Here in Finland we have shelters on every bigger building, required by the law, and there should be enough room for everyone to be in a relatively safe space within few days if needed. In practise a lot of those are not in the shape they should be (full of stuff, without verifiably functional facilities for water/air/sewer/so on, but the hardware is there, it just lacks maintenance due to funding or whatever.

So, give us a week or two to get ready and after that there’s a reasonably strong bunkers for every civilian to hide in for at least some time and if the society is still even remotely functional they can receive more food and resources. On the face value it’s pretty simple. For every big enough apartment complex or any other building holding enough people you need to build a cellar or similar with necessary infrastructure and when the bomb shelter isn’t needed you can fill them with storage units for residents and things like that. Everything inside just has to be built lightly enough that you can clear the space in pretty short notice.

As Ukraine will eventually rebuild a crapload of infrastructure and buildings something similar might not be a bad idea. And it doesn’t cost Finland practically anything, we just need to share knowledge on how we did things and maybe how it could be improved. Maybe some Finnish construction companies could even make a few euros on building these things.

At least to me this is a no brainer, there’s no losers on a deal like this. Civilian people are better protected in the end and it just requires sharing knowledge and experience, which doesn’t really have any monetary value or political leverage. Maybe Ukraine can chip in with a bed, few warm meals and few cold beers for the experts on this field to travel and share their knowledge, but that’s about it.

And Finnish version. Also available in English.

I think it was some XMPP related server I ran quite a few years ago which had ‘i_have_read_the_manual = 0’ or something similar buried into default configuration file. And it would just silently exit if that variable was not set properly.

Maybe we need more things like that.

Don’t know what Elmos minions are doing, but I’ve written code at least equally unefficient. It was quite a few years ago (the code was in written in perl) and I at least want to think that I’m better now (but I’m not paid to code anymore). The task was to pull in data from a CSV (or something like that, as I mentioned, it’s been a while) and it needed conversion to XML (or something similar).

The idea behind my code was that you could just configure which fields you want from arbitary source data and on where to place them on the whatever supported destination format. I still think that the basic idea behind that project is pretty neat, just throw in whatever you happen to have and have something completely else out of the other end. And it worked as it should. It was just stupidly hungry for memory. 20k entries would eat up several gigabytes of memory from a workstation (and back then it was premium to have even 16G around) and it was also freaking slow to run (like 0.2 - 0.5 seconds per entry).

But even then I didn’t need to tweet that my hard drive is overheating. I well understood that my code is just bad and I even improved it a bit here and there, but it was still so very slow and used ridiculous amounts of RAM. The project was pretty neat and when you had few hundred items to process at a time it was even pretty good, there was companies who relied on that code and paid for support. It just totally broke down with even a slightly bigger datasets.

But, as I already mentioned, my hard drive didn’t overheat on that load.

And don’t you dare to forget wear a very nice suit and say thank you to everyone you see.