But isn't this the beauty of programming to begin with. Barring certain things like medical devices, cars, etc., where it has to be very orthodox, for stuff like Web back/frontends, and even gaming, this is how people learn, I guess. Sure, that code could be re-factored for speed, cleaner in appearance, etc.
Reminds me of the video driver (forget card) some Linux developers wrote that was ~30k lines of code. OpenBSD wanted to use it because the HW manufacturer wouldn't release the specs, but because the Linux code was GPL, the OpenBSD guys re-wrote it from scratch in less than 1/4 of the code.
That's not bad, actually. It's one reason why I hated leaving Perl for Python. Python is a little too orthodox sometimes.
What I'm seeing is where frameworks are becoming the new "programming languages". People now bicker over what framework to use rather than first master the language they are using for a task. I tend to favor the method of "do the simplest thing that works".
My cousin lives up in East Anglia in a house built in the mid 1300s. They have bought box fans for every room otherwise they cannot even sleep. No aircon, obviously. The local council will not allow the house to be retrofitted since it's historical.
I only drink water during/after lawn work. That amounts to maybe 32oz. Other "water" would include the half gallon or so of green tea I drink daily, along with my 4-5 double espressos during working hours.
Yet companies build plants on the Great Lakes, hoover up all the water, filter it, bottle it, and sell it to the unsuspecting, who happily buy it.
I never ever saw bottled water as a kid in Europe. It wasn't until I moved to the US where it appeared to be commonplace. When I went back home to England last year, they've got it in every supermarket I visited. Sad, really. I still just drink out of the tap here in Texas.
What you wrote about bottled water not being a thing in Europe is definitely country specific. When I lived in Germany none of my German friends drank water from the tap. They would buy packs of bottled water for drinking at home.
Much of the US cities have great tap water. Some places (Flint) get lead going on.
However, much of the water in the US by area is well water. Well water tastes gross, and has some dubious health effects if not filtered right. Bottled water seems reasonable for those people.
Just because bottled water is not useful for you, does not mean it's not useful for anyone.
I never said it wasn't useful. Obviously there are people who need it. I just won't pay for it when I already do by paying for house water. Our tap water is clean here in Texas.
Yet companies build plants on the Great Lakes, hoover up all the water, filter it, bottle it, and sell it to the unsuspecting
I can't speak for every state, but here in Michigan (The Great Lakes state!), companies like Nestle have to apply for a license that subjects them to regular inspections to make sure they're not over-burdening the local groundwater supply. They pump from wells on their own private land using their own facilities. Their license fee is pretty cheap, something like $300USD.
This seems like a common-sense regulation that doesn't overly burden either the company or the regulator.
I buy Ice Mountain spring water with a clear conscience.
Meanwhile here in Texas, that level of heat is business as usual. I get that most places in the EU don't have aircon, as they rarely need it, barring southern EU, which I have spent considerable amounts of time in. I far prefer the misty moors of England over anything with tons of sun.
Having grown up in Europe, I do prefer their weather when it's normal for them. If only I could convince my wife to move somewhere with a proper 4 seasons rather than this hideous backwater of heat and humidity.
Good luck! My wife and I were fond of Texas (well... really only Austin and select parts of Houston) -- but I was more fond of having four seasons than anything Austin had to offer. A move to Boston convinced her pretty easily and since then we're both on the same page about sticking to places with similar climates. We would love to see our friends in Texas more but ever moving back is a very hard no, both due to weather and politics.
I also grew up in Europe for a few years at least.
Guess some Texans have seen your post ;) Not in TX myself but after a recent Texas-like heat/humidity wave I found myself thinking how much more energized and comfortable I felt after it left, but it was still subjectively quite a high temperature. Such oppressive heat really does affect your quality of life in a big way. I lived in Europe for many years without air conditioning and was never more than mildly uncomfortable on the worst days. There was something very different about the heat...it may be as simple as humidity levels, but it was not particularly dry where I lived and visited either. Here I don't see many days that would be tolerable without AC.
