. Added null coalesce operator (??). looks fun and can short-circuit functions!

function foo() {
        echo "executed!", PHP_EOL;
}
var_dump(true ?? foo());

// outputs bool(true), "executed!" does not appear as it short-circuited

With the upheaval at Reddit, it seems Voat.co should be thriving as the heir apparent. Yet it seems like every time I try to visit them, they are overloaded. I'm not sure what's going on, but it's clear they have a huge opportunity here and are apparently squandering it.

NASA says their New Horizons probe suffered a temporary communication breakdown on Saturday at 17:54 UTC, 10 days before it's supposed to fly past Pluto on 2015-07-14. The probe went into "safe mode" but it will still fly past Pluto at the planned distance, speed, and time. The glitch may cause the approach animations and a gap in the light curves for Nix and Hydra. The mission team is working to restore communications to normal. "Full recovery is expected to take from one to several days," NASA wrote in a status report on Saturday. "New Horizons will be temporarily unable to collect science data during that time. The latency one way is currently 4.5 hours.

The two way communication progress can be seen here at the Canberra dish. There's a thread over at New Horizons Pluto System Encounter, 28 Jun 15 that has some things to say about the issue.

Some close up pictures of the planet: dark band at the bottom is around the equator.

(Trying to turn grumpiness about rejection into something positive for Soylent)

The other day I submitted a story on the woes of Greece (when I wrote it, the Greek prime minister had just called for a referendum, which basically blew the entire negotiations completely out of the water and would likely imply that Greece would default on its loans - which it did today).
The story was rejected.
Within a few hours of that, there was a story running that a woman had cut down a flag which was put up again within a matter of hours.

Neither of these stories are tech-related. One was accepted, the other one rejected. Unfortunately, Rehash doesn't yet have a system to tell me *why* this was rejected. That is a pity, because now I'm wondering what the difference is what made the one submission accepted and the other rejected. Is it in the write-up? That can be improved for a next submission. Or is it the subject? In that case, which general news subjects do we like? Stories about something that will likely have major long-term economic impact are out, while stories about things that will keep social media abuzz for a week or so are in?

That's probably not it. Other possible ways these particular stories contrast:
- One is about economics (we don't care), the other is about civil disobedience (we love).
- One is about fast-developing issues, the other is a "done" case.
- One is covered in general news well enough, and the other... ermmms, is covered well enough too?
- One is about Europe, the other about the US.

The above is only about two particular stories, but in general, comments would be great.
They help clarify the editor's view on acceptable stories is, thereby helping submitters focus on stories that Soylent would want to run in some form.

PS: If someone has a good argument why Greece's financial woes don't belong on Soylent, but removal of a flag that is replaced within the hour does, I'm interested!

University of Cambridge is Recruiting for a Professor of LEGO in 2015. The selected candidate will head a new research center that focuses on children’s relationships with play in education, development and learning. They will also investigate how unrestrictive play can help improve a child’s experience of education. LEGO funds it with an 4 million GBP donation (6.2 million USD).

So I released one of the biggest updates ever for Epoch a couple days ago. As of writing I have yet to update the site documentation, but I thought I'd recap some of the new stuff.

* Basic dependency support. ObjectStartPriority=sshd+1 for example. This is the most requested feature for Epoch of all time.
* 'epoch merge' and 'epoch unmerge' commands to automatically add or delete a config Import= line from epoch.conf, which will help distro maintainers.
* Ability to change logfile location via the LogFile= config attribute.
* Ability to skip or start objects from the kernel command line via skipobj= and startobj=
* New "interactive" mode for boot which mimics old Red Hat releases' "press I for interactive startup" thing with sysvinit. All objects intended to be interactive must have ObjectOptions=INTERACTIVE set.
* Ability to ignore all kernel options passed to Epoch, useful for initramfs. Depends on existence of /.epochnokargs file.
* Added option to ignore when a MountVirtual (e.g. /proc, /sys, /dev. /dev/pts, or /dev/shm) fails to mount.
* Ability to specify the amount of time that should be considered too soon for a service to be auto-restarted.
* Fixed problems with colors and 'less' command. 'epoch help' now returns without color, and 'epoch statusnc' can be used to view status without color. I prefer color because it's easier for me to see at a glance, but now you have the choice.
* Added makefile support, which just calls ./buildepoch.sh. There is also a make clean and you can specify options to buildepoch.sh with 'make BUILDOPTS="--myoption"'.
* Epoch now compiles as C99. I was getting too happy with my nice C99 // comments.

This is probably the biggest update I've released since 1.0.0 "Sage".

Get it while it's hot.

http://universe2.us/epoch.html

Now one can have 128 GByte of RAM in a PC. Corsair offers 128 GB DDR4/2400 for 1980 US$ and Kingston is to offer 3000 MHz speeds. Kingston did the deed not with the pricey Core i7-5960X Haswell-E processor, but the cheapie Core i7-5820K CPU.

But to get ECC you need a very pricey Xeon processor. But your alpha radiation detector is included by just scanning the RAM..

Guess 64-bit address bus finally found a use case :p

Looks like we're about to hit 200,000 posts today.