When Metal-Rules.com posted their Top 30 Metal Albums 1990-2000, I thought it’d make a fun list for Sunday Metal.
#27 – Entombed – Clandestine
Full album
Edit: Looks like between when I queued up this post and when it published, the YouTube account with the video I embedded got suspended. So here’s a cut off the album: “Chaos Breed”
My coding style (programming) has evolved over time.
The biggest change I made wasn’t too long ago, when the NYTimes Style Guide came out. There were some style things in there that I had long resisted, but they made a solid case for that wasn’t just good style but also had functional implication.
One of the biggest was dealing with BOOL types.
See, while BOOL uses YES and NO as the logical constants, there’s nothing that says it must work out that way because BOOL isn’t as deeply ingrained in the Objective-C language as say bool is in the C++ language. You can read the NYTimes guide for the reasoning and style, and it’s a solid reason. I actually found myself getting bit by this very thing in an interesting way.
This is from memory, but it was something like:
- (BOOL)checkForSomeCondition {
return (BOOL)foo; // where 'foo' was SomeObject*
}
Most of the time, things worked. But sometimes I had strange behaviors and crashes, which ultimately tracked down to this. I saw in the debugger that the foo pointer was non-nil, but yet it returned NO. I think that’s how it was going. Basically the logic wasn’t working out given the value of foo. So I changed it:
- (BOOL)checkForSomeCondition {
return foo ? YES : NO;
}
and things worked. Hooray for compilers and scalar sizes, right?
But you can see how subtle things can bite you. And furthermore, it also shows that if I checked the return value of -checkForSomeCondition by seeing if it was equal to YES or NO, I may not have gotten the right behavior.
So that was a solid coding style change.
Now, the fantastic folks over at RayWenderlich.com just created their own style guide. But their intention was a little different, because they were more concerned about style for their tutorials — print and web. Nevertheless, there are a few great things in their style guide that even in my 20 years of doing this, I hadn’t directly thought about.
1. I need to remember to use the CGRect functions instead of accessing the struct values directly. This is just bad habit that I need to work on breaking.
2. The “Golden Path”. I’ve never explicitly thought about this, but once you see it you’re like “duh!”. I always had mixed emotions about this, because it just depended. I never liked “littering” the top of methods with a lot of “if it’s not this, return” type of things. I tended to like a positive conditional flow. But yes, that could lead to a lot of nesting, which would be really bothersome if that led to a deep nest before you got to the meat of things, or if the method implementation was long (e.g. more than a screen, which can happen despite best efforts). This is something I’ll consider more as I code.
I like a lot of the things in Ray’s style guide, but there are things I do not like. Mostly those things I don’t like are because it creates exceptions. That is, you should do this, except in this case or that case. That creates too many rules to have to remember, and then things become easy to violate. I prefer to have a single rule, in the spirit of keeping things simple and consistent… because isn’t that a key reason for style? I do accept that exceptions can and must occur on occasion, but they should be the (ahem) exception and not the rule. Reading Ray’s guide felt like there were just too many exceptions. But again, they are writing a guide for a particular paradigm.
Overall I don’t think Ray’s stuff is bad tho. It adopts many established and common conventions and introduces some new ones.
If you have no particular style, just pick some established style and go with it. In time, you’ll see what works, what doesn’t work, and you too will evolve. You’ll find other style guides out there, and there will be gems within it, and new things to consider. That whole “take what is useful and discard the rest” Bruce Lee philosophy. 🙂
Smash and grabs are happening in Austin (not surprising, given Austin’s crime rate):
“Apparently it just takes a minute to shatter that glass and grab a purse,” said Sharon McMillan.
She was picking her son up from a birthday party at Brentwood Park Saturday afternoon. “So, I quickly parked and left my purse in the car, knowing I would only be just a couple minutes,” she said.
She locked the car doors. But when she came back, a window was shattered and her purse was gone.
(h/t Michael Cargill)
Only gone a couple of minutes. I’m sure you’ve done this too. We think nothing of it. Just running in really quick — to the house, to the convenience store to buy a drink after gassing up, whatever excuse. Crime only takes seconds to unfold.
“I never leave my purse in the car, but of course that day I did, thinking, the car was in sight, and we were just a few hundred yards away,” she said.
