tlavoie

In general, sure. MirageOS is in OCaml though, where you have a memory-safe language with a small C runtime. Corrupting arbitrary memory is much less likely.

Or a house fire, or flood...

Oh I suppose. Now I'll have to go look at what's on our current cars. Haven't had a European vehicle, so can't compare with what might crop up there. I do have a colleague who's into old English cars, will have to see what he has.

Mistakes, or careless at best? I'm thinking of a couple of scenarios I've had in personal vehicles, where I'm positive the design decision was the unreviewed work of some co-op student's summer project.

Case 1: Ford Taurus wagon, my wife calls in a panic because it's blowing all hot air, and the dash is awash in lights. I get her to shut it off, wait a bit, and limp the last few km home. Turns out the serpentine belt goes around a pulley, the center bolt of which is screwed into the engine block. When the bearing started to go, there was friction, and the belt spun the bolt out and it fell off. It could have been reverse threaded, like one pedal on every bike, ever. But no. If it had, the bearing would screech, we'd get it replaced, instead of just silently falling out with potentially catastrophic consequences.

Case 2: Chevy Venture van, where the lights on the rear door all stopped working. Turned out the wiring harness for them ran through this accordion hose at the top, plugged into the bottom of a rain gutter across the top. So as soon as that hose broke its seal with the trough, the whole harness is shorted.

Funny, I have never experienced this sort of stupidity in the Toyotas and Hondas that have followed these last couple American-branded vehicles.

Oh nice, I think the city nearby uses a similar format. As for duration on volunteer depts, I wonder if the median value would be somewhat more useful as a measurement? Basically thinking that many people leave quickly, but the rest tend to stick around for quite a while.

I went the other way. Small town ambulance station was chronically short of people to keep the truck staffed, and I figured I could spend some time. Did a year of ride-alongs, took the EMR course on my own dime, and after licensing, joined for part-time on-call. It was convenient for me at the time, where I could stay at home near the hall for my shifts, and then go if paged. They did eventually move to 12-hour fully paid shifts, which is better for retaining paid medics, but less convenient for some like myself. Those 12-hour shifts at the office were certainly less fun though. Did that for ~ 6 years.

Moved three provinces over, and joined the volunteer fire department, doing FF and medical first responder calls. Back to just carrying a pager wherever I go, but otherwise largely back on my own time. If I'm available, great! If not, well, it's volunteer. It sure helped get acquainted with our new community, and met an awesome bunch of folks. It'll be 12 years for me in 2027.

Hahaha. Well, I didn't run into that issue, so it mostly "just worked" in the sense of where we had used it. I did mess around a bit with the Plone CMS that runs on top of Zope, and found it horribly slow and resource-hungry for the time. Someone must like it, it's still getting releases in 2026.

I was more traumatized by the Java-based product from Open Market (acquired from Future Tense back in the day), and all the horribleness that that entailed. Starting from XML as a template language, then seemed to get only worse. Nothing like having multiple content areas all rendered as 500 Server Error pages within one page, when it all goes sideways.

I think it still exists, even! It has been a long time since I used it though, but it was interesting.

Pickle is likely still handy, as long as you created the data that you're deserializing. Zope's object database was a big pickle file, as I recall. But yeah, not a good idea if you're cracking open user-supplied files in any way.

Well, they're pollinating _flowers_. You don't eat those, I'm sure any traces of manure are long gone by the time there are fruit ready to pick.

Try an app called Merlin, from Cornell University. It's excellent, and basically runs against a regional machine learning model to identify birds.

TWO! Mine's cobalt as well. My wife picked it out when I'd lost my original gold ring (temporarily, cough). Besides looking interesting, apparently it was much less expensive than gold is these days.

Does the water end up including some of the colloidal silver? As it happens, there is someone living in my area who has taken colloidal silver in some fashion for ages, with the side effect of turning the skin a ghastly grey hue. I can't say how they're doing for infections and related illness, other than that they probably also have fewer in-person interactions with other people.

My fire hall has spray-paint lines to align the rear wheels with in the mirror, including a short cross-line at the stopping point when backing in. Works great!