"I'm in!" -too casual?

Question: When you are invited to the party from your boss and would like to join, is it appropriate to say "I'm in"? Does it sound too casual in a business setting?
I'd like to know more formal ways of saying.
Comment: It depends on the boss, the relationship between you and your boss, the company's culture, and other things. All we can do is give answers based on whatever work situation we dream up  or maybe the "average" work situation (if there is such a thing). There are many bosses I've had who I wouldn't hesitate to say *I'm in* to.
Answer: It depends on the type of party.  If it is a formal dinner party, no. But if it is an informal get-together for a drink after work, you can say "I'm in" or "Count me in!" which would be an expression that you are happy to come along.
Answer: If it is a formal business setting - such as a formal dinner party that is too casual. Especially as it is your boss, it is always best to err on the side of caution. A phrase such as "Thank you that would be great" would be better.
For a Friday night drink or informal setting, "count me in" would be fine.
Answer: It depends on how you want to portray yourself.
Because the conversational situation you are describing is
1) informal (someone you know well)
2) you are being invited to a party
3) you are talking to a co-worker, even though it's your boss
4) assuming you are on good terms with your boss
using

I'm in

is appropriate, of course adding "thank you" is courteous

Thanks for the invite, I'm in!

would convey a certain excitement of looking forward to going to the party. If you are too formal you may come across as being aloof or distant.
Answer: Only you can answer this properly. That's because, like with any conversation, it depends entirely on your relationship with the other person.
As it happens, just a few weeks ago I literally replied "I'm in!" to a party invitation from our HR manager, but it's a small company at which I've been working for thirteen years. My colleagues are also my friends.
I wouldn't recommend responding in that manner to a senior manager who you don't know socially, because it is medium informal.
The other extreme is:

Dear Mr Biggins,
Thank you for your kind invitation. I am delighted that I shall be able to attend this event. Please let me know what the dress code is: black tie, or will simple business-wear be acceptable?
Best regards,
  Eri

"I'm in!" -too casual?


Assigning Department based on Active Directory OU's

Question: We have just gone to Office 365 tied in with ADFS.  We want to be able to see people's departments automatically when we view their contact info in Office 365.  We do not have any Department attributes currently assigned in AD.  However, we basically have each department in it's own OU.  Is there a way to automatically assign a department to each user based on the OU that they're in, so that if they move to a different department (and therefore OU) it will update on all levels?
Comment: Powershell scripts run on a nightly schedule should do the trick.
Comment: What would be the syntax? Would it be Get-ADUser -filter * -SearchBase "ou=EXAMPLE,dc=MyDomain,dc=com" | Set-ADUser -Department "EXAMPLE" ?
Comment: Sounds reasonable. Did it work?
Comment: Yes, but I'm having trouble with nested OU's.  Is there a certain syntax for those?
Answer: As suggested in the comments, having a scheduled powershell script run  would be the best course of action.
How you schedule is up to you, I would suggest some time late in the evening, so any changes you've made during the day will take place overnight.
Now the script... I think it would be prudent to have the script pull all the users from the OU and set their department name to something you've chosen, rather than setting it based on the OU name. My reasoning for this is that your OU names might not reflect the name a department would like to have displayed.
e.g The finance department may come to you and say please update our department to "Companyname Finance Team" and you're OU name is still "Finance". It would then be easier to edit one entry in script, rather than renaming your OU to something potentially long and horrible.
Sript
<code>get-aduser -Filter * -SearchBase "ou=FINANCE,dc=iammred,dc=net" | Set-ADUser -Department Finance
</code>
Obviously replace the "ou=xxx" and "-Department xxx" with your OU and desired department name.


When we run the upgrade wizard on the CM machine, how will the assemblies be deployed to the CD?

Question: For upgrading our Sitecore instance from 8.2 to 9, we want to use the Sitecore Update Installation Wizard, as mentioned on https://dev.sitecore.net/Downloads/Sitecore_Experience_Platform/90/Sitecore_Experience_Platform_90_Initial_Release.aspx
under the header "Upgrade options". However, I am wondering how this is supposed to work in a multiple machines environment. We have 1 CM server and 2 CD machines. And when we run the upgrade wizard on the CM machine, how will the assemblies and other files be deployed to the CD machines? How does it works?
Answer: How to do upgrade multiple instances is described into upgrade guide Chapter 8:
The upgrade procedure for multiple instances depends on your environment architecture.
For a scaled environment, you must repeat the steps in this guide for each instance, with the
exception of actions related to the database, which you must follow only once for each
database .
Answer: You can use the sitecore migration tools, from the sitecore website.
https://dev.sitecore.net/Downloads/Express_Migration_Tool/31/Express_Migration_Tool_31.aspx
Express Migration Tool 3.1 can help you migration to major releases of Sitecore 6.6,7.2, 7.5 or 8.0 to the latest version of Sitecore Experience Platform 9.0.
P.S. DMS data to xDB will still require the use of the conversion tools found on the Sitecore Experience Platform download pages


How do I tell what is filling up the transaction log?

Question: We have a transaction log on a sql database and for some reason it has filled up to 50GB when our live system only has about 2GB. Is there any way I can profile sql or the transaction log to try and find out why this particular one has grown so much?
Comment: What recovery model are you using? Full..simple? Do you create Transaction Log Backups or only Full Backups? If you don't know the answer to these, I suppose it's yes to both, so you should first follow Remus's advice.
Answer: Start by investigating what is holding up the log reuse. Read Factors That Can Delay Log Truncation, look at log_reuse_wait_desc value is sys.databases. Based on what you find there, there could be several potential actions.
Answer: I would guess that you are not backing up the transaction log. This is not the same thing as backing up the database. I would suggest you back it up at least daily. In a high transaction environment, it should be backed up more frequently, ours is backed up every 15 minutes.


How to debug a aws lambda function?

Question: During this weekend i was running some node functions on aws lambda integrated with dynamodb, im using x-ray to debug it creating my own annotations, i like to know if there is a better approach to debug lambda functions something like a step-by-step?
Answer: Lambda local can be used to test the lambda code in local machine.
Answer: I think there is some misconception, pardon for switching from node.js context to python (the title is not specific to node so many folks will end up here anyway).
You CAN debug actual deployed AWS lambdas line-by-line. The approach involves running a debug server pydevd on the development machine and lambdas communicating with a debug-server over long-running TCP connection.
Is it supported by various IDEs, we use is with PyCharm Pro, so setup for it (hypothetically you should be able to setup VSCode similarly):

Debug configuration with Path mapping: right-top corner run/debug configuration dropdown -> Edit Configurations -> + (add new configuration) -> Python remote debug -> specify host name / port for your dev machine (which needs globally exposed: setup path forwarding on your router or use ngrok if previous option is not available). Make sure to setup path mappings, that is how your IDE can map the remote scripts to local sources.
pip install pydevd. (For pycharm, you will need to install IDE-version specific custom distribution like: pip install pydevd-pycharm~=193.5233.109)
Add the RemoteDebugSession context manager abstraction(since debug session is over long-running tcp connection, its needs to be closed explicitly in your lambda otherwise lambda will timeout) like:

# from config import config
from logging import getLogger
logger = getLogger(__name__)

class RemoteDebugSession:
    def __init__(self):
        self.active = False
        if not self.is_available():
            logger.warning(f"Remote debugging is not available")
            return

        try:
            # pydevd_pycharm exposes only settrace() from pydevd, import pydevd directly instead
            # import pydevd_pycharm
            import pydevd
            self.pydevd = pydevd
        except Exception as e:
            logger.warning(f"Remote debugging is unavailable")
            logger.warning(e)
            self.pydevd = None

    def __enter__(self):
        if not self.is_available() or self.pydevd is None:
            return

        self.pydevd.settrace(config.REMOTE_DEBUG_HOST, port=config.REMOTE_DEBUG_PORT,
                             suspend=False,
                             stdoutToServer=True,
                             stderrToServer=True)

        logger.warning("Starting remote dubugging session")
        self.active = True

    def __exit__(self, exc_type, exc_val, exc_tb):
        if not self.active:
            return

        if exc_type or exc_val or exc_tb:
            logger.warning(
                f"Remote debugging on {config.REMOTE_DEBUG_HOST}:{config.REMOTE_DEBUG_HOST} failed")
            logger.warning(exc_type)
            logger.warning(exc_val)
            logger.warning(exc_tb)
        else:
            logger.warning(f"Remote debugging on {config.REMOTE_DEBUG_HOST}:{config.REMOTE_DEBUG_HOST} closed")

        self.pydevd.stoptrace()

    @staticmethod
    def is_available():
        return hasattr(config, 'REMOTE_DEBUG_ENABLED') \
            and hasattr(config, 'REMOTE_DEBUG_HOST') \
            and hasattr(config, 'REMOTE_DEBUG_PORT') \
            and config.REMOTE_DEBUG_ENABLED \
            and config.REMOTE_DEBUG_HOST \
            and config.REMOTE_DEBUG_PORT

You need to have config object with REMOTE_DEBUG_ENABLED, REMOTE_DEBUG_HOST, REMOTE_DEBUG_PORT set.
(pydevd.settrace is used with suspend=False so the executing won't stop unless we set a breakpoint)

Wrap your feature of interest with it like:

 with RemoteDebugSession() as session:
    # your code to examine
    pass

In practice, when building web servers, this can be inside an individual API handler, which will allow you to debug multiple simultaneous incoming requests as other lambdas will block on connection.
Please REFRAIN from using this in production. Apart from security risk, remote evaluation can allow you to do all sort of nasty things.
Answer: BothSAM Local and The Serverless framework provide tools to locally execute an AWS Lambda functions. In case you need to debug your function in the AWS environment, I suggest using Cloud9Cloud9 IDE for AWS Lambda debugging.
However, to debug invocation failures occurred in production, you could use something like Dashbird to detect and debug failures using logs, X-ray traces and other metadata.
Answer: You wont be able to do a step by step debug like you would on a regular program by attaching a debugger.
As you mentioned you can use X-Ray and basically logging statements to figure out what went wrong.
As @ConfusedCoder pointed out there are ways in which you can run a lambda locally and debug it.
But also make sure you have enough logging in to ensure that you can try to figure out what went wrong, for future issues, using the logs as you would typically be looking at it after the actual execution happened.
Answer: Rookout offers live debugging of NodeJS on AWS Lambda. This gives you breakpoints on the production function to allow traditional step-debugging. There are also lots of hacky solutions that effectively run your Lambda locally (eg lambda.local, serverless framework) but if you want to debug with true inputs, then debugging it in its true environment using Rookout is a good option.
Answer: You can now create tests within Lambda itself:

