Very nice interactive graphic from Bloomberg (h/t to Daring Fireball). Gruber is right, sort by wins…
Author: fish1964
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Saving $14 Million a Year
With lightbulbs. 250,000 of them. NYC will switch to LED bulbs entirely by 2017. Sure, that’s a lot of light bulbs, but $14 million a year? Wow.
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Obamacare Site Source Code Has Non HIPPA Compliant Comments
Oh the horror.
Truthfully I don’t even know what that title means. Comments in code cannot be HIPPA compliant or not, because they don’t do anything.
As a developer, perhaps I should explain. Software code is often complex. Developers can add “comments” to the code. This is just text that no one sees except the next developer trying to figure out what the code does. It doesn’t appear to the user, it’s not even part of the system at all. It’s the developer equivalent of a sticky note to remember to pick up the laundry.
Different languages have different syntax to indicate a comment. I code mainly in C#. You can put // at the beginning of a line which means the whole line is a comment. Or you can put /* somewhere and everything in the code until */ is a comment (good for really long, multiline comments.
But it’s not always explanatory comments. Sometimes you have a chunk of code, maybe you copied it from somewhere else, and you realize that part of it isn’t applicable. Or maybe you aren’t sure if it’s applicable. So you don’t delete it, you comment it out. Same thing, at that point it’s just not part of the system anymore.
In HTML (basic web site) code, comments always use the code block approach (like /* … */ above). For HTML the syntax is <!– to start the comment and -–> to end it.
This is the chunk of code that Rep. Joe Barton (R – Tex.) went ballistic over in the house hearings today. The highlighted part in line 1408 is what he objected to (click to zoom). But note the beginning of line 1406 and the end of line 1411. This is a comment block. It was probably boilerplate code used on many sites that the developer commented out. Honestly, I have no clue what it was, but it’s not part of the actual system.
Can we officially state that folks in Congress have no business discussing computer source code?
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Geek Humor
Courtesy of Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal.
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Hat Trick Sunday, Game Winner Tuesday
Our nephew, Matt Garcia, is on a roll. We saw his hat trick Sunday (against an admittedly not great team). Today he had a much more challenging away game against a good team.
It was tied 1-1 after regulation. Still tied after the first overtime.
He had a similar free kick goal last Sunday. It’s Division III, but I think he’s leading the conference in scoring.
Fun stuff…
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Beautiful Hudson
My wife and I did a weekend away from the kids as a belated anniversary trip. We stayed at a cute B&B in Stone Ridge NY. We wanted to do some hiking but my wife is rehabbing from minor knee surgery so we needed something not too rugged.
The owner of the B&B suggested the Walkway over the Hudson. I didn’t know about this, but apparently they took an old rail bridge across the Hudson River and converted it to a pedestrian bridge.
It’s gorgeous.
The leaves were changing and it was a beautiful day.
This is the bridge itself (those are friends of ours who joined us):
And these are the views:
The girls stayed with my wife’s sister, who lives fairly close to this. On the way home we got to see our nephew play soccer for Mount Saint Mary College and he had a hat trick in a rout.
A great weekend…
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One Billion…
kilometers. Really more like 1.6 billion. That would be the distance from earth.
Click on the picture to see the real resolution (10x bigger).
Think about it. We took a picture, not of something over a billion kilometers away, but from over a billion kilometers away.
Holy crap, that’s awesome.
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Oregon Cuts Uninsured By 10%
In two weeks.
We don’t need no stinkin’ web site…
Though Oregon’s health insurance exchange is not yet up and running, the number of uninsured is already dropping thanks to new fast-track enrollment for the Oregon Health Plan.
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Default is Good?
Most people seem shocked that people would even threaten that the US default, because it’s so unthinkable. But other folks have been thinking about default for a while now and not in terms of it being horrible.
As always, I think it’s important to be reading all sides of a debate, even (especially?) the side you disagree with.
So in that vein, a reading list:
There Is Life after Default (that’s how they capitalized it, draw your own conclusions)
The Looming Federal Default: Sooner or Later?
Niall Ferguson: America Needs to Cancel Its Debt
(side note, there’s been a funny Eco-blog-slamming between Ferguson and everyone else lately)
America’s default on its debt is inevitable
The other side?
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Obamacare Rate Shock
The Incidental Economist is a health care focused blog, frankly often over my head in the health care arena.
This post talked about costs on the Indiana heath exchange. The main point:
Let me say that again: The most expensive plan I could find for a family like mine on the Indiana Health Insurance Exchange is less expensive than the average employer sponsored health insurance plan in the US.
Steve Fischer's Random Blog 