The women say they tracked their credit cards, and found that the cards were being used at a few businesses on West Anderson Lane.
“Immediately, we got on the phone with our credit card company and the bank and canceled the cards,” Spradling said. “It was probably 40 minutes from the time we got to the park and until everything was canceled, and already they had $600 on the credit card.”
And the subsequent crime continued very quickly, faster than you could respond. Within 40 minutes, already $600 in fraudulent charges rang up.
Think about it.
You thought things would be safe. That it’s just a couple minutes. But what would it have cost you to pick up your purse (or put your phone or wallet in your pocket, whatever) and bring it with you? Just another second or two, if that? But failing that, look at the cost you now have to deal with. Smashed car window. Time off to get it repaired. Dealing with insurance, and certainly the cost of repairs/deductible. Losing all your credit cards and other identification, whatever else might have been in the purse. Now you have to replace everything, monitor your credit and identity for further fraud. Whatever the specifics wind up being, it’s certainly a FAR greater cost in time, money, emotion, energy, to deal with the aftermath than it would have been to just take your purse or wallet with you.
Learn from their mistakes.
Gas… I no haz it.
Injury work
Again, just winging it until I find out what’s up with my injured ankle.
Worked my way up doing triples. It was hard. Close-grips, hard. I realized I forgot to superset my back work, so I opted for a little faster/shorter and did some Kroc-style rows. Grabbed a 50, 10 reps, change hands, 10 reps, 15 seconds rest, another round of 10, then just crank. After 15 reps on one side, I was peeding out; the muscles were fine, but the gas tank needle was on “E”. Ground it out to 20, and felt like I could have done more but told myself “whatever you do here, you gotta still do with the other hand” so I stopped at 20. And boy, trying to do the right hand was killer. 10 reps and I was dying… I was running on less than fumes. The last 5 were pure sloppy willpower. I was spent.
That sucks.
I had no physical nor mental motivation to keep going. And hey, that says a lot when all that’s left is arm work. I mean, what guy willingly skips arm work! 🙂
But no gas. I guess it makes sense… today is CarbNite, so in theory I’m at my lowest point for glycogen/carb reserves. Sessions like today are better for immediately after CarbNite, which is why doing this last week worked so well. Well, I learned something.
In other news….
Tomorrow I get the MRI results. We’ll see what comes of it.
I picked up Paul Carter‘s 3 books. Been following him for a while and really like what he has to say — the powerlifting philosopher, the Socrates of Strength, the Plato of Poundages. His books have been on my “to read” list for a while, and he’s presently having a special/sale on them so no time like now to buy them.
Still feeling frustrated in my fat-loss efforts. The scale isn’t moving, but pictures seem to be telling a different story — but who knows if the camera is lying to me, or I’m lying to myself. Funny thing is as I flipped through Paul’s books, there’s some dietary addressing in there. It would seem I’m on the right track, I just have to keep at it. There are perhaps some things I could do better, and well… once I know what’s up with the ankle, I’ll see what I can do.
Even more reasons why NOT the SERPA holster.
Despite all the solid reasons why to avoid this holster, it keeps selling, it keeps showing up.
Please folks, just say no. There are lots of other good holsters on the market.
Karl just sent this out. I thought it worth the repost.
KR Training will be hosting legendary trainer Massad Ayoob on March 8-9 for his MAG-20 course.
It’s the classroom part of what used to be called his LFI-1 class (Lethal Force Institute).In my opinion, training with Mas is something that should be on every credible instructor’s resume.
Back in the early 90s, when I first started teaching, I flew to Oregon to take LFI-1 because (a) I thought it was important to do and (b) there were no LFI courses offered anywhere near Texas.It’s 20 hours of classroom lecture. We’ll be holding it in Austin, at a nice, big meeting room (Red Oak Ballroom at Northcross Mall), and we’ll have catered food both days.
Mas is the #1 expert in the country on armed citizen legal issues. There isn’t anybody else in the training business that offers anything similar. If you train with Mas and you get into a shooting incident, he will come work on your legal defense if needed. If you are an instructor and one of your students gets into a shooting, odds are very high that you will get called to court to testify about the training you provided. Being able to reference Ayoob’s training and his curriculum as part of your own training may have significant benefits.