Choose Test at the top right of your Lambda function to bring up a screen that allows you to configure a new test that can be run. There are lots of example templates to choose from, including one for DynamoDB like you suggested:

Now choose your new test and click the Test button again. It will run immediately and you'll see console results on your screen, including logs and error messages.
Answer: You can use the serverless framework to debug the function. In this approach, you don't have to install docker.

npm install -D serverless
serverless config credentials --provider aws --key 'your_key' --secret 'your_secret' --profile 'your aws profile'
npm install --save-dev serverless-offline
in package.json

"scripts": {
    "start": "serverless offline -s dev",
    "test": "mocha"
}

use following code as launch.json if you use vscode (Fill you aws profile name in #PROFILENAME#)
 {
// Use IntelliSense to learn about possible attributes.
// Hover to view descriptions of existing attributes.
// For more information, visit: https://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?linkid=830387
"version": "0.2.0",
"configurations": [
{
  "type": "node",
  "request": "launch",
  "name": "Launch Serverless Offline",
  "program": "${workspaceRoot}/node_modules/serverless/bin/serverless",
  "args": [
    "offline",
    "--noTimeout",
    "--dontPrintOutput",
    "--stage=local",
    "-P",
    "4000",
    "--aws-profile=#PROFILENAME#"
  ],
  "sourceMaps": true,
  "runtimeArgs": ["--lazy"],
  "outFiles": ["${workspaceFolder}/.webpack/**/*.js"],
  "protocol": "inspector",
  "runtimeExecutable": "node",
  "env": {
    // Here we set some environment vars that should be set locally.
    // They can and will overwrite the ones coming from your serverless.yml
  },
  "windows": {
    "program": "${workspaceRoot}\\node_modules\\serverless\\bin\\serverless"
  }
}
]
}
SET SLS_DEBUG=*

Then you can debug function as usual.
If you don't have package.json you have to npm init and npm install as a 4th step.
You must install serverless in locally not globally to use the given launch.json

How to debug a aws lambda function?


How can I resize my / (root) partition?

Question: Even though my SD card is 16GB, the image I flashed onto it was only 2GB and now I can only see 2GB of storage space on the disk.
How can I resize the image so that I have more space on my root partition?
Comment: @mbaitoff - because the default system image only has 68MiB free space, which doesn't leave much room for adding additional software.
Comment: Why resize a root partition when you can create new partition at the remaining free SD-card space and then mount it inside the root partition at `/mnt/storage` for example. This effectively isolates system and data and makes it easier to maintain and backup.
Comment: @mbaitoff most programs install in /usr, not /opt/software.  The prebuilt images have the contents of /usr in the root partition.  It therefore seems essential to increase the size of the root partition if you want to install any non-default software.
Comment: Thanks..worked great for me and didn't tank my system..still have IRC and apache webserver and my full 8gb capacity
Comment: @Jules - I wasn't asking why one would want to resize a partition. A was asking why would one resize the system partition instead of mounting additional storage at system partition mount point thus effectively isolating system and software/data? If you want storage, mount remaining SD spcae at `/mnt/storage`, if you want programs - mount at `/opt/software/`.
Comment: @Jules mount the space at `/usr/local`
Answer: Assuming you  are using Debian.
The Short Version:

Backup your system
Remove the main and swap partitions (leaving the boot partition alone)
Recreate the main partition to utilize the remaining disk space (excluding the boot partiton). Make sure to reuse the same start sector as the original root partition.
reboot the system
resize the new boot root partition to utilize the full partition size.

Step by Step Instructions
First make a backup of your SD Card using the instructions found here in case something goes wrong.
From the command line or a terminal window enter the following
sudo fdisk /dev/mmcblk0

then type p to list the partition table
you should see three partitions. if you look in the last column labeled System you should have

W95 FAT32
Linux
Linux Swap

make a note of the start number for partiton 2, you will need this later. though it will likely still be on the screen (just in case).
next type d to delete a partition.
You will then be prompted for the number of the partition you want to delete. In the case above you want to delete both the Linux and Linux swap partitions.
So type 2
then type d again and then type 3 to delete the swap partition.
Now you can resize the main partition.
type n to create a new partition.
This new partition needs to be a primary partition so type p.
Next enter 2 when prompted for a partition number.
You will now be prompted for the first sector for the new partition.
Enter the start number from the earlier step (the Linux partition)
Next you will be prompted for the last sector you can just hit enter to accept the default which will utilize the remaining disk space.
Type w to save the changes you have made.
Next reboot the system with the following command:
sudo reboot

once the system has reboot and you are back at the commandline enter the following command:
sudo resize2fs /dev/mmcblk0p2

Note: this can take a long time (depending on the card size and speed) be patient and let it finish so you do not mess up the file system and have to start from scratch.
Once it is done reboot the system with the following command:
sudo reboot

You can now verify that the system is using the full capacity of the SD Card by entering the following command:
df -h

Why This Works:
The real magic here is that you delete the root and swap partitions, then recreate only the root partition (using the original start sector) before writing the data to the disk. As a result you don't erase the existing data from the root partition.
By removing the swap partition you allow the root partition room to grow beyond its current size and fill the unused portion of the disk (because of the placement of the partitions -the root partition is sandwiched between the boot and swap partitions - it can't simply be resized leaving the swap partition alone).
You then resize (which is safe to run on  a mounted disk) the file system to  use all the space in the new root partition.
ref:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R4VovMDnsIE
http://www.raspberrypi.org/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=5584
Comment: It seems very wrong that you have to delete a partition in order to resize it.
Comment: @AwesomeUser  You don't do it on the mac, you do it on the pi itself. Also, if you are running raspbian you can boot the pi and from the command line issue the following command sudo raspi-config, and choose the resize root partition option.
Comment: From the comments it seems like you should also document **why** this works, not just how.
Comment: @Jivings if done correctly you don't lose a thing, but it is the reason I made step one backup.
Comment: @Jivings hopefully this addresses your concerns.
Comment: You are deleting it but not formatting so no files are lost
Comment: I've been using this process like forever without any problem, however the latest images from arch linux arm  changed the partition structure, so you can't follow the above instructions in a 'copy-and-paste' fashion, I found the updated instructions in this website: http://jan.alphadev.net/post/53594241659/growing-the-rpi-root-partition, this works for me.
Comment: @SteveRobillard the question was "how can i make my root partition bigger" - not "how can i make my root partition bigger and as a bonus remove my other partitions"
Comment: I know how to create a swap partition, what I'm saying is you should add "leave space for swap partition" and "fdisk another swap partition to replace the one deleted in step 2" to the answer, because the way it is presented currently makes it look like the swap partition isnt neccesary.
Comment: There no longer is a swap partition in Raspbian.
Comment: I did: `sudo resize2fs -p /dev/mmcblk0p3` and got `resize2fs 1.43.3 (04-Sep-2016)
resize2fs: Device or resource busy while trying to open /dev/mmcblk0p3
Couldn't find valid filesystem superblock.`
Comment: Great answer!  Would you mind adding something about deleting the signature?
Comment: The last prompt was if I wanted to delete the partition signature.
Comment: Same here! After creating the partition (i.e. enter the number of last sector) it asks me "Do you want to remove the signature? [Y]es/[N]o: "
Comment: A good answer. But this will still only give a maximum of 2GB I believe, the size of the image.
Comment: But `resize2fs` cannot normally be used on a mounted partition can it?
Comment: @Jivings check the linked reference for proof it works - also I did this before putting xbmc on the pi.
Comment: @finnw It looks to me like this method deletes the root partition so that it can be recreated larger, which is not really optimal.
Comment: @finnw You can see more evidence for this method here http://www.raspberrypi.org/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=5584 as well as an asnwer to your resize2fs question.
Comment: @AlexChamberlain  I think if the command was resize (it is actually called resize in Windows) partition rather than delete partition this would go down a little easier.
Comment: This really felt like complete spine replacement surgery (with leaving old spinal cord in place) on a live patient without using anesthetics or even interrupting their daily routine, but surprisingly, it worked just fine. If you're scared, do it on a newly-flashed card, which you can flash anew if anything goes wrong; also you might want to create a swapfile and mount it, since the swap partition got removed.
Comment: @Couto if that is the case please post an answer with the steps for arch?
Comment: Wait, how do you do that on a Mac?  I am trying to install Raspbian again on my sd card but I have formatted it several times with the erasing kind of formatting and it still does not seem to be gaining any memory.
Comment: What if you actually like your swap partition, and would like to recreate it after following these steps?
Comment: @zaz, that is really a separate question and should not be asked in the comments of an answer.
Comment: @zaz and that is why it should be a separate question. Click the ask button above and ask about your swap partition. New questions do not belong in the comments especially to old questions. By asking it here the only person who is likely to see it is me. if you ask a new question the entire community will have a chance to see and answer it. Also, note that depending on the OS/distro you are running Raspbian for instance includes a script to resize the root partition, and does not need to be done manually.
Comment: Actually it would probably just be enough to post a link to http://raspberrypi.stackexchange.com/questions/70/how-to-set-up-swap-space or something, and make a remark along the lines of "We removed the swap partition, but those are a bad idea on a raspberry anyway because sd card."
Comment: I tried this on raspberry pi3 but I am getting this error after reboot: `PANIC: VFS: Unable to mount root fs on unknown-block(179,2) Entering kdb (current=0xcb82ac80, pid 1) due to Keyboard Entry`.
Comment: @haccks First you should not ask new questions in the comments to another question. Second, assuming you are running Raspbian did you not use raspi-config to do this. As you have learned this way can bork your system if not done correctly. I would suggest re-imaging your card and starting fresh.
Comment: @SteveRobillard; I am not asking a new question. I came out to this answer and gave it a try. And I am using Kali image instead of Raspbian. I wanted to know how to do this using CLI ( earlier I used `gparted`).
Comment: Can this be done on a PI to shrink instead of grow a partition? (While doing that on the same PI).
Comment: @clankill3r Maybe, but I would not recommend it, as it can potentially destroy your system. A search here or google will turn up complete instructions for shrinking the size of the disc image.
Comment: For [NOOBS partitions](https://github.com/raspberrypi/noobs/wiki/NOOBS-partitioning-explained), the partitions would be e.g. primary "1", and extended "2" that contains the **logical** partitions "5" (`SETTINGS`), "6" (`/boot`) and "7" (`/` root).
Make sure you select "7" and **logical** as partition type when creating the new partition.
For more check [this tutorial](https://dracoy.com/2016/06/26/expanding-partition-on-sd-card-for-raspberry-pi-with-noobs-pre-installed/).
Comment: @Steve Robillard Thank you Steve, this worked like a charm! After failing to resize from another OS and messed up the installation, I tried this method. It is the right method to resize. We don't need to remove and move the card to another system just to resize a partition. Great work!
Comment: Worked like a charm for my OSMC on RPi2!
Comment: even this is an old post, it still works with a current Kali 2018 image
Comment: @EliaWeiss are you running noobs? What distro are you using? Is the filesystem already expanded?
Comment: @SteveRobillard Please see more info in https://raspberrypi.stackexchange.com/questions/82585/resize2fs-device-or-resource-busy-while-trying-to-open-dev-mmcblk0p3
Comment: @Steve Robillard Thank you Steve. Just one complementary information, in my case I use a RPi2, I boot on the SDCard and use an external HD as /, so disk path is /dev/sda2. Plus I have no swap partition ...
Comment: @DanGreen-Leipciger What signature?
Comment: An easier CLI option is to open `fdisk mmcblk1`, choose `O` to dump the disk layout to a local script, and back it up. Use `p` to get the number of sectors on the disk, and in each partition. Sum up the `Sectors` values for partitions you want to keep, and subtract them from the total. Now edit the script, and use that number for the `size` of the target partition. Save it, use `I` to load it into `fdisk`, and write your changes. Use`partprobe /dev/mmcblk1` instead of rebooting and, finally, `resize2fs /dev/mmcblk1p2`.
Comment: Following all the steps the partition was changed, but the /dev/root filesystem still had only 16G (instead of 128G). If someone has the same issue just scroll one answer deeper. raspi-config does the magic :)
Comment: May have been said but you do not need to delete the swap.
Answer: Using the Debian-Wheezy Beta image, there is a configuration utility built in that makes this easy:
There is a utility called raspi-config. This runs on first boot if you're connected directly to the RPi. If you're over SSH you can run it manually using $ sudo raspi-config. (I think you can re-run the tool manually at any time).
The second option on the blue dialog that follows is titled expand_rootfs, with the description "Expand root partition to fill SD card".
Selecting this will cause your root partition to be resized to fill the card the next time you boot your RPi.
Update for 2015!
I'm coming back to this answer with a note of caution: I have been using a bunch of 16GB SD cards, and I got caught out by maxxing my partition to fill the card I was using. Doing so caused a bunch of problems when switching to a new card which (even though it was stated as 16GB) was about 200MB smaller than the older card.
This came to a head when I switched a couple of RPis from v1 to the new v2 model, which uses Micro SD cards.
I now leave about 1GB free to make absolutely sure that my images can be switched between SD cards without issue.
Comment: This is so much simpler than the top answer. This is the solution to use.
Comment: How do you leave the 1GB free space? or how/where do you specify how much to expand the partition size?
Comment: This doesn't work for Raspbian when installed from NOOBS on the SDCard's they're shipping with RPi kits. when you try to run the expand option it says that it's not supported by this config, but since your running noobs it's probably using all the space anyway... problem is I'm trying to reflash the 8GB image onto a 32GB Card
Comment: This process took about 10 minutes with a 16 GB card on my Pi.
Comment: @JamesSkimming: This is the solution to use for Debian-Wheezy Beta image. Not for others.
Comment: Raspi-config doesn't know how to resize root of Raspbian Wheezy.
expand_rootfs as you suggested caused issues.
The answer above yours works like a charm in a live system and no need to "leave about 1 GB".
Comment: For anyone using Plex and moving your sd card files to a larger sd card, this worked great after copying the new image.
Answer: If you are not very comfortable working on the command line, like in Steve Robillards excellent answer, there are some GUI applications available. In particular gparted works very well.
I think it's installed by default on a Ubuntu LiveCD but not on an installed system. There is of course an easy fix for this: apt-get install gparted. You can't do this on the actual Pi, because to resize partitions they need to be unmounted.
The picture below is in Dutch, but don't let that spoil the fun. It's very easy to use. This is the layout of the default debian image on a 8gb sdcard.

