The American Trucking Associations (ATA) expressed what it called its “grave concerns” about media reports that the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) may be on the verge of granting the state of California waivers to implement potentially harmful and unrealistic emissions rules on the industry. Under California rules, new Class 8 heavy truck models would be zero-emission next year. Diesel and gasoline-powered drayage trucks must retire after 18 years to guarantee that they meet a zero-emission requirement by 2035.

Rod-shaped fragments of RNA called “obelisks” were discovered in gut and mouth bacteria for the first time

Charlotte, a stingray in a small North Carolina aquarium, is taking a DIY approach to reproduction

A long-awaited study of people with ME/CFS revealed differences in their immune and nervous system. The findings may offer clues about long COVID

Without adding an extra day to February every four years, our calendar would get increasingly out of sync with the cosmos

8002/20943Thanks to Peter Jones (not that one) and others who sent me this clip from a TV quiz.On the one hand kudos to me for getting this self-produced chat show to the point where it is deemed worthy of a general knowledge question, but on the other the complete look of bafflement on the faces of both women does suggest there is some way to go. Even with my first name as a given. And even, as I suspect, if the theme of the round might well have been fish.

8003/20944I came downstairs for breakfast having forgotten there was an election on. As I made my coffee I remembered and thought, I wonder if they've got any projections yet. I wasn't overly concerned. Some were saying it was tight, but the posh bloke off that politics podcast and a few others had said Kamala was going to win easily and Elon Musk seemed to be the only one saying there would be a landslide the other way and he seemed to have ulterior motives.

8004/20945Dropped the kids off at school then went up to the Lister Hospital to have my bloods done ahead of next week's annual catch-up with my oncologist. I had my full body scan done a couple of weeks ago and I very much appreciate this regular check up to make sure nothing nasty has returned or if my body is concocting a new way to kill me.

8005/20946A day that will go down in history as the Great Fire of Hitchin. Almost the whole town was burned down overnight and it was only the intervention of the fire brigade that kept the flames at bay in the industrial estate where the conflagration had started.  So only maybe one building was affected, but it's horrible to think of what might have happened if no one had called 999. Apparently the industrial estate has about four fires a year, so they are especially lucky that the fire fighters show up.

8006/20947Another 9/11 passes by with barely anyone recognising it at all. It seems to be only me and Harriet Harman who remember that fateful day at all (thanks to @BookHonest for the clip). I guess the world moves on, but I will remember them. The rest of you should be ashamed.I was hoping to get to Park Run this morning, but Catie took the early shift with the kids (I am usually the one who gets up to do this, as I generally wake up before the children) and I slept in til after 9am. I don't remember the last time this happened.

8007/20948Scientists have ascertained that chimpanzees will never accidentally type the complete works of Shakespeare - there's simply not enough time left in history for the population of chimpanzees on earth to type even a simple sentence. Thank goodness that's been sorted out.Also even if you put chimps in a room with a typewriter, the probably wouldn't attempt to use it. And if they did it would be hard to force them to do nothing else but type for more than a few seconds. There's all kinds of reasons why chimps won't ever do this.

8008/209498008th entry. BOOB!I am 57. Imagine what my life will be like if I get to 69. What a year that's going to be. 
 
When I was in Cheddar last month I informed by 88 year old dad about what I was going to talk about in his eulogy, which might be considered tasteless and that would be an accurate assessment. To be fair the old bastard hasn't shown any signs of snuffing it yet and I think there's a good chance he will outlive me, so the joke will be on me, as he has loads of embarrassing stories about me.I

Holidays are a perfect time to try something fun, easy, and no-fail. Hello, mokume gane! Problem is there are variations nine ways to Sunday! You’ve got your deep, shallow, scrap, ghost, and natural methods. For your holiday polymer pleasure, follow this free link from the UK’s Jane Hewitt, who gathers a slew of approaches to […] Read more

I thought I’d keep writing PCD occasionally but my inner 5-year-old defiantly stomped her feet and said, “No.”  There was no coaxing her back to the computer. Abandoning artwork and artists gathered over 18 years didn’t feel good either. That’s a lot of water under the bridge! How to solve the dilemma? My mind wandered […] Read more

Ross needed to write software to integrate with a credit card payment gateway. The one his company chose was relatively small, and only served a handful of countries- but it covered the markets they cared about and the transaction fees were cheap. They used XML for data interchange, and while they had no published schema document, they did have some handy-dandy sample code which let you parse their XML messages.

