Fahrenheit

For some reason, I never persuaded my brain to remember what temperatures in Fahrenheit meant, at all. I vaguely remembered 32 was freezing and 98 was body temperature, but never really absorbed how to extrapolate between them. Then I saw people quoting celsius reminders on siderea's post.

I especially liked "Cheat sheet: 0C=hat and mittens, 5C=coat, 10C=jacket, 15C=light sweater, 20C=short sleeves, 25C=sun hat, 30C=stillsuit"

And "30 is HOT, 20 is NICE; 10 is COLD, 0 is ICE".

So I decided to ask, what temperatures in F I should remember, and that 0, 10, 20 were probably the most useful. So 30 = freezing, 50 = cold, 70 = starting to get warm. And even if that's off by a couple of degrees, that lets me remember what's what in the comfortable range.

Incremental Translation

https://www.dropbox.com/s/re1eu39rpaphtx1/pride_and_prejudice_e2f.html?dl=0

You may have seen the hash I made of Pride and Prejudice last week. Here's the point.

The idea is, take a simple word-by-word translation and an English text, and apply it to one word in the first sentence, and also anywhere that word appears thereafter, and another word in the second sentence, and anywhere that word appears thereafter, as so on. And the replacement has a hovertip telling you the english word (that should work in the link, at least in Chrome, let me know if not?).

The idea is, like people learn bits of Lapin by reading Watership Down, without ever consciously trying to remember it, or by watching TV with subtitles, that you always can click to get the translation, but by being repeatedly reinforced, you start to remember it as you go on without having to make a big effort to do so.

Or at any rate, that was the idea. I've no idea if it would work!

I apologise for the quality of the translation, I used a dodgy wordlist to get something up and running, but it doesn't do an actual context-sensitive translation. You could also do the reverse, take a French text and translate all the words in your wordlist to start with, and successively less as you go. So the grammar would be correct.

Any suggestions?

2d source control history

I talked about this several times before, but the idea was still settling down in my head and I don't think it made a lot of sense.

Imagine each commit had one parent that was the "branch" parent or "this is a logical atomic change" parent or the "the tests still pass" parent, or the "space not time" parent. All the same guarantees you'd expect from code on the same branch hold (eg. compiles, tests pass). This represents history the same way a non-branching source control history does, a list of changes that sum up the current state of the software. Or, for that matter, the same way a heavily rebased clunk-free history does. It shows the code being built up.

And each commit may have none or one (or more) "content" parent or "rebase" parent or a "chronological" parent or a "meta" parent, that represents "the change made in this commit, is based on this other commit".

If you already merge from branch into trunk, you may find the parents are quite like this already.

Why might you want to do this? Well, to me, the good reason is that it does away with all the "oh no I want to rebase but I already pushed". The pre-rebase history is just always there by default, though you could choose to purge those commits if you wanted. So any software working off your remote, when it pull-rebases, can just automatically move anything that was built on top of your pre-rebase branch onto your post-rebase branch, just as if you'd committed a few extra commits without rebasing anything. And the new code isn't just suddenly in limbo, anyone can check that the branch tip is the same as the pre-rebase branch tip.

It also may provide useful hints for merging avoiding duplicated commits, when there's extra info about which commits are "the same" other than their content. It doesn't solve the problem, but it may help some of the time your source control program can't automatically fix it.

It also removes all the "oh fuck, I screwed up, reflog, reflog, flog harder!" if you accidentally screw up a branch you're working with. Instead of the previous tip of the branch floating in limbo hoping you'll retreive it, the previous branch history, all of it, is retained, until you explicitly delete it. You don't even need to be on the same computer, someone else can ask you can push the changes and sort out your mess, when you can't (I think?) push a reflog.