Right-click the partions to unmount them and then right-click to resize or move the partition. You can also create new partitions and format existing ones. In the picture below I've removed the swap partition and now I'm able to resize the root partition to the entire space on the right of it. Don't fill it entirely, because you still have to add a swap partition.

You can play with the partition layout, changes are only written if you apply the changes (the grayed out 'return' key in the first picture).
It's very easy to move partitions but like in Steve's answer I'd recommend you remove the swap partition entirely, then resize the root and then recreate a swap. Moving a partition can take a very long time and the swap does not contain data you need to keep.
Comment: I have used this method; works like a charm.
Comment: I agree. I've used gparted to do exactly this and its very easy
Comment: If you are connecting through VNC, run `sudo -E gparted`
Comment: May also need to run the following command before `gparted` if you're running under Wayland (not sure these issues have been resolved): `xhost +SI:localuser:root`
Answer: If you use the newer Debian Wheezy image:
http://www.raspberrypi.org/archives/1435
A boot-time script allows you to resize to fill the sdcard automatically.
Comment: How would do such a thing though?
Comment: **This** is the easiest way to resize the partitions for any up-to-date wheezy image.
Comment: I'm using Arch Linux.
Answer: I followed this video and it worked perfectly for me (I have a 16GB card):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R4VovMDnsIE&feature=plcp
Comment: -1 Answers should be able to stand on their own in case of link rot.

How can I resize my / (root) partition?


Does Drona also tell Pandavas how to kill him?

Question: Bhishma certainly did that.  Drona also fought only half-heartedly for Duryodhana.  For example, he pretended that he couldn't kill Ghatotkacha thereby forcing the wasting of the Vasavi Shakti. Also I don't know this for a fact but did Krishna directly tell him "we can't win as long as you are fighting on Duryodhana's side - please tell us how you may be removed from the war".
Answer: Drona also fought only half-heartedly for Duryodhana. For example, he pretended that he couldn't kill Ghatotkacha thereby forcing the wasting of the Vasavi Shakti.
This claim of yours is totally wrong. Dronachary was the main cause of Death of Abhimanyu which was the most significant win of Kauravas. Also Dronacharya had killed many warriors of Pandavas. Duryodhana also thought that Drona is not fighting for him but he got a proper reply from Ashvatthama mentioned in Mahabharata, Drona Parva, SECTION CLIX.

'Thus addressed by Duryodhana, Drona's son, that warrior difficult of defeat in battle, set his heart upon destroying the foe, like Indra bent upon destroying the Daityas. The mighty-armed Aswatthaman answered thy son, saying, 'It is even so as thou sayest, O descendant of Kuru! The Pandavas are always dear to both myself and my father. So also, are we both dear unto them. Not so, however, in battle. We will, according to the measure of our might, fearlessly contend in battle, reckless of our lives. Myself, Karna, Salya, Kripa, and Hridika's son, could, O best of kings, destroy the Pandava host within the twinkling of an eye. The Pandavas also, O best of the Kurus, could within the twinkling of an eye, destroy the Kaurava host, if, O mighty-armed one, we were not present in battle. We are fighting with the Pandavas to the best of our might, and they also are fighting with us to the best of their might. Energy, encountering energy, is being neutralised, O Bharata! The Pandava army is incapable of being vanquished as long as the sons of Pandu are alive. This that I tell thee is true. The sons of Pandu are endued with great might. They are, again, fighting for their own sake. Why should not they, O Bharata, be able to slay thy troops. Thou, however, O king, art exceedingly covetous. Thou, O Kaurava, art deceitful. Thou art vainglorious and suspicious of everything. For this, thou suspectest even us. I think, O king, thou art wicked, of sinful soul, and an embodiment of sin. Mean and of sinful thoughts, thou doubtest us and others. As regards myself, fighting with resolution for thy sake, I am prepared to lay down my life. I will presently go to battle for thy sake, O chief of the Kurus.

Also, Drona had not suggested Karna to use Vasavi Shakti instead Kauravas suggested as mentioned in Mahabharata, Drona Parva, SECTION CLXXIX.

At that time all the Kauravas, beholding Karna and that terrible illusion (of the Rakshasa) cried out saying, 'O Karna, slay the Rakshasa soon with thy dart. These Kauravas and the Dhartarashtras are on the point of being annihilated. What will Bhima and Arjuna do to us? Slay this wretched Rakshasa at dead of night, who is consuming us all. They that will escape from this dreadful encounter to-day will fight with the Parthas in battle. Therefore, slay this terrible Rakshas now with that dart given thee by Vasava.

Also I don't know this for a fact but did Krishna directly tell him "we can't win as long as you are fighting on Duryodhana's side - please tell us how you may be removed from the war".
This is not right (AFAIK from Mahabharata) as it is not mentioned in Mahabharata anywhere instead Lord Krishna suggested Pandavas to told Drona that Ashvatthama has been slain. So Bhima killed an elephant named Ashvatthama and told to Drona that Ashvatthama has been slain. Then Drona confirmed it from Yudhishthira he also said the same so Drona became distressed and dropped his arms. It is mentiond in Mahabharata, Drona Parva, SECTION CXCI.

