Minimal

Tonight, I watched Al Gore’s film-cum-presentation, An Inconvenient Truth (currently showing at the Tyneside Cinema). In it, he:

• presents the case for the existence of global warming,
• explains how it is on an unprecedented scale,
• examines how little debate there is over its existence in the scientific community, and
• offers the consequences of its continuation

As you might expect, it’s a heavily biased presentation. On occasion, non-sequiturs creep in and are quickly left behind. Throughout the presentation, graphs are used whose axes don’t begin at zero (not necessarily a problem, but it can be misleading). Where case studies were cited, there often wasn’t consideration given to the possible existence of opposite cases (e.g. retreating vs. advancing glaciers).

Despite all this, however, there was one graph that stood out a mile for me. It showed atmospheric CO₂ levels over the course of thousands of years; hundreds of thousands, I think. (The data itself was purportedly taken from air trapped in the polar ice caps.) Within that timeframe, levels varied, clearly showing ice ages and so forth. Right at the end, however, the plot climbed steeply outside the bounds of its previous levels. No doubt some statistician would be able to say something interesting about standard deviations and so forth, but I just looked at it and thought “Shit!”

So, if that’s the kick up the backside I need to take action, what can I do and will it be enough? Well, I might not be able to answer the second question, but I can answer the first. I can vote: both as a citizen living in a democratic state and as a consumer. The former is easy. The latter will take willpower — lots of it. As much as it pains me, I’m wondering whether it’s time I gave up the fast cars... :(

Hey kids! Not happy with your healthier school dinners? Here’s an idea: get your mums to go to the chippy for you! What dedication to a child’s needs! They really are super mums.

I coded something the other day that got me thinking, primarily because I wasn’t satisfied with my solution. The dialog class in which I was working needed to make some changes to a couple of its controls. I added a new private method to make those changes and then coded away.

When done, I noticed I’d coded the same thing twice in the new method: once for each control. So, being a diligent refactorisor, I factored the duplication out to another private method and just called that for each control. Now, however, I had a private method that really shouldn’t be called from anywhere but another, specific private method.

This felt bad. I didn’t want other client code to mistakenly call the second method, as it logically belonged to the first method. At least, it did in my head. The second method’s existence only really made sense in the context of the first one. What to do? The following options fluttered into my head:

• Do nothing. Just live with it and get over it.
• Revert back to having the duplication — at least that would keep it hidden from client code.
• Explain the weirdness in the second method’s header comment.
• Make the second method into a nested method inside the first one. (D’oh! Turns out C++ doesn’t support nested functions.)
• Extract a class to do the control-fiddling that the two methods achieved and make the second method a private member of that class.
• Move the two methods into a new pair of CPP & H files, putting the first method into a namespace (exposing it in the header) and the second method into the implementation file only. This is essentially the same as the previous option, but without a class, so it sucks harder.
• Something else?

I read an article by Herb Sutter that converted the whole shebang into a functor, but it just looked too damn obscure. Anyone reading the resulting code would no doubt blurt a swift “WTF?”. Overkill, for sure.

In the end, I went with the second option above. Normally, I might’ve gone with the new class option, but in this case, I needed to avoid adding new files to the project (and that’s another story). I’m still not sure I did the right thing. What approach would you have taken?

I went swimming yesterday for the first time in 15 or 16 years. It’s not how I remember it. I remember it being easy. Effortless, even. Yesterday, however, I simply splashed about in a desperate attempt to keep my head above water. Just hauling myself from one end of the pool to the other seemed to take an age. I used to be good at this stuff, dammit. Now I just ache.

With enough practice, though, I might at least regain some kind of fitness. Provided I can maintain the motivation, that is...