The Musings of the Kat

Fedora 12 RPM Fusion Smart Channels

2010-02-09T16:01:00+00:00

I still prefer the usability of Smart Package Manager over Fedora's default package management programs, so here are my Fedora 12 RPM Fusion channels for Smart Package Manager.

rpmfusion-smart-channels-fedora-12.tar.gz

Comments vs Readable Code

2009-12-29T16:51:00+00:00

There is a widely contested mantra of Extreme Programming that says that comments are superfluous. Inaccurate and often out-of-date meta-information just makes your self-describing code and accompanying tests harder to read and understand.

However the opposite can seem to be true; how often do we try to decipher unpleasant code that has no comments because the mantra said that they were “evil”? It is dogma that leads to this problem.

It is important to remember that “no comments” is mantra not dogma.

Dogma is authoritative and not to be disputed, doubted or diverged from. That doesn’t sound at all agile to me. The word mantra originates in Sanskrit meaning “tool of thinking” or alternatively “liberation of thought”.

Dogma forces you to stick to practices that are believed to be good for you. Mantra can help you to re-evaluate your practices to find those that are actually good for you.

When you come to the point where you feel compelled to write a comment, think hard about whether or not it’s really necessary;

Could I convey this comment by renaming a method or variable to something meaningful?
Could the accompanying unit test describe the code better?

Can’t think of a good name for a class or method?

Is the method or class trying to do too much (Single Responsibility Principle)?
Could I break down this object into two that are easier named?

Okay, sometimes higher level architectural structures need to be documented, right?...

Maybe the class that manages the high-level architectural pattern could be better named?
Is a complex high-level architecture really giving you the required benefit if it is not easily understood?

Personally I cannot get to the end of these options without recognising ways of improving my code, although sometimes I’ve added comments to help me understand a large amount of ugly code, prior to refactoring.

The trick is to just keep thinking. Process is never an alternative to thought.

ZX81 Sends an SMS

2009-10-06T07:44:00+00:00

Our latest work project (video, voiceover and music by yours truly).

Speed Camera Law Change

2009-07-20T12:54:00+00:00

It’s interesting how government measures that seem extreme in the first place are often only the thin edge of the wedge. It’s particularly worrying when it concerns human rights, but it happens constantly and insidiously. Many pieces of freedom restricting legislation have been passed “to combat terrorism”, in fact they tend to have no effect on terrorism and end up being used to spy on school children or prejudice the law enforcement agencies against anyone who expresses a point of view.

The introduction of GATSO speed cameras seems to have been the thin edge of another wedge.

Speed cameras were introduced “to reduce the number of people killed or seriously injured in road collisions”. This sounds great, less people hurt or killed, who could complain?

In order to ensure that drivers slowed down, UK law stated that GATSOs should be painted a highly visible colour (reflective yellow). Drivers would see the camera in advance and gently slow down to the correct speed for the road. Even with this law in place, the cameras were often either carelessly or sneakily placed behind other signs or foliage, meaning that drivers would see them at the last minute and either get slapped with a hefty fine or slam on the breaks, hopefully not causing a crash in the process.

Do they want us to be going to fast through these “accident hot-spots” so that more revenue can be earned?

In April 2007, the law changed so that speed cameras no longer had to be brightly coloured, visible from 60 meters or sited only on accident black-spots. This will surely further reduce any effect they arguably had on road accidents in the first place.

Another more rational part of the law stops companies that set up cameras profiting from fines issued. This closes a loophole, making your local council the organisation that profits. At least then, the money raised will go back into the system and will hopefully end up being spent on improving roads.

The clear message from the government is “Speed Kills”. Of course what actually kills is irresponsible driving. I’m not advocating breaking the speed limit, but delegating the responsibility for policing road traffic law to cameras that only care about speed means that people will drive however they like as long as they don’t break the speed limit.

Rowridge Update

2009-04-09T08:58:00+00:00

Seems I was a little hasty in demanding the head of light entertainment on a spike.

It turns out that the solution to the retuning of MythTV after the Rowridge frequency changes is to delete and recreate the entire Capture Card using mythtv-setup. I have done this and now all my channels work as they used to.

