September 02, 2017 at 09:24PM

Today I learned: 1) I'm a big fan of the Chipotle* system of food service. For those not in The Know, I'm talking about restaurants where you build a food from a bar of ingredients, and then get it cooked super-quickly. One cool thing about the system is that it works for a lot of different foods: Chipotle makes burritos; Subway makes sandwiches; Blaze makes pizzas; any number of Mongolian barbeques make... some sort of unholy American seared-noodle thing. So... what food *hasn't* been made with the Chipotle system that should be? Until today, my answer was "pasta" (and no, Mongolian barbeque doesn't count). Today I learned that there's a restaurant called Noodles and Company that's basically the Chipotle of pastas. It's not *exactly* the same model, because they don't have the bar of toppings to choose from explicitly. It's more that they have a bunch of pre-arranged selections of pastas that you can customize heavily. Still, it's close enough to the Chipotle system that I'm counting it. *Really it's the Subway system, but I'll eat Chipotle over Subway any day, so for the purposes of this series of posts, it's the Chiptle system. 2) ...how the sliding doors work in the Ikea PAX system of wardrobes. It's pretty simple, all in all, but there are a lot of ways you can misassemble it. In particular, there are two rails on the top and two rails on the bottom, one for each of two sliding doors. If you hang either end of either door onto the wrong rail of either the top or bottom, you get some nasty physical conflicts. Also, importantly, the screws on the PAX doors tend to come loose over time. If you have a PAX wardrobe, make sure to check the screws on the back of the doors every couple months. If a screw loosens too much on the outer door, it can get the whole door stuck so that the doors can't come apart, leaving you with a one-door PAX wardrobe. 3) Early computers used to break a lot. For some reason, discrete components (transistors, resistors, capacitors) are a lot more failure-prone than integrated circuits (anybody know why?), so computers built out of discrete components (all of the early ones) were a lot more breakage-prone. Accordingly, debugging used to be a lot of tracing out circuit diagrams and figuring out what components would produce the bug if broken. I count this as a "fact" particularly because it's really antithetical to all of my programming instincts -- in my experience, if you run into a bug, it's because you made a mistake. No, the interpreter is not mis-reading your bytecode. No, your compiler doesn't have a bug. No, your processor *definitely* isn't broken (unless it's a Pentium P5 800 nm 5V or a Pentium P54C 600 nm 3.3V -- http://ift.tt/1LvPh8u). You made a mistake, and you have to find and fix it. But that wasn't always true. #todayilearnedToday I learned: 1) I'm a big fan of the Chipotle* system of food service. For those not in The Know, I'm talking about restaurants where you build a food from a bar of ingredients, and then get it cooked super-quickly. One cool thing about the system is that it works for a lot of different foods: Chipotle makes burritos; Subway makes sandwiches; Blaze makes pizzas; any number of Mongolian barbeques make... some sort of unholy American seared-noodle thing. So... what food *hasn't* been made with the Chipotle system that should be? Until today, my answer was "pasta" (and no, Mongolian barbeque doesn't count). Today I learned that there's a restaurant called Noodles and Company that's basically the Chipotle of pastas. It's not *exactly* the same model, because they don't have the bar of toppings to choose from explicitly. It's more that they have a bunch of pre-arranged selections of pastas that you can customize heavily. Still, it's close enough to the Chipotle system that I'm counting it. *Really it's the Subway system, but I'll eat Chipotle over Subway any day, so for the purposes of this series of posts, it's the Chiptle system. 2) ...how the sliding doors work in the Ikea PAX system of wardrobes. It's pretty simple, all in all, but there are a lot of ways you can misassemble it. In particular, there are two rails on the top and two rails on the bottom, one for each of two sliding doors. If you hang either end of either door onto the wrong rail of either the top or bottom, you get some nasty physical conflicts. Also, importantly, the screws on the PAX doors tend to come loose over time. If you have a PAX wardrobe, make sure to check the screws on the back of the doors every couple months. If a screw loosens too much on the outer door, it can get the whole door stuck so that the doors can't come apart, leaving you with a one-door PAX wardrobe. 3) Early computers used to break a lot. For some reason, discrete components (transistors, resistors, capacitors) are a lot more failure-prone than integrated circuits (anybody know why?), so computers built out of discrete components (all of the early ones) were a lot more breakage-prone. Accordingly, debugging used to be a lot of tracing out circuit diagrams and figuring out what components would produce the bug if broken. I count this as a "fact" particularly because it's really antithetical to all of my programming instincts -- in my experience, if you run into a bug, it's because you made a mistake. No, the interpreter is not mis-reading your bytecode. No, your compiler doesn't have a bug. No, your processor *definitely* isn't broken (unless it's a Pentium P5 800 nm 5V or a Pentium P54C 600 nm 3.3V -- http://ift.tt/1LvPh8u). You made a mistake, and you have to find and fix it. But that wasn't always true.