Beholding the sons of Kunti afflicted with the shafts of Drona and inspired with fear, Kesava, endued with great intelligence and, devoted to their welfare, addressed Arjuna and said, 'This foremost of all bowmen is incapable of being ever vanquished by force in battle, by the very gods with Vasava at their head. When, however, he lays aside his weapons, he becomes capable of being slain on the field even by human beings. Casting aside virtue, ye sons of Pandu, adopt now some contrivance for gaining the victory, so that Drona of the golden car may not slay us all in battle. Upon the full of (his son) Aswatthaman he will cease to fight, I think. Let sonic man, therefore, tell him that Aswatthaman, hath been slain in battle.'
Comment: You need to read for comprehension.  I never said Drona suggested the use of Vasavi shakti.  You should also understand English idiom - when someone says " If I recall right" it means he himself is not sure.
Comment: @S K I know english. So please don't teach me english. What do you mean by "forcing the wasting of Vasavi Shakti" ? So learn the [be nice](https://hinduism.stackexchange.com/help/be-nice) policy and then comment otherwise don't.
Comment: you are trying to lure me into meta-debate.  Sorry, I won't play.
Comment: @S K I am not forcing. You can always do what you like and so does I.
Comment: @SK I've edited the question to reflect more clearly what you wanted others to understand by the phrase "If I recall right". you're welcome.
Answer: https://www.sacred-texts.com/hin/m06/m06043.htm
Yes.
After Krishna recites the Gita to Arjuna and before war commences, Yudhisthira gets the blessings of victory from Bhishma, Dronacharya, Kripacharya, and Shalya. Yudhisthira received the blessing of victory from Bhishma and goes to Drona.

Sanjaya continued,--"Then, O son of Kuru's race, Yudhishthira, once more saluting him, accepted Bhishma's words with a bend of his head. And that mighty-armed one then proceeded towards the car of the preceptor ( Drona) through the midst of all the soldiers who were eyeing him, accompanied by his brothers. Then saluting Drona and walking round him, the king spoke to that invincible warrior words that were for his own benefit.

Yudhisthira asked Drona how he will vanquish his foes.

"Yudhishthira said, 'I ask thee, O invincible one, how I may fight without incurring sin, and how, with thy permission, O regenerate one, I may vanquish all my foes.

Drona is gratified.

"Drona said, 'If, having resolved to fight, thou hadst not come to me (thus), I would have cursed thee. O king, for thy complete overthrow. I am, however, gratified, O Yudhishthira, and honoured by thee, O sinless one. I permit thee, fight and obtain victory. I will also fulfil thy wish. Say what thou hast to say. Under these circumstances, battle excepted, what dost thou wish? A man is the slave of wealth, but wealth is not one's slave. This is quite true, O king! Bound I have been with (their) wealth by the Kauravas! It is for this that like a eunuch I shall fight for the sake of the Kauravas. It is for this that like a eunuch I am uttering these words--Battle excepted, what dost thou wish? I shall fight for the sake of the Kauravas, but will pray for thy victory.'

Yudhisthira told Drona to fight for Kauravas but pray for his good.

"Yudhishthira said, 'Pray for my victory, O regenerate one, and counsel what is for my good. Fight, however, for the Kauravas. This is the boon solicited by me.'

Yudhisthira asked Drona how to vanquish him.

"Yudhishthira said, 'I ask thee, O foremost of regenerate ones, listen to what I have to say. How shall we in battle vanquish thee that art invincible?'

Drona then replied that as long as he fights, victory will never be his.

"Drona said, 'As long as I will fight, so long victory can never be thine. (Therefore) O king, seek with thy brothers, for my speedy slaughter.'

Yuudhisthira then asked for the exact means of his death.

"Yudhishthira said, 'Alas, for this, O thou of mighty arms, tell (us) the means of thy death. O preceptor, prostrating myself I ask thee this. (My) salutations to thee."

Drona told him how he can die.

"Drona said, 'The foe, O sire, I see not who may slay me while standing in battle I am engaged in fight, with wrath excited, and scattering (my) arrowy showers continually. Except when addrest for death O king, having abandoned my arms and withdrawn (in Yoga meditation) from surrounding sights, none will be able to slay me. This that I tell thee is true. I also tell thee truly that I will cast off my arms in battle, having heard something very disagreeable from some one of credible speech.--'"

Drona told Yudhisthira that if he cast off his weapons if he hears something disagreeable from some one of credible speech.


Need to clean up my Oracle database

Question: Requirement is that I need to clean up my database in which my application has extensively tested on, and now I will have to clean up the data and have a database which will be ready to go live. By clean up, I mean the metadata of the tables, users will stay but their data will have to cleaned. What is the fastest and the best method to go about with? Truncate? Any help would be appreciated.
Comment: I'm not sure that I understand what "By clean up, I mean the metadata of the tables" means.  Perhaps you mean that you want to retain the metadata but remove all the data?  From every table?  Or just some tables (it seems likely that you'd need some tables to remain populated).  I'm not sure why you would test on a production database.  But presumably you can just do a fresh install of your application which will, presumably, install whatever lookup data you need.
Answer: Unless you have a storage snapshot, restore point or backup of the database before the testing started, TRUNCATE is a way to go. You may need to disable FK constraints for that. Another way is to run expdp with CONTENT=METADATA_ONLY, drop the schema, and import the metadata back.
Comment: May i know why i need to disable fk constraints before export
Comment: @tesla747 Not before export. Before truncate.

Need to clean up my Oracle database


How to restrict users from getting entered in a lookup field based on their permission set assignment using validation rules

Question: I've a use case where Users having a PermissionSetAssignment X should not be allowed to be made owner of a custom object record by another users. I'm able to do this using a trigger but I've to make it work using configuration. How can I achieve this using validation rule or any other config concept (The Lookup field is based on User and Group and lookup filters can't be used here).
Answer: Validation rules can reference custom permissions and custom permissions can be assigned to permission sets
so, a rule could look like
$Permission.Owner_Change_Restricted

where Owner_Change_Restricted is a custom permission assigned to a permission set possessed by some users
Personally, I prefer to make my permissions named something positive, so the validation rule would be:
NOT($Permission.Owner_Change_Enabled)

and custom permission Owner_Change_Enabled assigned to permission sets for users that can change ownership.
Comment: Let's suppose we have a user A with Permission Set X and another user B with permission set Y. If user A tries to make user B and owner of a record, he shouldn't be able to do it. Using $Permission in validation rule will reference custom permission of User A and I need to verify Permission of User B when logged in with User A.
Comment: Ah, I misunderstood your requirement.  To do declaratively, use a before save Flow that does the check and if not valid, sets a checkbox on the object Is_Invalid_Change__c that a Validation Rule can then test and render an appropriate error message. Flow can query the target user and relevant permissionsetassignment object.
Comment: Creating a new field would require design changes and approval. Seems that going through apex is the only way here not to break the existing design and functionalities.
Comment: Best I can come up with for your request for a declarative solution:-)


Initramfs unpacking failed: read error + keyboard not working during ArchLinux boot

Question: Recently installed ArchLinux via AnarchyLinux, mounting it's root partition in my /dev/sda6 and it's boot at /dev/sda2, which is the EFI partition i also use for Windows.
However, when trying to boot, while my keyboard works on GRUB, i will receive this error message when it tries to boot Arch:

Worse than that, my keyboard will not work following that, so i couldn't try any of the possible solutions i found online. How may i be able to solve this?
Answer: It's most likely due to the initramfs-linux.img and initramfs-linux-fallback.img being missing. For some reason on my computer when I install GRUB2 as my bootloader it removes all files in the current dir (and I install it in /boot with my linux and initramfs images.) Just try reinstalling the linux kernel from a live CD or USB in chroot with pacman -S linux. It's a simple fix that worked when my pc did this the first time, it took me a few hours to realize those files were missing.


Visual Studio custom properties dialog

Question: I'm familiar with how to include properties of a user control in the Properties Window of Visual Studio.  Can anyone tell me how to create a custom dialog, similar to the color picker for BackgroundColor, for a user control?  I have a control with many properties and a "Control Builder" form would be very helpful.
Comment: Are you looking for something [like this](http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/cc164048.aspx)
Answer: I think your looking for UITypeEditor. A walkthrough is available at msdn, Walkthrough: Implementing a UI Type Editor.

Visual Studio custom properties dialog


Restrict "Find My" on kids' iPad

Question: Is there any way to restrict access to the Find My app on my kids' iPads? I'm concerned about the possibility of precocious six-year-olds marking their parents' devices as lost or remote wiping them.
Comment: Are you using parental controls on those devices?
Comment: @fsb yes I am using parental controls
Answer: I took some time to research this.  It doesn't appear that you can disable 'Find My' using the Apple Parental Controls.
It seems strange to me that this isn't possible but I couldn't find any authoritative way to prevent changes in this app.
Using the regular Parental Controls on your child's iPad allows you to prevent changes to many system settings and apps so I would recommend doing that, at a minimum.  Also, there might be 3rd-party apps that provide more granular control, for a price, but that's a space that I don't know much about.

