Letter to my MP: using starvation as a weapon

Dear Ben Spencer,

The behaviour of Hamas on 7th October and afterwards is inexcusable, and is rightly condemned by our government.

I believe that the ongoing behaviour of the Israeli government in response to these attacks is inexcusable, and should be condemned in the strongest terms.

Human Rights Watch reports:

* Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said on October 19 that Israel would not allow humanitarian assistance “in the form of food and medicines” into Gaza through its crossings “as long as our hostages are not returned.”

* What’s been happening on the ground, backed by such top-level statements from Israeli leaders, is “reflecting an intent to starve civilians as a method of warfare”.

* Israel’s continuing blockade of Gaza, not to mention its illegal closure of Gaza for more than 16 years, amounts to collective punishment of the civilian population.

* The government of Israel needs to immediately stop weaponizing starvation, and concerned governments should call on Israel to do so.

(Reference: https://www.hrw.org/the-day-in-human-rights/2023/12/18?story=paragraph-7339 )

Please urge our government to condemn these actions, and work for a lasting peace.

Yours sincerely,

Andy Balaam

(Feel free to re-use my wording in similar letters.)

Santa Circles 0.3 is out!

Santa Circles 0.3 is all new and shiny!

"Organise circle" Circle Name: Alice's Party Draw Date: 15th November 2023 Rules: Spend no more than £10

santacircles.artificialworlds.net

(It’s a secret-santa-style gift exchange web site.)

Don’t worry, it looks exactly how it did last year, except there is a tiny “Forgot password?” link you can click if you need it.

It also has some useful new abilities for people organising circles: the ability to copy an old circle, and visibility of who has made a wishlist (and who needs nagging).

There’s still zero JavaScript, and it’s all very FOSS and self-hostable.

The code is at:

gitlab.com/andybalaam/santa-circles and gitlab.com/andybalaam/santa-circles-api

Rust 101 – 6: Structs and Enums

Continuing our review of the things you need in Rust to write programs – grouping together data using structs, and allowing multiple possibilities with enums. We look at how to decide which thing you’ve got with the match keyword, and review a very popular enum called Option, which lets you say either you’ve got something, or you’ve got nothing.

Series: 1: Intro, 2: Language basics, 3: Memory and ownership, 4: Exercises A1, 5: References, 6: Structs and Enums, 7: Panic and Result, 8: Methods, 9: Vec and Box, 10: Strings, 11: Exercises A2, 12: Traits, 13: Type params, 14: std Traits, 15: Lifetimes, 16: Exercises A3pt1, 17: Exercises A3pt2, 18: Dependencies, 19: API design, 20: Tests

Links:

The course materials for this series are developed by tweede golf. You can find more information at github.com/tweedegolf/101-rs and you can sponsor the work at github.com/sponsors/tweedegolf. They are released under the Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike 4.0 International license.

This series of videos is copyright 2023 Andy Balaam and the tweede golf contributors and is released under the Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike 4.0 International license.

Rust 101 – 5: References

Starting some more advanced Rust programming ideas by looking at references – the ability to “borrow” values and refer to them without taking ownership. We look at mutable and immutable references, and the rules about references that prevent us ever having an “invalid” reference that points at something that has been dropped or changed.

Series: 1: Intro, 2: Language basics, 3: Memory and ownership, 4: Exercises A1, 5: References, 6: Structs and Enums, 7: Panic and Result, 8: Methods, 9: Vec and Box, 10: Strings, 11: Exercises A2, 12: Traits, 13: Type params, 14: std Traits, 15: Lifetimes, 16: Exercises A3pt1, 17: Exercises A3pt2, 18: Dependencies, 19: API design, 20: Tests

Links:

The course materials for this series are developed by tweede golf. You can find more information at github.com/tweedegolf/101-rs and you can sponsor the work at github.com/sponsors/tweedegolf. They are released under the Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike 4.0 International license.

This series of videos is copyright 2023 Andy Balaam and the tweede golf contributors and is released under the Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike 4.0 International license.