Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • News and Links Digest (publ. 2025-02-12)

    Life-bearing water arrived on Earth later rather than sooner | ScienceDaily

    This is problematic from an evolutionary perspective, as water is necessary for the supposed evolution of life.

  • Other peoples time

    We had a group away day in January. Or rather, away days. A Tuesday and a Wednesday off-site. There were a bunch of good ideas that came from it. Even better, we left with the acknowledgement that none of it would mean anything if nothing was implemented, nothing changed. For me, that's left a sense of impending change sitting in the air for the better part of a month now. Yes there's a working group looking at exactly how to change some things, but it all feels ... very quiet.

    The one thing that has noticeably appeared on my radar is the result of a fairly off-hand result I made at one of the session. Something along the lines of "if we're going to go massively over time in a meeting, give people the chance to ditch out of the meeting at the scheduled time". This wasn't even part of the discussion, it was now more me being tired and grumpy and being 2 hours and 25 minutes into a 2 hour session.

• Technology and Free Software

  • GOING OFF WATCH

    Well both of my wristwatches that I've talked about before are now broken. My recreation watch, the mechanical self-winding one I talked about in 2024-02-17At_One_with_the_ST6_Wristwatch.txt, had one of the lugs that holds the watch band break off late last year. I've been meaning to attempt some sort of repair using epoxy but I'm not very confident. Then yesterday my everyday Casio calculator watch, described in 2022-11-06Reviewing_the_Casio_CA-53W.txt, finally went blank after a long time getting fainter. Granted that's been going for well over ten years on the original battery which the manual expects to last less than five.

    Opening up the Casio, where the calculator buttons were getting stuck with gunk and needed cleaning anyway, it turns out quite unlike any other watch I've opened up. The battery is a large CR2016 size, and held in a clip-in cradle where it seems impossible to unhock the clip from the back. Since I needed to get through to the keyboard anyway, I proceeded to pick apart all the clip/snap fit components expecting to eventualy find a typical membrane style keypad. This I did, except for water resistance the rubber button pad is sandwiched in the case plastic with no apparant way to separate it. So rather than simply washing it in the sink, I spent the evening pushing out each button from behind with a small screwdriver as far as it will go and trying to clean out all the gunk that was revealed. How much good that does remains to be seen, but really I'm less confident about getting all the bits back together correctly and undamaged now anyway. I did at least make sure to photograph it at every step of disassembly, so I _should_ be able to get things back in the order they came out, but how much damage is done in the process remains to be seen.

  • Programming

    • Naming types is hard

      I have obviously run into the common problem of what to name tables / classes / structs, and respective files. It varies greatly depending on language and surrounding environment, some languages even break their own conduct. For example, in Java you have the classes: Arrays, Collections, Files, Objects, etc., which are mainly used to provide a static API that affects the corresponding type of object, making a mess of OO rules.

      Programmers must also have to take into account the context of the program, such as SQL databases. The table Users is a collection into which you insert individual users, makes a lot more sense... UNTIL you start adding harder cases, for example if I want to store the address of a user: UserAddresses; it would be a lot cleaner to use User and UserAddress. Moreover, things start getting extra chaotic when we introduce names that do not have a regular plural, such as Children and ChildDetails.