Electric Weblog Machine
Via the National Institute of Health, a 1991 study from the British Journal of Sports Medicine identified horse-riding is more dangerous than motorcycle riding.
Horse-riding carries a high participant morbidity and mortality. Whereas a motor-cyclist can expect a serious incident at the rate of 1 per 7000h, the horse-rider can expect a serious accident once in every 350h, i.e. 20 times as dangerous as motor-cycling.
From the fish shell design document:
Every configuration option in a program is a place where the program is too stupid to figure out for itself what the user really wants, and should be considered a failure of both the program and the programmer who implemented it.
If any program could go wild with user configuration options, a shell program could. Its notable that fish explicilty tries to avoid this.
Scott meyeres is one of the foremost experts on C++. He recently had this to say regarding bug reports on the code in his books.
I retired from active involvement in C++ at the end of 2015, and in the ensuing two and a half years, I’ve forgotten enough details of the language that I am no longer able to properly evaluate bug reports regarding the technical aspects of my books. C++ is a large, intricate language with features that interact in complex and subtle ways, and I no longer trust myself to keep all the relevant facts in mind.
In case you don’t know him, he’s not particularly old (born 1959, which makes him 59 as of this writing), and in good health as far as I know. So this is a statement about the complexity of C++, and not about Scott Meyers, who is still as sharp and brilliant as the day he retired.
One of the criticisms of C++ has always been its complexity. There are so many “gotchas,” special cases, and unexpected side-effects that it seems impossible that a single person could keep it all in her head. This seems like a good illustration of the extent to which that is true.
I’m in a period of Japanophilia. Recently the Austin Film
Society showed all six installments of Lone Wolf and Cub, which were excellent.
This weekend they’re playing Lady
Snowblood. I have never seen it but
am very excited. Apparently it’s an inspiration for Kill Bill, but I won’t hold that
against it.
Update: YouTube video pulled
We recently cancelled our cable TV. We’re an Apple household, so we get most our stuff from AppleTV apps now. In addition to the usual Netflix and Amazon, here’s what we use.
iTunes: We purchased episodes of The Expanse (which airs on SyFy) on iTunes. We’ll have to do the same thing if we want to watch Better Call Saul. That, or wait for it to come on Netflix.
HDHomeRun: This is a TV tuner with an Ethernet port. An app on the AppleTV streams the video. This is working great for local broadcast channels. We use it the occasional live sports broadcast, a few network shows (The Good Place and Saturday Night Live come to mind), the BBC stuff that airs on PBS, and whatever else might show up on broadcast.
Channels DVR: This works with the HDHomeRun and runs on my QNAP NAS (which I already had). It writes the digital broadcast stream to the NAS and comes with an AppleTV app which ties it all together. The same app can either stream the broadcast from the tuner, or stream recorded shows from the NAS. The DVR service costs $8/month, which give you the schedule data and the ability to sechedule a season pass, etc. The price is on the high side for comparable services. There’s no contract, so I can switch if I figure out a better service.
I tried Hulu, both with and without the live TV option. Neither one was completely satisfactory. For example, I didn’t watch the first episode of The Good Place Season 2 soon enough, and it becase unavailable. A broadcast show unavailable? What am I paying for? That won’t be a problem if I record a broadcast off my HDHomeRun.
There’s one more service we use that isn’t generally available–membership to the Austin Film Society. They have a membership level that comes with free movie tickets for a montly fee. We live a few minutes away from their new theater, and we average about two films a week.
What’s missing is premium cable. We have no HBO or Showtime. If we had HBO, we would have watched the latest season of Silicon Valley and Westworld. There’s enough other stuff on that I can’t say I miss it too much. When Game of Thrones comes on, we will subscribe to HBO Now, but until then we have plenty of stuff to watch.