Live fire classes are more fun, but the mistakes that land people in court (or jail) are almost never live fire errors. It’s not poor marksmanship or a slow draw that results in criminal charges; it’s doing or saying the wrong thing, or shooting the wrong person. The core topics of the MAG-20 course are covered in the Texas CHL curriculum, but MAG-20 goes into much more detail and depth — depth you should understand if you are teaching those topics yourself to others.
It’s very unlikely that I’ll host Mas again in 2015, and this is his first class in Austin, ever, and one of the very few he’s offered in Texas in a long, long time. So this is not one of those “I’ll go when he comes next year” situations.
It’s a special event, possibly a one-time opportunity to attend without having to travel out of state.Tuition is $450, which includes lunch and snacks both days. We will do a working lunch each day.
Registration is open on the KR Training website.
http://www.krtraining.com/signup.php
$225 deposit required in advance, per our typical 50% deposit policy.
I recently came across a bunch of data about the crime rate in Austin. I’m not sure where city-data.com gets their raw data (and apparently they don’t disclose it), but let’s just take it at face value.
Austin’s crime rate seems to have declined. There’s fluctuation from year to year, but if you look at the span from 1999 to 2011, it’s gone down overall (using city-data’s “crime rate” number).
But if you look at some specifics, it’s gone up. Over that time span:
And using City-Data’s numbers, Austin’s crime rate is significantly higher than the US average.
City-Data then breaks some numbers down.
Violent crime rate? Almost always higher than the US average.
Property crime rate? Significantly higher than the US average. I know property crime is a big problem in Austin.
Austin is lower than the US average murder… but murder is so statistically rare, whereas property crime and assault isn’t. And note that while some assaults are just as simple as that, “aggravated assault” used to be called “attempted murder”; basically they were trying to kill you but you lived — can’t call it murder unless they die. And due to our improvements in medical and Emergency Room care, there’s a high probability that if you are attacked but get to an ER with vital signs, you have a high likelihood of living. So, consider that when you look at violent crime numbers.
Rape has generally been higher in Austin. I do wonder what role in the data the University has.
Robbery is higher than the US average, every year.
Assault fluctuates year over year vs. the US average, but it’s still high.
Burglary is significantly and consistently higher than the US average.
Same with theft.
Austin is a high crime city. It may be getting better, depending who you ask, but it’s still high.
Here’s another tidbit.
Full-time law enforcement officers? Lower than the Texas average.
Hrm.
Well, if you break the crime down in Austin, it seems we can see a few things:
Take the data for whatever it’s worth.
Continuing to experiment while on the shelf due to my ankle.
I go in for for the ankle MRI later today.
Meantime, I continue on doctor’s orders to do no lower-body work. So since it’s all upper, and since pressing is out, benching it is. I’ve been curious about The Cube Method for some time, but various reasons have kept me from going whole hog on it. I always said if I got injured, that’d be a good time to focus/specialize/experiment on something, so here I am.
The above session came right out of the 365 Strong book. It’s the “week 3 – Bench Explosive” from Cube Kingpin (nĂ©e Cube Boss). So it’s the explosive bench session of the first rotation. I guessed a bit at the weights to use, but I think they were pretty close, especially for a “first rotation” (read: a wee light).
I liked it. It was different. I am sure I will get better simply due to repetition because my body will get more efficient at the explosive part. I don’t feel dead to the world after this session, but I do feel worked.
All in all, not bad. 🙂
My current feeling (and this could change depending upon circumstance) is once I’m off the fat loss train and start eating carbs regularly again, yeah… Cube. I may actually do a cycle or two of 5/3/1 to get back into the groove and reestablish my maxes, then Cube it. But I really want to give Cube a try.
But that’s later. Right now I have to deal with my ankle. So what to do the rest of this week? I don’t know. I thought I’d do “heavy bench” on Friday, and Wednesday I’d do some bodybuilding stuff. But am I wondering if I might be setting myself up for too much work to recover from (I keep thinking Texas Method here, and I know that’s a lot for an old fart like me… esp. one that’s working with a fat-loss-oriented diet, and an injury). Not sure, will think about it. Else maybe I’ll modify for now and go 2x week, going Thursday to bench heavy. I dunno. I’ll take it one day at a time and see.