Restrict "Find My" on kids' iPad


GIMP automatic actions

Question: I'm using GIMP2 to crop product photos, then I have to resize them to 690x690, then export them in .png and .jpg to PNG and JPG folders. It's so repetetive, I  tried BATCH but every image is diferent so it doesn't help.
Comment: By different, do you mean you need to crop it in different places? For example, the product isn't necessarily centered or might take up a different portion of the frame compared to another image?
Answer: Use ImageMagick's convert command, something like:
convert NNNNN.jpg -geometry 690x690 -quality 85 JPG/NNNN.jpg
convert NNNNN.jpg -geometry 690x690 PNG/NNNN.png

Insert in a shell script/.BAT. You can have a more complex processing, for instance you can recover some sharpness and add contrast:
convert NNNNN.jpg -modulate 100,120 -sharpen 0x1.0 -geometry 690x690 -quality 85 JPG/NNNN.jpg
convert NNNNN.jpg -modulate 100,120 -sharpen 0x1.0 -geometry 690x690 PNG/NNNN.png

Comment: It's worth pointing out that `mogrify`, which is part of imagemagic, can do most of the same stuff as `convert`, but on multiple files, eliminating the need to use a script or .bat file in most common use-cases.
Answer: Treating images in bulk like this can be done with the ImageMagic tool mogrify, which is a free command line program available on most platforms.
Note: Imagemagick actually includes many programs, such as identify and convert. The mogrify program is simiar to convert but is intended for operating on multiple files. If you need a lot of control and complicated logic, using convert in a script will be more flexible, but is generally not necessary.
There are two modes of operations in mogrify that would be of interest to you: -crop and -trim. Crop requires you to tell it how much space you want to cut on the ends of the image and how you want to offset it. Trim attempts to get rid of excess outer space on its own.
The following example will crop all JPG in the current directory to 960×960 relative to the center.
mogrify -crop 690x690+0+0 -gravity Center *.jpg

Below is another example that will also change the images geometry
mogrify -geometry 690x690^ -gravity center -crop 690x690+0+0 *.jpg

The -trim operator is different and tries to crop an image by removing outer padding like white space and transparency. The -fuzz option can be used to get rid of space that might not be a consistent color, which is likely the case in product photos.
mogrify -fuzz 1% -trim *.jpg

Experiment
Take a small set of your image and try a few different mogrify commands and see if you can get the results you want. Imagemagick is very well documented and there's lots of examples out there.
Accept that it won't be perfect.
mogrify is an axe. It can do a huge amount of work that would otherwise take a long time to do by hand. It may also miss. If I can get Imagemagick to do 80-90% of the work, I'm usually willing to pull out my proverbial scalpel and finish the rest.
Answer: Perhaps the most difficult part is to crop the images, since it can be different images (size, location of what you want to crop, etc).
If the images you want to work out are more or less in the same graphic arrange you can try the crop commands given before (imagemagick is really good). Other than that, it's better to pick up one image at the time.
For batch process there is the  David's Batch Processor GIMP plugin and BIMP (Batch Image Manipulation Plugin). Both are good ones. David's plugin is more stable while BIMP has a bit more of newer options. Give a try to both!

GIMP automatic actions


Is it possible to go faster than the speed of light in vacuum?

Question: If it is possible for particles to go faster than the speed of light in certain events, would it be possible to create a situation in which the barrier of the speed of light can be crossed?
Comment: But it isn't, so no.
Comment: Particles can only go faster than the speed of light *in a medium*. Light is slowed down in optically dense media, but it might happen that high-energy particles move faster than that (Cherenkov effect).
Answer: No.
According to Special Relativity, speed of light is the maximum speed at which anything can travel through free space. And there are no known violations of Relativity.
Comment: Dark energy violates dominant energy condition and is in agreement with observations.
Answer: If you had a magic rocket with unlimited fuel, and if your body could withstand any acceleration, then there would be no lower bound to how quickly you could get from one place to another in your own proper time.  You could travel from here to another galaxy and back in a matter of minutes, but...
...if you sent a powerful radio message to that galaxy before you took off, you would never be able to catch up to it, and...
...when you returned, you would find that millions of years had passed on Earth while you were away.
Comment: @no_choice99, I did not say you could travel faster than light.  In fact, I explicitly said that you would not be able to catch up to a light beam (radio signal) that was making the same trip.  I explicitly said that millions of years would elapse on Earth while you made the trip.  But your _subjective experience_ of the trip could, in theory, only seem to take a few minutes.
Comment: That is false. Even if your body could handle any acceleration, you wouldn't be abe to travel faster than light and light takes more than "a matter of minutes" to travel between galaxies.
Comment: There actually are minimum times: in order to reach a high enough speed, you need to carry a rocket producing a lot of energy, which may create a black hole eventually.
Comment: @fffred, :-)  Obviously I wasn't thinking out _all_ of the details.  I guess it's risky when you start a hypothetical with, "Assuming we could do the impossible,..."  There's also a little detail of radiation exposure (if that's the right word for it) as you and your magic rocket collided with the occasional stray hydrogen atom out in the intergalactic medium.
Comment: @jameslarge in this case could you edit your post and replace subjective time by proper time? Else I can't remove my downvote.
Answer: No, it's not possible. All objects slow down their systems with time by a factor of $\frac{1}{\sqrt{1 - \frac{v^2}{c^2}}}$ and contract in length by a factor of $\frac{1}{\sqrt{1 - \frac{v^2}{c^2}}}$ in their direction of motion. If you exert a constant force on a particle with mass, as it gets closer to the speed of light, its time dilation and length contraction keep getting bigger so it can never quite reach the speed of light.


How will the beta be evaluated?

Question: Our Area51 page says that the site's status will be evaluated in 7 days.  What's going to happen then?  Is this "promote or shut down", or might the beta continue, or what?  (I see the five criteria and our progress against them, but I don't know how that turns into a decision and what the likely outcomes are.)
Answer: This site will not be shut down in 7 days. The 90 day beta is a minimum requirement before a site can graduate. The vast majority of sites need more time to build up a critical mass of users, questions, participation, and traffic.
You can read much more about that process and what those Area 51 numbers mean here:
Does this site have a chance of succeeding?
Make special note of the sections that describe what you can do to help your site get closer to graduation. Other sites have had a lot of success with these techniques.
Comment: Thanks.  I was confused because other betas I'm following just say they'll continue "indefinitely", but we had a date.  The others are older, so I guess they hit 90 days and moved into "indefinite" and we probably will to?
Comment: @Monica, That's what I'm expecting to  happen.

How will the beta be evaluated?


The ideal transformation for a non-normal variable

Question: The dependent variable seems to resist to become normal. Here I have depicted the probplot of the variable in three situations. The top plot depicts the original data, the middle plot shows log1p(y) and the last one highlights BoxCox transformed data.
Are there any other transformations that would work better?
Comment: Why do you think your dependent variable should be normal? What kind of analysis are you using it in?
Comment: @Glen_b It's a regression problem and so I expect that by making my Y normal I would gain better results.
Comment: There's no assumption that the marginal distribution of Y should be normal in regression. (i.e. the thing you're looking at has no need whatever to look normal, it's unrelated to any regression assumption). This is addressed by answers to many questions on our site. When doing the usual testing or confidence intervals or prediction intervals there is an assumption that relates to normality but the thing you're looking at is of almost no use for that assumption (because the assumption relates to the error term or equivalently the conditional distribution of Y, not its marginal distribution).
Answer: The problem you are facing is a common one!  It can be solved by a clever analyst, but is really viewed as more art than science.
I will point you to a fantastic answer found at this link where the OP was asking a similar (though less detailed) question.  You, however, already understand the basics of variable transformation to make your residuals approximately normal.
For other more 'exotic' transformations, you may be interested in the link found here, which describes alternative data transformation methods.  Look for the section which starts with the following:

Third piece of advice. If the error variances are unequal, try "stabilizing the variance" by transforming y

This page details transformations you may be looking for to coerce your residuals to normality, including arcsine transformation and reciprocal transformation.
Without your actual dataset to work with, one can not recommend a specific method that would definitively "work better" than your current methods, as we can not test our guesses using trial-and-error.
Comment: The Johnson Distribution could also be applied as a transformation.

See:

Youn-Min Chou, Alan M. Polansky & Robert L. Mason (1998) Transforming Non-Normal Data to Normality in Statistical Process Control, Journal of Quality Technology, 30:2, 133-141, DOI: 10.1080/00224065.1998.11979832

Control Charts for Non-Normal Data: Illustrative Example from the Construction Industry Business
http://www.wseas.us/e-library/conferences/2014/Malaysia/MACMESE/MACMESE-10.pdf


How much to bend "the rules" about populating a world?

Question: All right, I have a question about creating a world and populating it with appropriate monsters, etc.
I created a world a little while back, loosely based off of the world found in Michael Stackpole's "A Hero Born". Did the timeline, created the history, fractional events, etc. Mapped all the major topographical features, then populated it on a semi random basis (Most of this from the World Builders Guide), and ran it past a power gamer friend of mine, who absolutely picked it apart. "This monster was in Dragon #242, and wouldn't appear here with this other monster from MMII, and this monster was in MMI and doesn't appear in the 3.5 world", etc etc.
For a nascent DM, it was rather disheartening and intimidating. However, looking at some other worlds on the 'net, it appears that the license is pretty much whatever you want to do.
What's the correct or accepted way to populate a world without continuity issues for those that would know? What's the worst that happens if you mix monsters from various editions (2e, 3, 3.5, etc) into one world?
Answer: It depends. What are you trying to achieve?
As the author of the campaign, you have a tremendous amount of freedom to create whatever world you wish to. You don't have to stick with the world created in the books any more than you want to. In many years of playing I have spent far more time playing in "generic fantasy world populated from the Monster Manual" than I have in Faerun or Greyhawk.
If you wish to write your own world, loosely based on the ones published by WotC (or others), you have the power to do that. There is no grand committee that will penalize you for straying too far from published canon :)
On the other hand, role playing is inherently a social hobby. If your players are big fans of Faerun or Eberron, and they expect to be playing in Faerun or Eberron, and you deliver something else, they may be distracted by the difference.
Figure out what your group's expectations are (usually by talking to them), and meld them with your own. Most players who have a problem with deviating from canon only have an issue because they came in expecting something different than what they got. Tell them up front that they're playing in a custom creation and give it an identity of its own and they'll be much more accepting of it.
Technical Issues
There are some things to be aware of that could inherently cause problems. Creatures from different eras may play much differently from each other. Obviously creatures from the "wrong edition" will need to have their stats translated to the game you're playing. But in addition to this there is a big mechanical difference between creatures from the 4th Edition Monster Manual I and Monster Manual III. Creatures from one need adjusting to be compatible with creatures from another.
Verisimilitude Issues
Sometimes when building a world you might miss something that just doesn't make sense. Why are the Chaotic Evil Dogeaters living right next door to the Lawful Good Puppylovers? Shouldn't there be more conflict there? Why not? These issues are easy for an author to overlook (there may even be a reason for it, just not communicated fully).
Summary
Boiling this down to bullet points:

Are you trying to match canon, or create your own world? Or a mixture of the two? Either way, communicate that to your players. Giving your setting an identity and a name helps with this if you're setting out on your own.

Ask your friend to explain each of the issues he's come up with. Is the issue a problem you care about? If yes, fix it. If not, move on to the next one.

Good luck, and have fun.