$response = curl_exec($ch);
$authecode = fetch_data($response, '<authCode>', '</authCode>');
$responsecode = fetch_data($response, '<responsecode>', '</responsecode>');
$retrunamount = fetch_data($response, '<returnamount>', '</returnamount>');
$trxnnumber = fetch_data($response, '<trxnnumber>', '</trxnnumber>');
$trxnstatus = fetch_data($response, '<trxnstatus>', '</trxnstatus>');
$trxnresponsemessage = fetch_data($response, '<trxnresponsemessage>', '</trxnresponsemessage>');

Well, this looks… worrying. At first glance, I wonder if we're going to have to kneel before Z̸̭͖͔͂̀ā̸̡͖͕͊l̴̜͕͋͌̕g̸͉̳͂͊ȯ̷͙͂̐. What exactly does fetch_data actually do?

function fetch_data($string, $start_tag, $end_tag)
{

  $position = stripos($string, $start_tag);
  $str = substr($string, $position);
  $str_second = substr($str, strlen($start_tag));
  $second_positon = stripos($str_second, $end_tag);
  $str_third = substr($str_second, 0, $second_positon);
  $fetch_data = trim($str_third);
  return $fetch_data;
}

Phew, no regular expressions, just… lots of substrings. This parses the XML document with no sense of the document's structure- it literally just searches for specific tags, grabs whatever is between them, and calls it done. Nested tags? Attributes? Self-closing tags? Forget about it. Since it doesn't enforce that your open and closing tags match, it also lets you grab arbitrary (and invalid) document fragments- fetch_data($response, "<fooTag>", "<barTag>"), for example.

And it's not like this needs to be implemented from scratch- PHP has built-in XML parsing classes. We could argue that by limiting ourselves to a subset of XML (which I can only hope this document does) and doing basic string parsing, we've built a much simpler approach, but I suspect that after doing a big pile of linear searches through the document, we're not really going to see any performance benefits from this version- and maintenance is going to be a nightmare, as it's so fragile and won't work for many very valid XML documents.

It's always amazing when TRWTF is neither PHP nor XML but… whatever this is.

Some time ago, poor Keith found himself working on an antique Classic ASP codebase. Classic ASP uses VBScript, which is like VisualBasic 6.0, but worse in most ways. That's not to say that VBScript code is automatically bad, but the language certainly doesn't help you write clean code.

In any case, the previous developer needed to make an 8 element array to store some data. Traditionally, in VBScript, you might declare it like so:

Dim params(8)

That's the easy, obvious way a normal developer might do it.

Keith's co-worker did this instead:

Dim params : params = Split(",,,,,,,", ",")

Yes, this creates an array using the Split function on a string of only commas. 7, to be exact. Which, when split, creates 8 empty substrings.

We make fun of stringly typed data a lot here, but this is an entirely new level of stringly typed initialization.

We can only hope that this code has finally been retired, but given that it was still in use well past the end-of-life for Classic ASP, it may continue to lurk out there, waiting for another hapless developer to stumble into its grasp.

• The Dwarves venture into the Mountain (1341)
• The Elvenking's host leave Mirkwood for Erebor (1341)
• The Council of Elrond (1418)
• The Council of Hobbits... and a Wizard.
• [Join us on the Discussion Boards here]

October 25, 2941 (S.R. 1341)

1. The Dwarves venture into the Mountain.

(determined from text)

"Now do be careful!" whispered the hobbit, "and as quiet as you can be!  There may be no Smaug at the bottom, but then again there may be..."

