The Musings of the Kat

Another Painting

Kat Crichton — Sat, 01 May 2010 14:29:00 +0000

This time, from the north east corner of Ploscha Rynok, looking down towards the Dominican Church.

I had a brief chat with another artist, who's been painting around the square for many years. The chat was brief in no small part because of the limits of not speaking the same language. He showed me a press clipping of him painting in the square.

It's fun painting in such a busy place. Makes you feel like part of the action. Lots of people came up and had a look at the painting and several stopped to talk.

Batyar Day (Rascal Day)

Kat Crichton — Sat, 01 May 2010 13:58:00 +0000

Today is the day they celebrate “Batyarstvo” (an idle and debauched style of life) in L’viv.

A selection of smartly dressed rascals getting up to mischief and occasionally being reprimanded by the police.

Ploscha Rynok is heaving with people today, there’s live music, dancing and some deeply debaucherous foodstuffs.

Beautiful L'viv

Kat Crichton — Wed, 28 Apr 2010 07:55:00 +0000

I’ve been living and working in L’viv (a spectacular Medieval city near the west border of Ukraine) for a couple of weeks now.

I’m trying to learn a bit of the language, but it’s fairly hard getting your message across. Very few people who went to school during the Soviet era learnt English, because the chances of travelling anywhere where it was spoken were very slim.

Only people who have been in education in the last 20 years are likely to have picked up any English, so at the moment, the cut-off age is early-thirties.

Last weekend, I managed to find an art supplies shop thanks to some helpful ladies in a local art gallery. So I set to work sketching and painting one of the views from my balcony onto Ploscha Rynok (Market Square).

Hopefully the weather will be as good this weekend, so I can get out and paint somewhere else.

Fedora 12 RPM Fusion Smart Channels

Kat Crichton — Tue, 09 Feb 2010 16:01:00 +0000

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

Kat Crichton — Tue, 29 Dec 2009 16:51:00 +0000

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 Inaccurate and often out-of-date meta-information just makes your self-describing code and accompanying tests harder to read and understand.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

Kat Crichton — Tue, 06 Oct 2009 07:44:00 +0000

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

Speed Camera Law Change

Kat Crichton — Mon, 20 Jul 2009 12:54:00 +0000

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

Kat Crichton — Thu, 09 Apr 2009 08:58:00 +0000

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

Kat Crichton — Thu, 26 Mar 2009 21:53:00 +0000

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

Kat Crichton — Wed, 25 Mar 2009 23:26:00 +0000

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.