Epilogues
The following epilogues are based on the comments that have come and gone since this answer was first posted. Comments were distilled solely to present my own point of view, and all quotations should be taken with a grain of salt ;)
Epilogue 1 — I'm the DM, Do What I Say

A DM's world and monsters don't have to be justified, and a player who demands or expects it is a control freak who needs to sit back down in their player-chair.
[...]
Players who hold the MM over the DM's head can jump off a cliff as far as I'm concerned. I see it as a fundamental courtesy to the one running the game, and a pretty severe social courtesy to violate. Players who demand that the MM to be an inviolate reference manual for monster-killing deserve to have their plans backfire.

The key to what I'm trying to say here is communication. As the DM, you absolutely have the right to create your own world from the ground up. You can use the monster manuals, not use the monster manuals, use parts of them, whatever it is you want to do.
But it's important to understand that not everyone expects to play that way. And when people come into the game expecting one thing, and get something very different, they often react in negative ways (for reasons that are very human).
I see no real reason to pull the "I'm the DM, so do what I say" card. I don't think I've met a player who wasn't cool with a homebrew setting when told that that's what they were getting. This is something that's trivial with communication and a potential landmine without it. There's no reason to take the hard way here, even if it is "right."
Now, if you've decided to run an "off-book" setting, AND you've told the players, AND you have a group that wants to run that (and you should! Most groups will) AND someone is still giving you grief... THEN it's time to lay down the law.
Epilogue 2 — Playstyles

It depends on playstyle then, by what means that's communicated. My current game features many lessons that are available character-post-humously and I've yet to see a player take any dangerous situation for granted, or assume that they can know undiscovered things before discovering them.

This is very much a play style thing.
Some people like to play as though they themselves have been transported to an alien world where everything is new and waiting to be explored.
Others like to play like their characters are a part of the world, and have accumulated experience and knowledge.
Both styles are good, and can even be mixed-and-matched, but if your group isn't on the same page people can get angsty pretty quickly.
For players who expect their characters to be a part of the world, setting knowledge is what gives player characters autonomy, and allows them to take action beyond what the DM tells them.
Like rules lawyers, most of the players who bring it up do so in a jerkish and overly-entitled way, but that doesn't mean there isn't a grain of truth to what they're complaining about.
Again, simply communicating and demonstrating that you periodically change things is enough to defuse the situation and put players in an investigative mode.
Epilogue 3 — Monster Knowledge

The way I deal with players who wish to have experience and knowledge is a skill Knowledge: Monsters or such. It uses game mechanics, lets them identify even homebrew monsters if they want to, and gives them valuable data to work with without breaking the believability...at least somewhat. It was actually one of my players who came up with this skill, asking for it, and it turned out great.

Monster knowledge skill checks are a pretty great way of pushing customized exposition to the players. And latter editions of D&D have extensive knowledge check systems baked in.
But... A skill check requires an explicit stop, realize information is missing, query DM, make skill check, get exposition cycle. It works great if your players know they're dealing with a custom world, and fails spectacularly if they think "Faerun; got it," make a plan, and have the rug pulled out from under them.
Answer: Your player is giving you bad advice — ignore him.
Your world works how you want it to.
Neither of the critiques you cited from your powergamer make a bit of sense at all. "That's a 1e monster it wouldn't be in a 3.5e world" has no merit — people have ported absolutely every monster forward, and what edition they have rules for is totally separate from whether they inhabit the fictional world.  "Those monsters wouldn't be found together" is marginally more coherent, though a) maybe those two races aren't enemies in your world regardless of what the MM says, b) maybe those two races are indeed at war and that's why they're in the same county (as it's hard to have enmity if you always live on opposite sides of the continent) or c) maybe they're exceptions to the rule.
Mixing "monsters from different versions" is no problem whatsoever; at worst you need to port the stats but often that's not necessary (no fight, no stats!). You're letting this guy make you doubt yourself.
Comment: It's your world, your story, you put whatever you like in it.
Answer: Question: How do you kill a vampire?
Answer: Any way you like: they do not exist!!!

So, provided you have an in-world reason for creature $critter to have either $ability or be at $location then you are right. Sure, vampires can be gay (aka homosexual) Chartreuse-drinking cretins.  Sure, Dragons can be mindless evil creatures.  Sure, Cthulhu maybe the saviour of humanity.  Whatever rocks your boat.  What matters is that there is a reason within the world for this.  They should have reasons for being what they are, living where they live, and acting the way they act – evolution, magic, society, whatever…
I would be very hard pressed to have a horse riding culture living in Alpine terrain.  That would require some major explaining: What are the horses living on?  How can they cope with the terrain?  Where did the horses come from: where they native or imported?  If the latter, by whom?  If the former, how?
As for your "friend"…  If you really value your friendship, talk to him and get him to understand your point of view.  Otherwise, find better friends.
Answer: I second everything AceCalhoon said and he said it better than I could.
But I think I can add a couple of relevant things.
I use the rulebooks for inspiration and modify relentlessly
Personally, I think homebrew has a lot of advantages.  It lets the GM have more creative control, and lets the GM tailor the rules to his group and his situation.
Also, your players if they have been playing for a while are probably expert in the monsters in the Monster Manual. But a group of first level characters shouldn't be.  One way to help ensure that the players have some surprises is to only use the manuals as a rough guide.
You need to communicate clearly that it is homebrew.
AceCalhoon said this, but I think it is worth emphasizing.  When I GM, I always take lots of liberties with the rules and the monsters especially.  But, I always make sure my players know that before they so much as make their characters.
Failing to explain ahead of time can lead to frustrated and angry players as they repeatedly get surprised in ways they did not expect to be surprised.  On the other hand, if they expect to encounter variations ahead of time then it becomes a possibly interesting new dynamic.  It encourages them to do in game research (really talking to the survivors of the last attack instead of just hearing "dragon with red scales" and rushing off to get fire-protection), and it encourages them to fight cautiously, ready for the monster to break out an unexpected ability.
Be ready to adjust
While certainly not perfect, most premade settings have a decent amount of verisimilitude.  You of course can achieve the same or better, but that takes a lot of work.  So, if one of my players points out something that really challenges the verisimilitude in a reasonable way, I always stand ready to either make up an ad-hoc explanation or even go back and change my plans.
What I mean is that if a player says something like, "But that is from Krynn and this one is from Faerun", then that doesn't really challenge the verisimilitude but highlights my deviation. I blithely respond, "And this is neither, but inspired by both."
But if a player says, to borrow from AceCalhoon's answer, "How are the Dogeaters and puppylovers living in peace?"  I will try to come up with a reason or else say something like, "Did I say puppylovers?  I meant kittylovers..."
It depends on playstyle
Again, AceCalhoon touched on this, but playstyle matters a lot.  I'm sure its obvious from this answer I prefer a more narrative style with emphasis on plot, exploration, and discovery.  By going homebrew, I can make more things to discover and tailor everything to the plot.
If you want a very tactical game, you probably do want the players to really know the exact abilities of everything they encounter.  In that case, it might make more sense to stick with the manuals or else be very open, explicit, and upfront with the changes prior to the fight.
Comment: It isn't really a tactical/narrative split. Tactical games can benefit from certain kinds of surprise. And in narrative games knowing about the setting/antagonists lets players riff on the world without having to constantly check back in with the DM. Mostly it impacts the shape of the exploration axis of play; dipping into something new and foreign, or digging behind the surface of something familiar.
Comment: You are completely right.  But at least amoungst the people I play with, the tactical players tend to want to know everything upfront and more narrative focus tends to want more opportunities for surprise.  It is certainly not a split as you point out, but at least in my experience it does tend to have something of a correlation.


Can I find a breakdown of SO's developer survey for most popular language?

Question: I saw the developer survey saying that Java is the most popular language and I find myself a little credulous, to be honest. I have quite a few friends who are programmers (still less than 0.000000000000001% of developers, I know), but no one uses Java. I would really like to see that statistic broken down more ie. Gender, Geographic Region, Years Experience, etc. Is there anywhere I can see this data. The report I saw gave a very passing comment on what the most popular were, but nothing else.
Comment: Have you looked in the [data dump](https://stackoverflow.blog/2019/05/21/public-data-release-of-stack-overflows-2019-developer-survey/?cb=1)?
Comment: I have not. Thnaks very much for pointing it out!
Answer: I played with the back-end thing (linked from here) and came up with this query.
It shows the number of responses from people who have worked with Java grouped by country and gender - you can break it down further by playing with the query.
The "languages worked with" field seems to be a semi-colon separated string, so I'm searching for Java; to avoid matching Javascript. This means that it's not catching responses where Java is the last or only language.  Please edit my post if you find a way to fix that :)
Here are the top 11 results, including the top country+gender combination where gender is not "Man":
count   Country Gender
6289    United States   Man
3522    India   Man
2386    Germany     Man
1514    United Kingdom  Man
1114    Canada  Man
894     France  Man
751     Brazil  Man
740     Italy   Man
707     Spain   Man
608     Netherlands     Man
597     United States   Woman

Comment: Very cool. Thanks. Interesting that in most nations, Java is more popular among Men, but in the United States, it is more popular among women. I love data!   Also, thanks for being careful with the javascript. I had assumed this was why 'Java' appeared the most popular. I know quite a few people that always refer to JS as Java so I assumed this was a major cause of that appearing more popular than it was. Tbh, I still assume some people might have said Java when they meant to put Java without knowning.
Comment: ^ Even then I put Java when I meant to put Javascript :(


What is the difference between "have had" and "had"?

Question:
I have had letters delivered to me that had abuses.
  I had letters delivered to me that had abuses.
Answer: The second is simple past use of had. It means that at some particular time in the past, such letters were delivered to you.
The first is the slightly more complicated present perfect. It means that at undefined time in past, such letters were delivered to you.
We can examine this further by adding specific times:

*I have had letters delivered to me last Sunday
I had letters delivered to me last Sunday
I have had letters delivered to me in the last week.