Good comment. I loathe Texas, but I'm here because of the wife and her family. I would prefer to live someplace where it's overcast 90% of the time, and where it rains at least twice a week. I also prefer snow on the ground for a couple of months. Here in the Houston area, the heat, humidity, insects, and sheer amounts of concrete all contribute to the lack of comfort. Moreover, there are too many people here all shoved into a space that really cannot accommodate them.
Maybe I'm biased, but take a look at Denver as a compromise? It doesn't fit all of your preferences (it's very sunny and the snow melts quickly), but it's also very low humidity, convenient to snowy towns in the mountains, and we've pretty much had at least a few minutes of rain every day for the last month or two.
Appreciate the comments. My brother lived in Denver for a few years. It's not really my cup of tea when I visited. Too much sun, and too high in altitude. I could barely breathe when I was there and my nose bled every day for the first three days.
My preferences would be Vermont, Snoqualmie, WA, Bellingham, WA, or the AK peninsula. Me and the sun are not friends.
Growing up in the US then living for quite some time in Europe it was initially weird for me to not see AC everywhere, but I quickly realized it was much more comfortable for me. Something about being in a cold building and then going out into a swamp heater just makes it more miserable. Maybe its slow acclimation or some subjective thing.
Not really acclimation, but willingness to suffer through it. I hate it when my children want to play outside because I'm out there for less than five minutes and my shirt is soaked through with sweat, it's unbearably hot, and the insects are legion.
When I leave work in the late afternoon, it's so hot my car takes 10 minutes to cool down to where it's comfortable inside. By then my Right Guard has gone left and I'm having cold air blowing on wet skin. It really does suck.
And I mentioned same in my statement above. The entire lower half of the US would be largely unlivable without aircon. Even Alaska get 90+ in the summer, albeit for short bursts.
Cats are far more independent than dogs, which is one reason why I like them. Certain cat breeds can be very dog-like, particularly Arabian Mau, Abyssinian, and Norwegian Forest. All are ridiculously intelligent and will happily accompany you like a dog, have dog-like mannerisms, etc.
Been using vim since 1998 and rarely stray unless I'm typing notes for something unimportant and them I use Nano.
Back in the day when I was a Unix admin, we often worked in full screen terminals and when editing a config file didn't like having to close the vim instance to go look at something, so learned about this little gem:
:sh (go back to shell and do your thing and leave vim running)
Ctrl-d to return to intact and running vim instance.
As an aside, if you decide to use nano to edit config files, make sure you use nano -w (no wrap), otherwise you may find yourself with a non-bootable OS instance.
This is one of the many things I learned from the destroyallsoftware screencasts [0] so many years ago. Before that I used vim in a gui (MacVim). Along with moving to tmux this completely changed how I work.
I haven't used many esoteric environments, but wikipedia says it "exists in most modern Unix shells" and the timeline for first adding it was the late 70s early 80s.
> :sh (go back to shell and do your thing and leave vim running)
In nvi (at least), one can also open a buffer and :script to run a shell inside vi and have all the yank/paste/navigation/all-the-things features of vi. Mind you need to i[nsert] or a[ppend] after the prompt to issue your commands.
Been using vim for almost a decade and embarrassed to not have known about how to go back to vim after doing `:sh` , so thanks for sharing that. I use tmux all the time so I tend to switch to a pane running bash and `ctrl-b z` to toggle the pane fullscreen
I wouldn't even use nano for typing notes; I'm so used to vim that I don't see why I wouldn't want its powers, even for something as simple as writing notes. I might very well want to reorder the notes, for instance: that's very easy in vim with dd/p. nano might have some Ctrl-key combo that does the same thing, but why bother learning that when I already know vim?
Reminds me of the video driver (forget card) some Linux developers wrote that was ~30k lines of code. OpenBSD wanted to use it because the HW manufacturer wouldn't release the specs, but because the Linux code was GPL, the OpenBSD guys re-wrote it from scratch in less than 1/4 of the code.