Meantime, it’s MRI time.
My main computer is a MacBook Pro (17″ late 2011 model 8,3). I know where the internal hard drive is located, and I’ve heard some sounds from it like a marble dropping.
That can’t be good.
So I set about the task of a replacement hard drive. Yes, I still have AppleCare and could get it replaced under warranty, but that generally means I have to wait until it actually fails and then I’m probably out my computer for a week, which I just won’t do. And that’s just to replace the drive, not even to restore my data. I’ve done this sort of thing before, and it’s not difficult, just time consuming.
But this is a little different and I wasn’t sure how to proceed.
Yeah, nerves. 🙂
At least I opted to use a 3-day weekend, just in case I needed that downtime.
Here’s how it went.
I bought a “DIY upgrade Kit” from Other World Computing. It had a 1.0TB HGST 7200 RPM platter drive along with an external enclosure. I debated getting a SSD, but I’m still a little wary of the technology. OWC does sell this “Disk Doubler” solution, which I gave serious thought to because I do not use the optical drive and having an SSD for a secondary would be interesting; the thought was put all my dev work on it because compiling is so file-intensive, but then Xcode generates so many caches on the boot volume I’m not sure what gain I’d actually see. *shrug* I passed due to uncertainty and cost.
Also, the external enclosure was a good choice. I hum-hawed on it because in the past I’ve used one but after the transfer I never use it again. But still, I’m glad I had it.
The trouble was trying to find some solid answers to questions. OWC actually has a very good guide on how to do this. However, they didn’t answer some fundamental questions, like if I had to reinstall the OS. The reason was my Recovery HD was setup for Lion (Mac OS X 10.7) but I’m using Mountain Lion (10.8) and of course needed that without going through the massive hassle. Furthermore, any sort of “migratory” approach would likely cause half-installed software and other things that may or may not work, and I just don’t need that hassle of trying to get going again.
Let me cut to the end result and let you know how things went.
And slowly, things seem to be coming back to normal.
The DIY kit turned out to be useful for simple copies of things that didn’t come back, the fact I seemed to need to use it in order to do a full restore of my non-boot partition. And a couple times I actually booted off that drive because I needed some “runtime” settings and config that I didn’t remember what I did, so I’d boot back into my old setup, see how things were, then boot back to the new setup to reconfigure things.
I also learned that yes, you do have to reinstall the OS. I grant for some people it might work to reinstall the OS then do something like “migration” to get you there. It might clean a lot of cruft out. But for me? That would be too problematic and time consuming. Plus I really wasn’t sure how the fact it would have started me in Lion then I needed to get to Mountain Lion… how that would have went. I would love if there was a way to ensure your Recovery HD was in sync with your major OS upgrade. I mean, when I finally go to Mavericks (10.9), recovery and reinstall could be a bitch to jump that much.
Note that when I didn’t have the Recovery HD, my machine is a recent enough model that can do “Internet boot”. There’s some peace in knowing that’s there, but what if I don’t have fast Internet access? And the fact you must have the local Recovery HD in order to use FileVault. I wasted a lot of time having to do things over again. Again, the main question that was never answered for me was how to handle the OS version differences. I figure if I migrated, it would have been a problem. But because all I used the OS reinstall for was to get the Recovery HD and other “internals” set up on the new drive, then blew away the actual OS install by doing a full restore from my Time Machine back up… well, there we go. Life goes on.
Anyways, I think I’m going again. So far, so good. The machine feels a little more responsive too. Looking at the specs of the old (looks to be a Travelstar 7K750) vs. new drive (Travelstar 7K1000): old had 16 MB cache, new has 32 MB; old uses SATA 3Gb/s, new uses SATA 6GB/s; new seems to have just a hair faster seek and r/w times too; new tho seems to consume a hair more power tho. We’ll see how it works out. 🙂
When Metal-Rules.com posted their Top 30 Metal Albums 1990-2000, I thought it’d make a fun list for Sunday Metal.
#28 – At the Gates – Slaughter of the Soul
“Slaughter of the Soul”
Stuff From Hsoi 