Notices by Kate Morley (kate@fosstodon.org), page 2

Updated my e-mail signature for the generative AI era:

British wind turbines averaged a record 22.02GW of power generation between 10:00pm and 10:30pm last night. Live data can be seen on my site at https://grid.iamkate.com.

It gets worse:

“In her autobiography, The Longest Trek: My Tour of the Galaxy, Whitney describes an incident in which she was sexually assaulted by an executive of the Star Trek production team, whom she never identified by name, and she drew a link between this incident and her dismissal a few days later”

People tend to defend things like this as products of their time, so I’d also like to highlight that someone much more recently writing the Memory Alpha article on the episode chose the belittling phrasing that Rand “walks away in a huff” in response to Spock’s remark.

Unsurprisingly, behaviour on set was just as problematic as that depicted in the show:

“Grace Lee Whitney once recounted that, while shooting the scene when a distraught, tearful Janice Rand accuses Captain Kirk of trying to rape her, William Shatner slapped her across the face to get her to register the proper emotion.”

So I thought I’d finally watch Star Trek: The Original Series. I expected it to be dated, but I didn’t expect the horrific levels of sexual harassment depicted. In one episode, Yeoman Rand is sexually assaulted by an evil version of Kirk, is then interrogated about the incident by Kirk and Spock, and apologises for getting Kirk in trouble (at this point no-one knows there’s a separate evil Kirk). The episode ends with Spock remarking to her that evil Kirk had some “interesting qualities”.

Between 2:00am and 7:00am this morning, electricity exports and storage exceeded fossil fuel power generation — in other words, Britain could (in theory) have been powered entirely without fossil fuels for these five hours. See the live data at https://grid.iamkate.com

In spite of everything, there’s still beauty to be found in this world, so I’ve started added some of my photos to a new ‘art’ section on my website: https://iamkate.com/art/

CSS advice required:

It’s easy to create a grid that contains the maximum number of columns subject to a minimum width:

grid-template-columns: repeat(auto-fit, minmax(400px, 1fr));

But how do you achieve the opposite: a grid that contains the minimum number of columns subject to a maximum width? This is invalid CSS:

grid-template-columns: repeat(auto-fit, minmax(1fr, 400px));

The use case is a gallery of images, where I want them as big as possible without exceeding a specific maximum.

Having recently been introduced to the tabletop role-playing game Deadlands, I’ve analysed its unique mechanic of exploding dice: https://iamkate.com/data/exploding-dice/

(This was the first time I’ve calculated expected values of random variables or the sum of a geometric series since I finished my A-level exams 23 years ago.)

My wife’s cousin’s kid asked me to make a vehicle out of this Lego octopus. After I finished, he calmly declared “Safety Octopus only knows how to kill”.

The etymology and shift in meaning of the word ‘virago’ tell you everything you need to know about society’s attitude to strong women:

I hope this e-mail… doesn’t find you.

I hope you escaped the corporate life.

I hope you bought that hectare of land.

I hope your crops are thriving.

I hope your crafts bring joy.

I hope you found peace between the deep blue sea and high blue sky.

I hope at night a million stars blanket your slumber, and every dawn reveals new wonders.

I hope.

Interviewer: Can you give an example of a guard statement?

Candidate: “I used to be a developer like you. Then I took an arrow function in the knee.”

Later today Britain’s last remaining coal-fired power station will shut down, bringing to a close 142 years of power generation that began when the world’s first coal-fired power station, at 57 Holborn Viaduct in London, started operation on 12th January 1882.

When I created https://grid.iamkate.com in 2012, coal accounted for 40% of Britain’s power generation. It was overtaken by gas in 2015, nuclear and wind in 2016, and solar in 2019. As I write this, wind is producing 40% of Britain’s power.

I was chatting with one of our junior web developers this morning and discovered he had never heard of Flash. This both makes logical sense (it’s 14 years since Steve Jobs’ Thoughts On Flash open letter) and makes me feel very old.

#Introduction (July 2024 edition)

Hi, I’m Kate. I’m a 41-year-old software developer based in the south-west of England. I created my first website in 1998, and I’m best known for my National Grid: Live site at https://grid.iamkate.com. In my day job I’m the Development Director at https://itseeze.com, where in 2007 I created a content management system that’s now used by thousands of sites for organisations across the UK and Ireland.

Does anyone know the algorithm used for laying out labels like this? The aim is to minimise the vertical distance of labels from their points while preventing them from overlapping. With two labels you can just move them equally far from their common centre if they would overlap, but with more labels this could then introduce new overlaps, so it’s not so trivial. I tried searching but all I could find were algorithms for two-dimensional placement of labels on maps.

I’ve been told to stop referring to the git commit history as “the public chronicle of our errors”

In the same way most of us say “goodbye” without realising it derives from “god be with ye”, maybe one day people will end conversations with “likensubscribe”