C++: the good parts

JavaScript hashes that inherit from a parent

For a JavaScript program I’m working on, I want to have hashes that can inherit values from a parent. Specifically, I have many widgets, each with a (usually small) hash of configuration parameters; when I access such a parameter and it’s not defined in the widget I want to get the value from the configuration of the team that the widget belongs to; and when that’s not defined I want it to get the value from the global configuration.

Seriously: shop around for your car insurance

The insurance renewal for our main car (a 2005 Saab 9-5 estate) came through yesterday. I was about to pick up the phone and renew when I was struck that the premium seemed higher than I expected — £823.62 for the year (plus the extra 10% they charge you for paying monthly instead of up front). Sure enough, when I checked last year’s renewal, I found it had been only £569.22. So they’d tried to slip a 45% increase past us.

The insurance company in question, in case you want to know to avoid them, was Direct Line.

The Once and Future King on compromise and disillusionment in middle age

This is from T. H. White’s absolutely brilliant book The Once and Future King — Book III (The Ill-made Knight), chapter XII (page 374 in my edition):

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There is a thing called knowledge of the world, which people do not have until they are middle-aged. It is something which cannot be taught to younger people, because it is not logical and does not obey laws which are constant. It has no rules. Only, in the long years which bring women to the middle of life, a sense of balance develops. You can’t teach a baby to walk by explaining the matter to her logically — she has to learn the strange poise of walking by experience. In some way like that, you cannot teach a young woman to have knowledge of the world. She has to be left to the experience of the years.