(Tolkien, 1966 Ballantine, p. 224-228 TH)

October 25, 3018 (S.R. 1418)

1. Council of Elrond.

(from the appendices)

"Suddenly as they were talking a single clear bell rang out.  'That is the warning bell for the Council of Elrond,' cried Gandalf.  'Come along now! Both you and Bilbo are wanted.'"

(Tolkien, 1965 Ballantine, p. 314-354 FotR)

The following event(s) took place in Middle-earth on November 3,

• Battle of Bywater, and Passing of Saruman. End of the War of the Ring (1419)
• [Join us on the Discussion Boards here]
• .

 November 3, 3019 (S.R. 1419)

1. Battle of Bywater, and Passing of Saruman. End of the War of the Ring.

(from the appendices)

"...a messenger from the Tookland rode in. He was in high spirits. 'The Thain has raised all our country,' he said, 'and the news is going like fire all ways.…"

(Tolkien, 1965 Ballantine, p. 363-371 RotK)

Have you always wanted to delight hobbit passerby with a beautiful springtime flower display but don't feel confident in your green thumb? Then you're in luck! Kili is here to show you just how easy it is to plant and grow bulbs! Watch the new episode and read her tips below.

Bulb planting tips:

• Plant bulbs in the autumn so that they have time to chill over winter.
• Choose a spot with partial to full sun
• Bulbs need soil that drains well (so they don't turn to mush after prolonged exposure to moisture), so amend clay soil with perlite or other substances to aid drainage
• As a general rule, dig a hole twice as deep as the bulb is tall.
• Plant bulbs in the autumn so that they have time to chill over winter.
• After the flowers have finished, don't prune them off! Allow the plant to continue its lifecycle. The leaves will continue to create and store energy that the bulb will use the following spring! The will die away on their own in mid-to-late summer.

Happy Hobbit has brought Middle-earth to its viewers' daily lives since 2012! Learn more hobbity recipes, crafts, and more by watching new episodes and/or perusing the 10+ years worth of videos on their YouTube channel. ???? New episodes debut every other Saturday, so be sure you are subscribed to Happy Hobbit so that you don't miss out!

Get even more slow-living hobbit content by following Happy Hobbit on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and TikTok! If watching the show has left you with an appetite for more, know that Kili (Kellie) has a podcast where Tolkien is often mentioned called Forests, Folklore & Fantasy

In October 2024 Nike will launch their legendary model Cortez in the new colorway - Dark Russet...

Ancient weaponsmiths combined bronze and iron to fashion swords during the early Iron Age – but modern forgers glue together elements from different weapons, making it difficult for researchers to study the ancient technology

A nearby star that exploded some 3 million years ago could have removed all dust smaller than a millimetre from the outer solar system

A new supercapacitor design that uses only water, clay and graphene could source material on Mars and be more sustainable and accessible than traditional batteries

China's carbon emissions may have peaked in 2023, as figures suggest its output has plateaued so far in 2024

A specialised algorithm could help autonomous vehicles track hidden objects, such as a pedestrian, a bicycle or another vehicle concealed behind a parked car

In support of their AI ambitions, tech companies are rapidly expanding US data centres, and this growth is on track to significantly increase US gas demand by 2030

Alan Turing's theories about computation seem to have a startling consequence, placing hard limits on how fast or slow any physical process in the universe can grow

Soil is full of an uncountable number of viruses, and scientists are only beginning to understand just how substantial their role in the carbon cycle may be

Zinc nanoparticles, a common sunscreen ingredient, can make plants more resilient to climate change – in a surprising way

Before Mesopotamian people invented writing, they used cylinder seals to press patterns into wet clay – and some of the symbols used were carried over into proto-writing

Fibres in wet wipes and clothes often make their way into soil - and natural versions could be more damaging than synthetic ones

Chronic pain has increased among adults in the US since 2019, which could be due to a rise in sedentary lifestyles or reduced access to healthcare amid covid-19 restrictions

Dangerous radiation reaches Mars at levels we aren't exposed to on Earth, which makes the Red Planet a particularly dangerous place to be during pregnancy

Reaching net-zero emissions is essential for halting climate change - but even after we achieve this goal, parts of the planet will continue to warm. Delaying net zero will worsen these effects