British Airways Flight 5390
His feet got caught in the flight controls, jamming the stick forward, turning off the autopilot, and forcing the plane into a dive and the sudden decompression pulled the cockpit door off it's hinges and onto the throttle controls so the copilot had no way of controlling the plane. Also the noise of the 550mph wind made it impossible to radio for help.
A flight attendant saw the captain hanging out the window and grabbed his legs. Eventually they got the debris off the controls and untangled his legs and the copilot brought the plane down to 12000 feet where they could breath but he cautioned the attendant to continue to hold on to the captain's legs because he didn't want him to release the body and have to fly into an engine.
At the lower altitude captains body slide down over the side and his face was smacking into the side windows leaving a smear of blood over everything.
The attendant holding his legs eventually had to switch places with another because all the skin on his arm was burned off from the cold and high wind shear. They flew another 30 minutes before the copilot could land the plane.
When they reached the ground they discovered the captain was somehow still alive.
You can skip through a terrible re-enacted documentary here (or here). Some of these pictures are re-created and some are real.
Beyond the Infinite Two Minutes
I can recommend this Japanese movie by Junta Yamaguchi. It's about a man who lives above a small cafe and discovers a computer monitor in his room and the monitor in the cafe downstairs are connected like a video call except the one upstairs shows events from 2 minutes in the future and the one downstairs shows 2 minutes in the past. He spends some time running up and down the stairs asking and answering his own questions and then his friends come over and one has the bright idea to point the monitors at each other. This generates an infinite number of images extending farther into the future and hijinks ensue.
I dislike most time travel movies but unlike every other dystopic plot this one keeps it lighthearted and didn't leave me feeling irritated.
Also the entire movie is filmed in a single shot.
dotfiles
I posted about my version controlled dotfiles setup before but the scripts I used have evolved and I was going to rebuild the repo to host it on this site anyway. The main difference is I now use a python script instead of bash to pull dotfiles into the repository. The code also has a command line argument that could be used to re-configure a system with the given dotfiles but I wouldn't recommend using it because it's under tested. When setting up a new system I generally like to do things manually so I can see exactly what has changed.
Unemployed
Now that that pesky gainful employment is over I can get back to the important things, working on the back end of a website which no one reads. I was let go along with hundreds of other engineers during an 'internal restructuring' and have decided to catch up on my neglected personal projects while I live from my savings for a while.
The static document generation scripts had grown over the years into a gnarled tangle of redundant functionality. It was often easier to just write a new implementation to get something done than to try to refactor what was there. Also I've been running this website for more than a decade and my python has gotten better. As a programmer it was irritating to see:
measured_response = 'hey {} you'.format(explicitive)
Rather than:
measured_response = f'hey {explicitive} you'
It was even worse to see both implementations living side by side. I wanted to remove the old code.
I use static generation for several bits of this site:
- single page documents
- double page documents (which has their own template with a table of contents and sidebar)
- recipes
- pictures
Each involved running a different script that used it's own particular method to index images, generate thumbnails, and render the markup into html.
I added yet another way of doing things when I wrote the routines behind the recipe generation. The recipe static generation scripts were written with hash files which meant I could just type
build_recipes
and it would use the existing hash files to determine if any file had to be updated. Because checking a few hashes on every directory is practically instantaneous, I could automatically discover documents that needed to be re-rendered from markup to html.
I wanted the same quick feedback for 'build_docs' and 'build_pics'. Building pictures was almost there but building the two flavors of documents was a painfully manual process.
So a couple weeks ago I started to consolidate and rewrite the static generation scripts. This involved rewriting some of the content to make everything consistent. There are only 8 different static documents but these contain 21000 files. As the static scripts matured over the years I added features like a table of contents file which let me have non-alphabetically incrementing chapters and this had to be bolted on to the older documents.
I used a lot of hash files because they were easy and fast:
def write_hash(filepath):
''' Update the hashfile for the given rest file
'''
hashpath = filepath.parent/f'.{filepath.stem}.hash'
hashpath.write_text(get_hash(filepath))
def get_hash(filepath):
''' Return the hash string for a given file
'''
contents = filepath.read_bytes()
m = hashlib.sha256()
m.update(contents)
return m.hexdigest()
def hash_changed(filepath):
''' Uses a hash file to determine if the rst file has changed.
Returns a bool
'''
hashpath = filepath.parent/f'.{filepath.stem}.hash'
if not hashpath.exists():
print(f"{hashpath} doesn't exist!")
return True
current_hash = get_hash(filepath)
if current_hash != hashpath.read_text():
print(f"{filepath} hash differs from cached version")
return True
return False
With these generic functions I could hash the markup file, the table of contents, the 'resize' file used to indicate what size I want my thumbnails, and I even developed a super fast media file hash routine that could generate a hash from all the media in a directory. This function could process 1GB of media in 0.5sec but with 6GB of media it was too slow to run often.
The document generation routines used to require an argument indicating which document to update but now with these changes I can type: 'build_docs', 'build_recipes', or 'build_pics' and it will rebuild things as necessary.
But you can see the final result and all the work that led up to this for yourself here.. I'm happy to report the latest gitea works much better than the previous version (which required manually poking the database to get it to show my changes) and I will be hosting more of my git projects here as I go through them.
If you see broken links on any of the document pages let me know.
The infrequently updated blog.