A change is as good as a rest

It is with no small amount of disappointment that I have decided to give up on this year's Project365. The pressures of life over the last couple of months has made it impossible to focus or be creative on demand, and having the ever mounting backlog of pictures I should have taken is not helping. And after all, if I'm just posting any old picture just to make up the numbers, what's the point? I'm 33 days behind now. I'll call it a Project193 and call it a day.

Of course, I'm not giving up making photos to put up here. I'll just not be putting the unnecessary pressure of one every day on myself. Like today's Fungi post, I'll be making more feature posts about things that actually interest me and that I enjoy doing.

Hobbies should be fun, not frustrating.

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Fairy Lights

Street lights at night can be very pretty. For someone who lives close to the centre of a large city, skirting round the edge of the town centre can provide a host of beautiful views at night. One advantage to using a wide open lens when taking these pictures is the capture of bokeh, or creative blur. An extreme example is shown to your right; a mass of coloured circles that roughly represent the city they are part of. A more subtle example, of course, is in the picture of the day at the top of this post. The lights cluster around the top of the leaves like fireflies, obviously part of a cityscape but at the same time abstract. The extreme out of focus image is a blurred version of the picture on the left. A view over Sheffield from Pitsmoor, looking up Netherthorpe Road and up to the university. Even when the buildings are focussed (roughly; I'm still practicing) the lights take on the shape of the lens's aperture. I try to incorporate some foreground focus wh...

In which I complain that coding standards are a waste of time

Just kidding. I'm not going to rail against coding standards. No, I'm going to rail against the absolute and dictatorial enforcement of coding style guidelines, to the point where a single misplaced curly bracket can fail the code review of a thousand line project before it's even started. I'm going to rail against the fact that many people these days don't actually know that coding style guidelines and coding standards are not the same thing. Coding style guidelines are not coding standards. Coding standards are rules on how to construct software. Rules that have practical and defined benefits. Rules than can be proven to assist in the structured and correct building of code. For example: Do not perform database access in the constructor. All database access should use the framework's DAL. Do not rely on complex instantiation instructions; provide a factory method. Do not inherit from a class in a different module or library; only encapsulate. Avoid sin...

DeCSS on Ubuntu 9.10 and later

It used to be the case that enabling DVD playback on Ubuntu was a case of installing ubuntu-restricted-extras and that was that. Unfortunately DMCA nonsense in the US has buggered that up for all of us and so now there's an additional step. So, without further ado, here are the commands that need to be run at a command line: sudo apt-get install libdvdread4 sudo /usr/share/doc/libdvdread4/install-css.sh Voila! DVD playback a-la Ubuntu.

Lazy Robot

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