Odd Lots

[jeff_duntemann]

• Here's a nice rant about something that's always bothered me: that programming is more difficult than it has to be, that programmers revel in its difficulty, and ceaselessly ridicule tools and languages that make it easier. The ranter lists COBOL, Hypercard, and Visual Basic as examples, but even he seems afraid to mention Pascal (much less Delphi or Lazarus) which looked like it might once have driven C into the sea. I admit I don't understand the constant emphasis on Web apps. Conventional desktop and mobile apps are still useful and far less fiddly.
• Speaking of Lazarus, TurboPower's stellar Orpheus component suite has been (partly) ported to Lazarus.
• AV software vendor Avast pulled an interesting stunt: They bought 20 smartphones on eBay and then used readily available recovery software to pull off 40,000 supposedly deleted photos, including 750 of women in various stages of undress. That, plus emails, texts, GPS logs, and loads of other stuff. I've always treated my old phones to a speed date with a sledgehammer. Someday I'm thinking my Droid X2 will go on the same date.
• Ahh, now global warming causes kidney stones. Two Snapple bottled iced teas a day for a year or two just might have had something to do with mine. (Thanks to Frank Glover for the link.)
• And while I was poking around io9, I stumbled across a piece I missed back in February. If you get 25% of your daily calories from sugar, you triple your risk of dying from heart disease. Again I say unto you: Fat makes you thin. Sugar makes you dead.
• Although not a gamer, I give points to a small Canadian game developer Studio MDHR who are creating Cuphead, a game series consisting of cel-animated action in the style of a 1930s Max Fleischer cartoon. These cartoons were played on TV endlessly when I was a 7-year-old, and they were often creepy as hell. (See "Bimbo's Initiation," "Swing, You Sinners," and Fleischer's surreal riff on "Snow White," especially once the action enters the Mystery Cave.)
• I generally don't watch online videos, particularly of a talking head lecturing. I can read a great deal faster than I can listen to people talk, and watching informational videos is therefore a bad use of my time. Here's an interesting example. Don't bother with the video, but read the comments. A guy summarizes the whole damned thing as a list that I read in seconds. So who needs the video?
• Megan McArdle stops short of making the point in her essay on Uber "surge pricing," but legislative attacks on surge pricing are thinly disguised protection for the medallion cab industry.
• Relevant to the above: The last time Carol and I took a cab, the chatterbox cabbie said he was going to look into Uber, not only to make more money but also to control his own schedule. (Uber just recently expanded to Colorado Springs.)
• New York police chase a hobby RC helicopter (and that is precisely what it was; this "drone" thing is loaded language intended to demonize RC aircraft) endangering themselves, their aircraft, and people on the ground. Governments are terrified of being filmed. That's it. That's all you need to know about "drones."