Go Static Typing 'Magic'

As I understand Go more, some of the concepts tend to make my head hurt. Sometimes, innocent examples in various tutorials hide such deep concepts, that it takes a while for me to decode it all.

Here is an example. In various tutorials, pauses are made using time.Sleep().

The first time I saw an example like the following, it made me stop in my tracks.

package main

import (
	"time"
)

func main() {
	time.Sleep(100 * time.Millisecond)
}

Troubles With Hugo as Well

Hugo

I have been using Hugo as a static website generator for a while. I love the speed, coming from its Go origins. I love a static website generator for the peace-of-mind it gives me (No did I forget to update my XXX blog software after that bug came out? ).

But of course, it is not all peachy.

The Borg design pattern

How to have shared state between different instance of a class without a singleton pattern.

The ‘Singleton’ DP is all about ensuring that just one instance of a certain class is ever created. It has a catchy name and is thus enormously popular, but it’s NOT a good idea – it displays different sorts of problems in different object-models. What we should really WANT, typically, is to let as many instances be created as necessary, BUT all with shared state. Who cares about identity – it’s state (and behavior) we care about!

By Alex Martelli at Singleton? We Don’t Need No Stinkin’ Singleton: The Borg Design Pattern.

Using Python to update a required field while performing a transition in Jira

'Gojira!' by donsolo

This might be a very esoteric topic for most people, but since I could not find information about this anywhere, I decided to document this in a post.

Here is the problem. I use Jira at work, and today, I needed to close a bunch of tickets based on a search result. Now, searching or doing batch operations is simple enough from the browser, but a small detail made the exercise impossible via the web UI.

German cycle superhighway opens its first stretch

The first 5km of a 100km cycle only superhighway has opened to public in Germany. When complete, the route will connect 10 western cities including Duisburg, Bochum, and Hamm, and four universities. Martin Toennes of regional development group RVR says almost two million people live within 1.2 miles of the bicycle highway and will be able to use sections of it for their daily commutes. With the rise in popularity of electric bicycles to help with undulating terrain, RVR says the bike way, which utilizes mostly abandoned railroad tracks in the Ruhr Valley, could replace up to 50,000 motor vehicles during daily commuting hours.

Using your gut microbes to find the perfect diet

Cave Man Paleo breakfast. Photo by Katherine Lim
Image credit: [Flickr](https://www.flickr.com/photos/ultrakml/15315629849/)

It seems every generation has its own bouquet of diets that people swear by.

In the early 80s, diet guru Nathan Pritikin believed that we should shun all fats and food containing cholesterol. He died of leukemia in ’85, but apparently his autopsy revealed that he had “arteries like those of a child and a heart like that of a young man”.

His arch rival in the time, Robert Atkins, of the Atkin’s Diet fame, espoused just the opposite - low-carb, high fat diets. His controversial death threw up allegations of a life long history of cardiac issues and obesity. But still there are people around who swear about it.

Loads of new diets have sprung up in recent years, with a loud number of them blaming carbs, sugar, starches and other GI (glycaemic index) manipulating food groups to be the cause of diet issues in the population.

Now a new article goes a bit deeper. It follows the published “study from an Israeli team led by Eran Segal”, to suggest that looking at all carbs the same way and avoiding them is too simplistic an approach. Human body is too complex and different sources of carbs affect different people in different ways. One of the major reason that they pointed out was the difference in the profile of the microbes in our digestive system!