There must be some metadata that is incorrect for the new channel locations.

More on Rowridge Retune Nightmare

2009-03-26T21:53:00+00:00

Looks like a lot of people have complained about losing channels. Apparently so far about 1% of the 500,000 households have called the helpline.

Friends of mine have had similar issues. One lives close to me and lost the same set of ITV related channels. Another lives near Salisbury (further from the transmitter) and has lost all channels except CBeebies!

I imagine a lot of people (like us) haven’t complained yet, in the hope that service will get better by the weekend. We need to get as many people as possible calling in, as they don’t seem to think there’s a real problem!

Here are my current channel settings, as requested by Ade, in case anyone wants to check their MythTV settings.

Rowridge Retune

2009-03-25T23:26:00+00:00

Notification of the changing of frequencies for Freeview channels broadcast from the Rowridge transmitter on the Isle of Wight came through a few weeks back.

I think I've picked up all the usual channels, but initial results in Poole are poor...

Not working:

ITV 1
ITV 2
ITV 3
ITV 4
Channel 4
Channel 4 +1
E4
More 4
Setanta Sports 1
Heart (radio)
Rabbit
Smile TV 2
Teletext

All the other channels (at least those that are broadcasting at midnight) seem to be alright. I could have quite happily done without "Premier Christian Radio" or "Teletext 1-2-1 Dating", but all the ITV channels?!

Hopefully they'll sort this out soon and restore the good reception I've been enjoying for the last few years.

Update

2009-02-20T17:15:00+00:00

Been a bit busy, so haven’t posted since last year. Here’s what’s been happening.

Christmas at home with the family – peaceful.
Got married on the fifth of January – in a castle.
Honeymooned in South Africa for four weeks – sunny.
Started using Twitter in earnest – tweety.
Got home just in time to go from 37 Celcius to -10 – snowy.
Blew up my home router by changing a big lightbulb – grrr.
Spent a week trying to get new router to do stuff – frustrating.
Made a video of our new Google Android OMA configuration code – geeky.

Right now we’re up to date, I’ll try to continue blogging properly again.

Fedora 10 PackageKit Problems

2008-12-10T23:23:00+00:00

I’d been using the Smart Package Manager instead of the standard Fedora/RedHat offerings for the last couple of years, as it seemed to do a better job of sorting out RPM dependancy problems.

However, on installation of Fedora 10, I thought I’d give PackageKit a try. It had been running nicely for two and a half weeks when an update caused any PackageKit use (even searching) to throw errors like this…


failed to get a TID: A security policy in place prevents this sender from sending this message to this recipient, see message bus configuration file...

There is a long thread on Fedora Forum about it, but after some hacking about and a general failure to get it sorted, I’ve decided to put Smart back on.

This went without hitch and in the process, I created some Smart channel files for RPM Fusion, the new third party software repository that merges Dribble, Freshrpms and Livna.

rpmfusion-smart-channels.tar.gz (864 Bytes)

Just put the .channel files in /etc/smart/channels/ and Smart-GUI will pick them up.

IPCop Firewall

2008-09-23T08:42:00+00:00

I originally set up a Fedora 5 Linux box which worked reasonably well. I had some traffic shaping and a limited number of ports open. However it was getting out of date (we’re now on Fedora 9) and I heard good things on the Ubuntu UK Podcast about IPCop, a firewall-only Linux distro.

I have now installed IPCop. It does have some security improvements over my existing set-up, although it doesn’t double-up very well as a mini server since it only includes the parts of the OS required for a Firewall. I think I’ll have to move my Subversion server onto my MythTV box which is always on – although I’m now tempted to give GIT a try, which I’ve also heard good things about.

I think I may have another issue which is muddying the waters as far as my firewall goes. Previously I had very bad connectivity with the old firewall, which went away after a few weeks. When I first set up the new IPCop firewall, I had the same problem, which now seems to have gone away too. It may be just freak network traffic. It may be I have a dodgy network adaptor in the machine (one of the four). More research is required…