It's not quite yet hot enough, only 89 degrees.

Tomorrow we should hit 95.

On today's ride I reviewed the idea of code-I-hate but have to live with. I have two pieces of code like that that I'm immersed in.

One bit is mainresponder.respond. Written in 1999, it was meant to be the end-all of HTTP responders. It handles membership, cookies, per-user data storage, hierarchic attributes, virtual domains, etc. It's the kitchen-sink responder. Because it does so much we always use it.

Finally last week I decided there was something wrong with this ancient piece of code. I've known it was wrong for a long time, but I never got around to fixing it. At first I tried to add the new bit in a philosophically compatible way. That meant using the coding conventiones we used in 1999. Problem is, those are no longer the state of the art. (I typed state of the arrrgh.)

After living with the old style for a while, and chasing bugs I should never have to chase, I decided hell-with-it, and coded it all the new way. So if you encounter a callback that works differently than all the rest, that's why.

The other ancient bit of code is html.directory. It's the low-level code underneath the directory feature in Manila, also circa 1999. This code has been worked on, special-cased, had things tacked onto it, over and over. Some of the ideas were, with the benefit of hindsight, perfectly awful. The code is still there.

There's a whole caching sub-system that I put there myself that I forgot was there until I went looking for it earlier today. I hadn't wanted to look. It was very nicely coded, however, there was a whole other caching system two levels up that did the same thing, but better. One of them is going.

Bike riding helps me appreciate all aspects of all of it. Old and new. (Borrowed and blue.)

Today's map: 59 minutes, 10.76 miles.

Note: It might seem that I've become a much more productive rider. Not so. I found a setting on Cyclemeter that has it notice periods when I'm not moving, and it doesn't count that in the time. So I've always been a bit faster than it seemed. And I take more rest stops that you might guess. You can see on the map that my average speed is much steadier at about 11.5 mph on the trail and not quite 10 mph on city streets.

 6/7/2011; 6:27:19 PM.   .