The first (marked with an asterisk) is incorrect because it defines a specific time, and the form does not work with a specific time.
It is used to describe experiences one has had in the past (and that hence influence the experience with which you speak today), changes over time, uncompleted actions, and things that have happened more than once.
By the way, abuse as a countable noun in terms of insult is unusual. It would be more common to say "…that were abusive" or "…that contained abuse".
Comment: There is no need to put quotes in the phrase *Indian English*: it's a perfectly legitimate dialect, with some 60 million fluent speakers, comparable to the number of Italian speakers.  Without Indian English, where would we have gotten such useful words and phrases as "bungalow", "pajamas", "crore" and, my personal favorite, "do the needful"?  If you are living or working outside of India, you might do well to learn American English, but only because of its popularity.
Comment: Thank you so much. Now the mistakes look really embarrassing; the thing is, I'm accustomed to using "Indian" English, and I really want to break that habit. Any tips for me?
Comment: @Malvolio *bugalow* and *pyjamas* were borrowed straight into British English rather than via Indian English. Still, you are 100% correct that there is nothing incorrect about Indian English.
Comment: @JonHanna -- you mean, borrowed straight from Gujarati and Urdu into the language spoken in Great Britain?  My dictionary agrees with you, but I am curious how that could have happened.  I'm hoping to be able to slip "do the needful" (and "lakh") into my vocabulary without my Indian colleagues laughing.
Comment: @Malvolio because what else would the British call pyjamas once they had learned about them, when the word the people they'd learned about them from served perfectly well? There was British traffic to and from India since the late 15th century that increased until the end of the imperial period because the British wanted stuff that was there, and when that stuff was something they didn't have a name for, the British took the name too. (Along with Anglicised forms of words derived from Indian languages, like *chutney* and *blighty*).


In a European country, it is possible to withdraw money, for example, from an e-wallet or electronic payment system, without using a bank account?

Question: Is there a way in Latvia to withdraw money from an e-wallet (such as Qiwi and ....) or an electronic payment system (such as PayPal, Skrill and ....) without using a bank account. Maybe some payment system has its own card or something like that?
Comment: Withdraw it to *where*?
Comment: You can certainly transfer PayPal funds to another user, if they accept payment that way. But eventually someone is going to want money that can be used outside of PayPal, and that means someone will have to go through a bank.
Comment: I assume Diana is thinking of retrieving cash? (Isn't that a bit uncommon in Latvia?)
Answer: PayPal is regulated as a bank in the EU (see here):

PayPal (Europe) S.à r.l. et Cie, S.C.A. is a credit institution (or bank) authorised and supervised by the Commission de Surveillance du Secteur Financier (or CSSF) in Luxembourg and is regulated by the Central Bank of Ireland for conduct of business rules.

So you cannot withdraw from PayPal without going through a bank because PayPal is a bank.
Skrill is not technically a bank. Their ToS allows withdrawals in several manner, however it appears that they do have to involve banks:

Withdrawal methods are payment services provided, at least in part, by
third party financial institutions (for example, the bank where you hold a
bank account).
Answer: Both Skrill and PayPal explicitely offer cards. PayPal does explicitely advertise that you do not need a traditional bank account to use it. Yet they both only seen to offer this for business accounts.


How does OP_RETURN burn coins?

Question: What exactly causes the output containing OP_RETURN to be unspendable?
And why do I have to use the byes after OP_RETURN for keeping data in the blockchain and I can't use bytes before OP_RETURN?
Answer:
What does exactly cause the output containing OP_RETURN to be unspendable?

Simply the fact that no input can possibly unlock coins which are encumbered with such an OP_RETURN-containing script. Whenever the script interpreter encounters an OP_RETURN instruction, it instantly aborts and cause the entire script to fail.
However, OP_RETURN does more than make a script unspendable. It makes it noticably and provably unspendable, and triggers special logic. For example, creating an output that pay to a normal P2WPKH address for a key you generated, and then throwing away the key, also makes the coin unspendable. However, it isn't obvious to the network that it is unspendable, and you can't prove to anyone that is.
This is different with OP_RETURN: any script that starts with OP_RETURN is obviously unspendable, and at least the Bitcoin Core software notices this as a special case, and will avoid storing such outputs in its database, because it is known that they cannot be spent. Attempts to spend it will trigger a "coin not found" rather than "script validation" error, but the result is the same: the transaction won't be allowed to proceed.

And why do I have to use the byes after OP_RETURN for keeping data in the blockchain and I can't use bytes before OP_RETURN?

For two reasons:

By putting the OP_RETURN at the front, the special certainly-can't-be-spent-so-can-be-forgotten-about logic will trigger, which is lighter on all future full nodes that implement this logic.
Standard relay policies implemented in most network nodes only permit a certain limited number of output templates. These include payments to typical addresses, and also scripts up to a certain size that start with OP_RETURN. If you'd try to create an output that put the data before the opcode, it would be considered a non-standard output type and not relayed by most nodes.
Comment: The UTXO database is distinct from the blockchain. All transactions that are mined are part of a block, and if you're running a non-pruning node, you'll be storing the blockchain in full. The UTXO database is a separate, and much small, non-optional set of all transaction _outputs_ that have not been spent yet (and, are possibly spendable). OP_RETURN avoids creating an entry in that UTXO database; it doesn't mean the transaction doesn't become part of the blockchain.
Comment: "and will avoid storing such outputs in its database" - 1. If the output is part of a transaction, then the whole transaction is saved and you can't avoid saving only that specific output, right? 2. If it's not saved, then what's the point in doing it? The idea was to save the data in the blockchain.
Comment: If by `burn coins` one means to make some amount of BTC unspendable, OP_RETURN outputs cannot really do this, as they have to have 0 amount (at least as enforced by Bitcoin Core).  I base this on description from here: https://developer.bitcoin.org/devguide/transactions.html#null-data

How does OP_RETURN burn coins?


What beans can I use to make refried beans?

Question: Refried beans are traditionally made with pinto beans. However, I'm having trouble finding them; what other beans can I use to make refried beans?
Comment: Pinto and black beans are the ones I've seen used most commonly in Mexico.
Answer: I have made refried beans out of pinto, small red, black, and even navy beans. I almost tried using kidney beans once but it seemed wasteful.
They were all different in texture but they were all good. Black beans, for example, have a much more fibrous skin so the refried beans are not as smooth- I actually prefer it to the homogeneous pinto mash. Obviously their color is also more interesting.
There are a lot of different bean varieties and I don't know what is available to you. In general I would say to just try whatever you have- it will probably taste good even if it isn't exactly like pintos.
Comment: `I almost tried using kidney beans once but it seemed wasteful.` Question: why would it be wasteful -- is there some particular dish you use them for? Just curious about good uses for kidney beans.


Snap Shot of Links

Question: Some links may in cause of time disappear and become invalid. Hence it would be good to have a mechanism to crawl the old links in the site and also have a snapshot of the link. For new posts the snap shot can be added when the link was added to the post. This way validity of a post is not lost in case the references / additional information disappear.
Comment: Excellent idea. Who's gonna pay for all the bandwidth and storage required to achieve this? And while we're at it, what about the copyright issues?
Comment: The main problem is as content ages many of the links in old posts will become invalid. We cannot run away from the fact that there are many questions which do have link in SE and SO sites. Storage is becoming cheaper now. One the links are cached then only links relating to new posts need to be cached. This can also be compressed.
Comment: If not what are the alternate ways this can be handled for older content which might end up having broken links? As mentioned above links supplement a question or answer. The quality of the user experience deteriorates when this supplementary information goes missing.
Comment: Two words: Wayback Machine.
Comment: I also wonder if you can just mirror pages copyright-wise...
Comment: Google does it. You can look at a cached snapshot of a page. Web archives sites also does it.
Comment: I don't think wayback machine accurately captures many of the blogs and other personal site links especially without static content.
Comment: I cannot believe this question only has 1 upvote. FYI some question on meta: [Archiving links referenced in questions](https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/228702/178179)
Comment: It would be great if some of the bibliographic references can be capture especially in SE sites in which such references matter.
Answer: This is exactly why the help center says this about answers:

Links to external resources are encouraged, but please add context around the link so your fellow users will have some idea what it is and why it's there. Always quote the most relevant part of an important link, in case the target site is unreachable or goes permanently offline.

It is also one of the reasons users can edit answers. To fix links if they break.
Besides, in my personal opinion, this is far beyond the scope of Stack Overflow.
Comment: All is good if this is strictly the case. What about all the content which is already there which does have links and there is substantial value in being able to see what is in the link. Going by this stance is OK if all the content is fully curated and strictly adheres to this in all SE / SO sites.
Comment: I'm interested in this: is fixing broken links with archive.org mirrors too minor especially when there isn't enough context given? I've done so before and been heavily rejected each time however I see value in it.
Comment: Having access to the entire linked page may be more convenient than having access to only some quoted part

Snap Shot of Links


Align from normal

Question: I wanted to know how can I align my A vertex to my B vertex while keeping a straight and vertex normal's based line. Thanks !
Answer: You could use the Knife tool to extend the CB edge:
Answer: First, the line you're interested in is not the normal of anything.  "Normal" is a term with a very particular meaning in 3D graphics.  If you're not yet familiar with its usage in 3D, then try to use other words, or else people will give you wrong answers-- "wrong" because they won't do what you wanted them to do.  (A has a vertex normal.  But you do not want to move A along its vertex normal.)
Okay, so we want to move A to the end of the dotted line-- not the B end (I will call the desired point "C".)  That dotted line is perpendicular to the edge containing A that does not also contain B (I will call that edge AD.)  How do we do that?

In edit mode, select edge AD.  "Create custom orientation" operation (hotkey ctrl alt space for me.)  We see our transform orientation change to "Edge".
Select B.  Snap cursor to selected (hotkey shift-s menu for me.)  Change transform pivot point, on the top of your 3D viewport, to cusor (hotkey . for me.)

"S y 0 [enter]" to scale A, along the edge AD, along our custom orientation's Y axis, to a position as close to B as possible.
Comment: Thanks ! And sorry for my misunderstooding !

Align from normal


How do you find the source of specific underlying Javascript?

