The Musings of the Kat

Posted by Kat Crichton Sun, 20 Aug 2006 18:47:00 GMT

It's hard work breaking in new recruits. I've had a sore throat all week from trying to justify our existing code-base and customer relationships.

As hoped, the new blood is having an almost immediate positive effect. Irritations that had faded into background noise have been brought to the fore.

Someone without the tarnish of several years on the frontline can much easier see the atrocities that are committed in the name of Truth, Justice and the Extreme Way. Not that any blame should be attributed to XP - just to our slow deviation from the path of the righteous.

Posted by Kat Crichton Mon, 14 Aug 2006 18:27:00 GMT

Son of a bitch! Gave him an 800 quid deposit (doh!) for a shed and he disappears without a trace. Apparently moved out of his house with no forwarding address. He sold his workshop and pickup truck to Dave of Wooden Buildings, who has quoted twice as much to do the same job.

If I had any idea where to serve notice, I'd small-claims his ass, but frankly for the sake of £800, it's hardly worth the effort as he'd probably just go bankrupt anyway.

You may infer from the above that this is not the first time I've been Royalled. However, previously it was my employer (Ian Powely) who did the dirty deed. Not before getting me to design the new corporate logo for the pheonixlike company that arose from the ashes.

I blame the parents - and the government - and anyone else who gets in the way!

Posted by Kat Crichton Sun, 13 Aug 2006 17:45:00 GMT

Bought a black Nintendo DS Lite along with Dr. Kawashima's Brain Training and New Super Mario Bros. The idea was to get Penny into playing video games - she'd shown some interest in Brain Training.

It's a lovely unit, nice bright screens (about twice as bright as the old DS), though it didn't come with the strap and thumb stylus that came with the original. It's black and shiny like the PSP, but the build quality is nothing like as good.

New Super Mario Bros. is pretty much the same as the SNES Super Mario Brothers. The only new features are Giant and Tiny power-ups that make Mario about the same height as the screen or half the size of normal Mario respectively. The tiny power-up allows Mario to fit through small holes and reach otherwise inaccessible areas.

Dr. Kawashima is quite a phenomenon, breaking the usual mould for best selling games. I have already noticed an improvement in my mental arithmetic and it is particularly enjoyable playing with more than one user, as your daily efforts are comparable with your friends'/family's.

The DS is a great toy and I've spent a lot of this weekend playing Mario.

Posted by Kat Crichton Thu, 22 Jun 2006 15:17:00 GMT

My attempt at making a brick barbecue may not look too neat - I was using old bricks and breezeblocks from the back of the garden, but it's pretty solid.

I'm about half way through, as I grossly underestimated the ammount of mortar it takes to stick a bunch of bricks together. I've popped to B&Q today for the next load of sand. It's surprisingly satisfying to actually make something big and solid like that.

Posted by Kat Crichton Wed, 21 Jun 2006 11:58:00 GMT

I've decided not to put it off any longer. I've finally had enough of Windows. It's time for the big switch from my increasingly sluggish Windows XP machine to Linux.

I've had more Linux than Windows machines at home for ages, but have never really had the guts to use it as a regular desktop PC.

I'm pretty sure the transfer will leave me with a more stable working environment and I'm very sure that Microsoft don't really deserve my hard earned Sterling for the DRM/Spyware ridden Vista.

I'll probably still use Windoze for games until I can persuade Wine to play them, but for everything else, there's a viable Linux alternative.

So far, I've migrated my office documents, email (including GPG), contacts, calendars, instant messaging. I'm now working on getting my iPod working properly (it's already looking like I'll be able to sync my contacts and calendar easier than before).

I feel better already!

Posted by Kat Crichton Tue, 06 Jun 2006 11:47:00 GMT

Our XP team is distinctly low on developers at the moment. We're down to five from twelve earlier in the year. The backlog of stories is constantly growing as the team just doesn't have the bandwidth. The extra pressure may be partly responsible for pushing good people out of the company.

It seems that any team looses motivation without a transfusion of new blood, even though years of team experience should create a much more capable entity.

The remaining developers have all been with the company for 5+ years which creates a more cynical atmosphere than usual. New blood brings with it enthusiasm untainted by previous business mistakes, which blends well with experience gained by learning from those mistakes.

The small team size also means that we don't have variety of skills and enthusiasm. Specific jobs cannot be handled by people with a preference for that type of work, so boredom sets in.

The good news is that we're recruiting heavily now and will hopefully soon have some of the necessary claret. It's up to us to make the team successful again.

Posted by Kat Crichton Tue, 06 Jun 2006 11:42:55 GMT

Discovered that XMAME now has a parameter -grabkeyboard that fixes the problem in my last post.

When XMAME runs from MythTV, it grabs the keyboard focus, instead of leaving it on the paused MythTV interface... Hooray, I can play OutFoxies again!

Posted by Kat Crichton Tue, 16 May 2006 18:56:00 GMT

Well, I've managed to get MythTV working fine with Fedora Core 5. XMAME isn't quite working in conjunction with it, because of a feature of the last version of Metacity window manager that caused the fullscreen window to not have keyboard focus. I think this is reverted in version 2.14.3 which I'm downloading right now.

Haven't yet got an iTunes server running on the box. I've read about the Multi-Threaded DAAP Daemon which seems to be a better DAAP server than the one I recommended previously. I'll update my little tutorial if I start using that instead.

Fedora Core 5 seems to be pretty good. Not 100% sure about the new bubbly look, but if it continues to offend my sensibilities I really should try and create my own desktop skin. Mind you most of the time it sits quietly behind MythTV, so It's not such a big deal.

Posted by Kat Crichton Thu, 20 Apr 2006 11:20:00 GMT

Easter Sunday started with a power cut. Unfortunately it wasn't as clean cut as that sounds - it was more a prolonged power dwindle. The lights flickered at about half voltage as I ran around the house switching off the all the computers.

The fault appeared to be just outside our neighbours' house and took most of the day for the electric company to fix. As usual we spent the time playing board games and enjoying the enforced low-tech entertainment.

The pain occurred when the power came back on (no not through electrocution). I found that my MythTV box (recently upgraded to Fedora Core 5) wouldn't boot. The fluctuating electrical supply seems to have managed to strategically uninstall large chunks of Linux. Most of Gnome desktop was missing along with the login screen and many of the installed packages.

I guess the JFS spotted the problems on the first boot and tidied itself up, as there don't appear to be any disk problems - just missing files!

Anyway, I think it's going to be easier to reinstall from scratch than to try and work out which files are missing from each installed package.

I guess that's my next weekend planned out then :(

Posted by Kat Crichton Sat, 15 Apr 2006 05:01:00 GMT

Okay, now I've done the sensible thing and put Rails into the vendor folder - after a couple of weeks of no site.

That should stop any further problems occuring thanks to my hosting company upgrading (as they should) to the latest version.

Mind you, the latest version includes the capacity to Freeze to a specific version, which should stop this sort of thing happening again.