DeMarco points out that any increase in efficiency, in an organisation or an individual life, necessitates a trade-off: you get rid of unused expanses of time, but you also get rid of the benefits of that extra time.
In the accident and emergency department, by contrast, remaining “inefficient” in this sense is a matter of life and death. If there is an exclusive focus on using the staff’s time as efficiently as possible, the result will be a department too busy to accommodate unpredictable arrivals, which are the whole reason it exists.
A similar problem afflicts any corporate cost-cutting exercise that focuses on maximising employees’ efficiency: the more of their hours that are put to productive use, the less available they will be to respond, on the spur of the moment, to critical new demands. For that kind of responsiveness, idle time must be built into the system.
]]>Use this not to capture and log every moment of every day; but as a window, through which to frame a handful of moments, forever.
]]>On my last attempt, I was almost there, and then realized I was creating specialized templates for half of the pages, because there is no way to extend or override part of the templates. I can’t have a block in partial within another block? Why? Shortcodes seem just like bandaids, especially when used for templating. The templating in Hugo is abbysmal for anything other than the simplest sites. It really goes to show how well thought out Jinja2 templating is.
And don’t even get me started on index
and _index
files. The use of _index
is overloaded from multiple concepts, which can clash and it’s hard to work around, to a point when Hugo’s own renderer will produce different results on subsequent runs.
This turned out to be more of a rant than intended, so I’ll leave it here. Don’t get me wrong, Hugo is great and has nice features, but for me falls very short at the job a site generator shouldn’t, the actual site templating and generation.
Future me beware: don’t try Hugo again until some of the major pain points are addressed. This is also to say, back to writing my own generator Hana and simplifying some of the concepts that got out of hand. And, first and foremost, push the latest code out, rather than hoarding it privately.
]]>What happened was fairly simple, I’ve come to believe. It was an accident. A virus spent some time in a laboratory, and eventually it got out. SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, began its existence inside a bat, then it learned how to infect people in a claustrophobic mine shaft, and then it was made more infectious in one or more laboratories, perhaps as part of a scientist’s well-intentioned but risky effort to create a broad-spectrum vaccine. SARS-2 was not designed as a biological weapon. But it was, I think, designed.
]]>For more than half a century, governments all over the world trusted a single company to keep the communications of their spies, soldiers and diplomats secret.
]]>There is the handy Network Link Conditioner Tool that comes with Xcode, but that affects the whole machine, rather than a limited setup or specific network interfaces. It turns out this is just a simple interface on top of generic tools that comes with the OS out of the box.
Most recent macOS versions ship with OpenBSD’s pf
firewall out of the box, however, quick check with pfctl
will show that ALTQ (alternate queueing) is not supported. Instead of ALTQ support, macOS version of pf ships with dummynet support, controlled by dnctl
.
The Opportunity rover stopped communicating with Earth when a severe Mars-wide dust storm blanketed its location in June 2018. After more than a thousand commands to restore contact, engineers in the Space Flight Operations Facility at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) made their last attempt to revive Opportunity Tuesday, to no avail. The solar-powered rover’s final communication was received June 10.
Fifteen years and more than 45 kilometers… That’s pretty good for a rover that was designed to operate for about 90 days and travel one kilometer. A very fitting XKCD comic to say goodbye.
Thanks for bringing us along, indeed!
]]>How did we get through the Neolithic Era without sunscreen? Actually, perfectly well. What’s counterintuitive is that dermatologists run around saying, “Don’t go outside, you might die.”
]]>Technology is imposed on the land, but technique means conforming to the landscape. They work in opposite ways, one forcing a passage while the other discovers it. The goal of developing technique is to conform to the most improbable landscape by means of the greatest degree of skill and boldness supported by the least equipment.
— Doug Robinson (1972 Chouinard Equipment Catalog) ]]>