Karto

Pity. I live in a remote part of France, shaped by hills, forests, and very devoid of public services. Most people don't have too much money, yet every third car you see is an SUV or 4WD, because they actually are quite useful in daily life. My neighbour drives a tiny but nimble Suzuki Vitara with which he does just everything, much of which no regular city car could do. Was he to buy that same car in two years, it'd cost almost twice as much because of those taxes. (damn even the baker drives his deliveries with a Vitara). I see all the excesses around the SUVs, I agree there's a nuisance to be dealt with. But again the government rules with a large and blind PR hammer, and we'll quietly sit under the blow once more.

And more spot on the cynics, whose name just says it : get inspired from those dogs. (although admittedly their name comes from the "swift dog's gymnasium", their gathering place, they themselves started embracing the pun as it was very fitting with their reasoning)

Quietness. Slowness causing you to deliberately select what information you need enough to bother finding it.

Reminds me of a friend of mine who's a lot into horses. She once told me "We say that books about horses and riding can only teach you the things that you already know."

I'm coming to wonder whether it could be a typo in the Italian Police's report, that other media may have corrected. Pretty much all media have written that they fought ALONG the separatists. See French Le Monde and German Deutsche Welle right now, who agree that'd be PRO separatist.

That would be a Hollywood version of the ideology. Right extreme groups are quite a tangled mess. Many of these groups in Europe are looking up to Russia (and Poland, and Hungary, and Serbia) right now. Those eastern european countries are perceived as the possible source for a European nationalist renaissance, as they display a strong stance against both european federalism and mass immigration. Obviously, that vision of Eastern European countries' politics is just as oversimplified as Hollywood's neonazism, but the war between Russia and Ukraine has been largely presented by western supporters as a war between nationalism and european blending.

I've been working for a few years for a large European trucks manufacturer. Two brands were co-developing a new range of models, one brand a bit more luxurious than the other. The "slightly lower end" brand were making a very fancy HMI with two large colour screens, lots of menus and the stuff. The top end stuff just had a huge bunch of well placed physical buttons and switches. When the prototypes came into drivers' hands, everybody liked the buttons, nobody liked the screens. It came as a bad slap to the people who had worked for years on it. "Those young drivers, the iPhone generation, think our screen based HMI is way too complicated and misleading."

I drive a Dacia and I love its simplicity... I fear the day when they try to make a Dacia look fancy.

Sécurité Civile, the guys who operate water bombing aircraft, have tweeted a couple of times that the dynamic pressure of water would present too much of a threat to the structure. https://twitter.com/SecCivileFrance/status/11178749242683760...

A few years ago, discovering J and playing a bit with it, I went through phases : "this looks square and clean, a nice exercise in language design" -> "those guys take it way too seriously" -> "people seem to be using it for serious stuff, they are simply insane".

Coming back to it every now and then for kicks slowly showed me a few strengths. First, with the short verb names and clear semantics, J is the only thing I've found that brings, for me, the comfort of a specialised handheld calculator to the PC. That realization, very independently from its array capabilities, is what got me really going with it, on a gentle learning curve. And you get it on your smartphone too ; I eventually sold my good old HP48 friend.

From there I started using it for small things. When I was building a lift for my brother's Warré beehives, J let me scribble a few beam-resistance equations in it and using its solver and plotter to easily get good results. So I started using it for things that were too big for spreadsheets, but that I was too lazy to deal with in a "proper" language.

That needs a change of mind regarding how you write and maintain programs. When I want J to do something in a program, I fiddle with it until I get the "sentence" right, and that's it. That sentence will never be modified again. If I need it to work differenty, I'll rewrite that sentence from scratch. Then find a good name for your sentence so that you can combine it with others, and suddently you discover that you can write J like a nice DSL that can very satisfyingly sound like plain spoken language.

I wouldn't stretch it though. I'm not passionate enough about it to invest what's needed for mastery. 80 lines of thin J is my largest. Beyond that, switch to something that helps with maintainability, but beware of the sudden and amazing code-size inflation !

I've done exactly that for my monthly time reports at work.

The company's official ERP in which we report our monthly activities is a horrendously slow and error-prone old-school GUI, where you basically punch a lot of numeric codes that represent customers and activities, and that can be pretty hard to get right. It looks like a spreadsheet with delays of several seconds after each cell is filled-in, because the apps commits everything over the network each time. I would waste several hours of life every month, typing one piece of rubbish at a time into that sad thing. It's a lot of pain and a colleague had written an automation tool based on the ERP's binary formats. However, his tool needed the code to be adjusted to each user, then compiling his thing was no easy task, then you needed to ask for special permissions to be able to feed the ERP with the binaries, and at last you realized that the binary output was a fragile thing, and so nobody used the tool.

So I wrote an automation script in Python with pluggable input sources which can be combined (text files that are easy to read and write, http connection to Redmine activities... later on a colleague took the tool and added a GrindStone source, and another guy plugged it into his Outlook calendar). The output stage to the ERP is built upon PyWinAuto, and it just simulates key-strokes on the proper window. It is not smart. It remains constrained by the ERP's slowness. But IT IS A HELL OF A FUN TO WATCH your monthly torture getting done all by itself, and enjoying a walk with a coffee in hand for that time, coming back from time to time to see your screen doing stuff.

All in all it took me about a whole day to write the script. It has been running for four years now. One ERP update broke the output stage. Fixing it was a matter of minutes : just write down the new keystrokes.

France has "refuges", but the word mushes a wide variety of accommodations together. Around Chamonix "refuges" will be full-service hotels sitting above glaciers, resupplied by helicopter. But most of the refuges, in most of the Alps, are just the same as bothies : small, romantic, cold, smelling of smoke and damp limestone, often maintained by a few men who once got up there alone for a whole month to rebuild old walls, and a great place to make serendipitous friends.