Question: How do you find the source of specific actioning Javascript that's being activated after clicking a certain item?
For example --
A site has:

    Labrador Retriever

On the webpage, when that listItem2 item () is clicked, it loads specific information on the item (Labrador Retrievers) into a pane on the right (without refreshing the page or going anywhere).
How would you find the underlying Javascript that's doing this? I did a quick search with Firebug for the "#" link, but as expected, that's like trying to find a needle in a haystack of needles.
I just don't know how you'd even go about tracking this down. It appears that the page is also using 10-12 external Javascript files, as well, making it all the more difficult to find what in the Javascript is watching and actioning on this specific .
I thought that perhaps setting some sort of breakpoint would help to trace what in the Javascript is doing the work, but I only see three types of breakpoints -- element/child removal, or attribute change -- which don't seem applicable to what's happening here.
Answer: I believe in chrome, you can select a specific element and look at what event listeners are attached to that specific element. Right-click on the element, select 'Inspect Element' or something similar, then scroll down in the right bar (I think it should contain applied styles, event listeners and how the 'box' is rendered with the width, height, margin, border and padding of the element).


Ubuntu alongside Windows

Question: Is that possible to upgrade ubuntu to never versions when it is installed alongside windows? Now it is currently 12.04. Is that upgradable to 13.04 and future?
Answer: Yes. If you use the normal upgrade process instead of reinstalling, upgrading will not change components critical for the boot process (whenever possible). This means, that it's very unlikely that the dual boot setup will be affected by upgrading.
Answer: Yes, you can upgrade to 13.04 alongside windows, using CD or using command line also
do-release-upgrade -d

Ubuntu alongside Windows


Unable to customize breadcrumbs on Site Contents OOTB page

Question: I have a requirement where I need to display the breadcrumbs in the following format:
HOME > SITE CONTENTS
In order to implement this I added the following block of code to the master page:
<asp:SiteMapPath runat="server" SiteMapProvider="SPContentMapProvider" RenderCurrentNodeAsLink="false" NodeStyle-CssClass="breadcrumbNode"
                                CurrentNodeStyle-CssClass="breadcrumbCurrentNode" RootNodeStyle-CssClass="breadcrumbRootNode" HideInteriorRootNodes="true" SkipLinkText=""/>

This is working great on all the page of the site except for the viewlsts.aspx which is the Site Contents page. It displays the breadcrumbs in a tree like format like
-Root Site Name
   . SiteContents

Note that this is the Team site on which I am working.
I am unable to render the bread crumbs in the format that has been described earlier.
How can this be fixed? Please guide.
Answer:
It's a style issue

You will need to apply the same styles as the other pages for the breadcrumbs.
Your best bet would be include the style on the master page.


Lost Pokemon Go data

Question: Pokemon is pretty fun, been playing since its release, yet it's still very glitchy.
I started my brother on it yesterday and he got to level 5 with some nice Pokemon.
Today I decided to log him on another device and when the game loaded, it started on the screen when Professor Willow introduces you into the world of Pokemon. The account was still logged in on the first device we used. I tried making a new profile using the same username used on his first account and it said "Username unavailable" or whatever it says. So the his first account still exists but I can't access it. Any help?
Answer: You have to sign out of your current account and login to the one your brother was playing on.
You can sign out by clicking the Pokeball on the bottom center of the screen, clicking the Settings button on the top right, and then scrolling to the bottom and selecting the sign out option.

Lost Pokemon Go data


What Japanese word for "user experience" or UX in IT field?

Question: My team is developing a app for mobile.
I want to tell to customer about the speed of some APIs are very slow. So it is not good for User Experience (UX)
How to say it in Japanese?
Comment: Sorry, we don't do translations on this site.
Comment: It's worth noting that if the customer is familiar with software development, they may already know the abbreviation UX, since it does get used that way in Japanese in the context of software development.
Comment: As my comment on dungarian's answer indicates, I agree with jogloran that this is essentially a translation request. In fact, it is one that could easily be answered by consulting a good English-Japanese or monolingual Japanese dictionary.
Answer: I assume you're asking here, because UX is not a simple "word" in the dictionary. There currently is no Japanese word equivalent with such context. Thus, UX is called "UX" in Japanese. You may want to say "User Experience" when verbally communicating.
This is interesting, because the mobility industry has created 乗り心地  (passenger comfort), a beautiful word to express their UX. But despite developing great video games and electronic applications for long, Japan still has not developed their own word to express UX.
But this may not be the case in future:

"API is slow" is technically wrong, as the slowness is caused by connection, middleware, etc.

"API" is API.

"Middleware" is middleware.

"Connection" is 回線 (as in the "internet connection").

Japanese word for 回線 exists, because we have been using (telephone) connections for a long time. So in the future, there might be new Japanese word to represent "UX".

Although there is no perfect match for the word, in essence it may be described as:

使い心地

or/and

使い勝手

These words are common enough that you may research on your own. Tech savvy people may say "UX is different from 使い心地・使い勝手" which is true, but I consider it close enough. After all, when someone asks "what does UX mean?" those are the words we tend to use for explanation.

EDIT
For further research or rationale, I recommend to consult the appropriate source, which is not a dictionary but an industry standard public specification/standards - JIS Z 8521 or 8531. This is because UX is still somewhere between a word and a term. There are many terms like UX causing the same debate: Robust design is 堅牢設計 or ロバストデザイン? Ergonomics is 人間工学 or エルゴノミクス? It's an interesting subject.
Comment: I don't understand what you mean by "there is no Japanese word equivalent." The fourth edition of 『大辞林』 **does** have an entry for UX in the 「アルファベット・その他」section. It refers one to the term ユーザ・エクスペリエンス, which is defined in the main body of the dictionary as 「製品やサーボスを利用したときに得られる知識・気分・感覚などの総体。ユーザー体験。」If these terms (UX, ユーザ・エクスペリエンス, and ユーザー体験) are used and understood by at least some native Japanese speakers, and are included in a widely available monolingual dictionary, then it seems to me that they are in fact Japanese, even though they contain elements that are derived from English.
Comment: @Nanigashi I understand what you mean. You seem to believe the question was a simple translation request of a ubiquitous word. I interpreted the question in a quite different way, and believe it deserved an answer, so I gave it my best shot. Your comment is a potentially helpful and concise answer, so I'd post it as an answer if I were you. You're always free to flag or down vote if you believe this question in itself is wrong. Again from my perspective サーボス isn't even a legit word, but I won't dare challenge a dictionary.
Comment: 「サーボス」 is just a transcription error. The Daijirin entry says 「サービス」.
Comment: So sorry about that typo! As Darius Jahandarie points out, the entry does of course say サービス; I apologize for not checking my transcription more carefully before posting the comment. And I have already downvoted and flagged the question. (Though I have not downvoted your answer, which I'm sure the OP will find helpful and informative.) And no, I don't think these terms are "ubiquitous" at all -- hence "used and understood by **at least some** native Japanese speakers."
Answer: For my day job in software engineering (game development), I often give technical presentations, and have technical meetings with different types of audiences. Discussing UX is something I do very commonly.
To express the concept of UX, I find ユーザー エクスペリエンス a bit unwieldy, and often unknown to less savvy audiences, so I generally use ユーザー体験 instead, as it's easy to understand, easy to read, and fits better in a presentation slide.


What video conferencing software is available?

Question: There 're somebody i want to talk with him in a video conference in Ubuntu, how can i do that?
Comment: If its person to person video chat I recommend google with empathy/pidgin or video/voice plugin
Comment: This question was: "Video conference in ubutnu". It was edited by Jorge Castro changing it to "What video conferencing software is available?". This way, the answers from people may be misunderstood by voters because of "Video Conference in Ubuntu" may refer to a way on how to perform that task, which can evenly be achieved by broadcasting a webcam for the convenience of the participants. Somehow, Jorge Castro changed the sense of the question to the meaning of a specific software for the task, which limits the possibilities and makes people to down vote given answers. For your consideration.
Answer: Skype:
You can use Skype, which fully supports video conferencing and other useful features, such as screen sharing. http://www.skype.com/download
aMSN
Even when aMSN is able to perform video conferencing, recently it is a difficult task as there are several changes in the MSN services and the way that it handles video connections.
In aMSN is it that easy as having installed Farsight, which is automatically installed in the majority of the cases and if not you will have enough information and a guide in order to install it.
Anyway it may fail as I have said in my initial words.
Web Services
You may wish to give a chance to an online free video conference service, such as
Ubiqq http://ubiqq.com

Ubiqq uses a flash player based interface in order to gain access to both your webcam and microphone and allows the same in your contact's side.
A whole thread about how to make these online services to work is fully documented right here. Just in case that you can't make it work out of the box.
Good luck!
Comment: Skype is my choice..
Comment: And how does your comment lead to find a solution for this question @Roland Taylor? Dare to post your own answer. Don't drop reviews on mine. Thank you!
Comment: I didn't attack you........................
Comment: Me neither...... Oh... the message... It's my signature, sorry...
Answer: OpenMeeting

OpenMeetings is a free browser-based software that allows you to set up instantly a conference in the Web. You can use your microphone or webcam, share documents on a white board, share your screen or record meetings. It is available as hosted service or you download and install a package on your server with no limitations in usage or users.
Answer: Ekiga
As their website says

Ekiga (formerly known as GnomeMeeting) is an open source SoftPhone, Video Conferencing and Instant Messenger application over the Internet.
It supports HD sound quality and video up to DVD size and quality.
It is interoperable with many other standard compliant software, hardware and service providers as it uses both the major telephony standards (SIP and H.323).

Can be installed from the Software Center or using
<code>sudo apt-get install ekiga
</code>
Answer: Google hangouts offers screen sharing and group meetings (unlike skype which you have to pay for groups).  Everything is supported within the browser so very easy to install and collaborate with users of various OS and technical savvy.
https://support.google.com/plus/answer/1660627?hl=en
Answer: Try out Reflap. It's web based so you won't need to download anything and it supports video conferencing with up to 5 video streams at the time. Also each user has a call address so you can get called by anyone that has your call address like your phone number.
Answer: BigBlueButton is really fine, it is a great open source technology. I'm currently working at TALCOD (French Open source and Web agency), and all the customers seem satisfied with the solutions and videoconferencing rooms that we base on BigBlueButton. I do believe that open source solutions have a bright future. Maybe you could be interested in this software.
Answer: GoMeetNow (http://www.gomeetnow.com) offers reliable, quality multi-point video conferencing despite platforms. It is full-featured and cost-effective and also listed in TOP 5 this year by Publicare. FYR, http://www.webconferencing-test.com/en/webconferencing_top5/webconference_compact_results.html.