Hacker's Diary

A rough account of I did with Emacs recently.

December 31

It's

December 30

all a bit

December 29

of a blur, really.

December 28

Broen's off to Castlebar to see The Hothouse Flowers, so I'm catching up on geekery. I'll have to make a visit to a computer store tomorrow to get some writable DVDs for my new toy...

Secretary is a pretty good movie.

December 27

Back to Dublin, again with laptop-as-jukebox. Collected Broenwynn from the airport and went to the pub. Whee!

December 26

Visited my goddaughter (and her family, obviously) so I got to play with the new digicam again. It does MOVIES.

December 25

Yay, geeky christmas gifts! New digicam, and a DVD writer!

Set up the digicam as a webcam when we phoned my brother but technical difficulties on his end (Donal, you SLACKER!) meant that we only had a one-way camera feed and were using my cellphone for audio. Just as well it's got a speakerphone...

December 24

Drove to Cork, then home, using the laptop as a jukebox on the way. Gnee.

NTL emailed to apologise for the error and assure me it'd been corrected. Mmhmm. We shall see.

December 23

Last-minute shopping...

December 22

Dermot was supposed to visit today, but the agency told him his interview had been cancelled so I ended up wandering pubward on my tod. Quiet night with book and beer, essentially.

December 21

Drove to Roscommon. Fixed computery things. Drove home.

December 20

Showtime is, enh. It's another harmless movie, I guess. A few moments, but on the whole, if you miss it, don't worry too much.

Got a bill from NTL today. For the service I cancelled a month ago. Do I have a tag on ALL my customer records reading "PLEASE IRRITATE"?

December 19

Orla showed up, so DRINK! DRINK!

Phonecall from Eircom in response to the complaint I had lodged. It will suffice to tell you that I did not gain any more confidence in their ability to actually provide customer service.

December 18

Rebuilt pilot-link with patches again.

December 17

Found a bug in the RSS Feeder that's been annoying me for ages - certain sites would have all their items clustered together and way backdated. It'll take a while for the fix to filter down so I can see the effects properly, but I think it should be doing The Right Thing now.

December 16

AAAAAH. Eircom, again. They never did cancel my ISDN service, despite the fact that the phone rep was able to look up my request-to-cancel and tell me that it was placed on November 4th. This despite calls to confirm the cancelling in the interim. What kind of idiots...?

December 15

Slightly more intelligent rearranging of LAN: use the other laptop as a dialup box, since it's running Red Hat 9 and it's in better physical condition and it's got a better modem. Of course, it did require an amount of farting around to get it to work, including abuse of wvdial - if wvdial keeps giving non-obvious errors about dialups you thought you deleted months ago, go fishing in /etc/ppp/peers, since that's probably where the trouble is.

Further faffing about with sendmail auth as a result of the above. Sendmail as configured out of the box by Red Hat does not play well with authentication. Basically, you have to reconfigure submit.mc to support authentication methods, then put appropriate auth info into the access database. I punted and just copied sendmail.cf over submit.cf.

December 14

Micromail update. Network continues to hobble along due to extreme slackery on my part.

America's Sweethearts is what my dad would probably call "harmless". Has a couple of great lines and no actual gratuituously bad bits.

December 13

Spent far too much time catching up on 24. Like, WAY too much.

December 12

Built a Linux 2.6-test11 kernel for the heck of it.

Wahey, got two items into this week's NTK. Gnee gnee, etc.

December 11

Tried to fool the goofy box into thinking it was Gonzo but it blew up during initrd for reasons I'm not totally clear on. So I punted and went back to watching 24, disc 3. Of 6. I might get this done by Christmas, and then there's series 2 to watch, plus the stack of DVDs accumulating from various sources, plus the constant feed from DVDRentals...

December 10

Doot doot doot. If I wasn't such a bloody slacker I'd have fixed the dead server by now. Cousin Dave suggests that the bulging caps on the board could well be tanked. So maybe I'll go on a soldering binge this weekend.

Watched Lost in La Mancha, the first ever non-making-of movie documentary - i.e. a documentary about a movie that didn't get made.

December 9

Further sagas with the sick server: looks like a motherboard problem. My cousin Dave has suggested that that if any of the caps on the board look iffy I could try replacing them.

Successfully remantled my digicam, which I'd dismantled to see if the flash memory was easily accessible. It's not. Looks like it'd be major surgery to even get near it. So, it remains a 4MB camera. I'd probably have had to mess around with the firmware to get it to take more than 60 pictures anyway.

December 8

Messing around with unzipping files in Perl, using Archive::Zip. The FAQ has attitude.

December 7

Traditional post-party hungover walk along the seafront at Doolin, although we didn't go in the direction of the cliffs of Moher (that's the Cliffs of Insanity if you've seen The Princess Bride) given the somewhat unstable state of most of the walkers. A quick lunch followed by a five-hour drive back to De Big Smoke, and thus endeth Office Party 2003.

December 6

Office Christmas Bash, featuring a five-hour drive to Doolin followed by drink, food, drink, guitar, singing, sleep-of-the-dead.

Gonzo appears to have eaten its system drive. At least, I hope it's just the system drive, because I really don't want to have to re-rip my entire CD collection again.

December 5

Big demo, all went well, yay me! Also, Parents called around so I showed off my BIG screen by playing a few bits from Ice Age.

December 4

Peeved at someone's mailserver rejection, I finally made damned sure that my mail is being routed through the nearest thing I have to an unimpeachable gateway. Next thing, I guess, is to investigate running SMTP traffic over an encrypted connection to make it unsniffable as well.

December 3

Trying to work late, watch more episodes of 24, and read Quicksilver. Sleep? Pah!

December 2

More fnu and gmaes with IPC and POE. Event-driven programming is HARD!

Ow. Gonzo crashed with some pretty messy hard drive errors. Looks like the drive took itself offline for a bit. Erk. Things That Are Different since I moved here: Gonzo's in a colder room, and there's an ISA modem and a PCMCIA adapter installed. Everything else is exactly as it was. Hrm.

December 1

I logged a bug about a futex hang in Mozilla today. This has been, har har, bugging me for quite some time, yet noone seems to have either logged anything similar or bothered to find out what Mozilla is doing when it freezes.

Hmm. According to a thing I just found, latest versions of up2date (Red Hat's updating tool) are able to handle apt repositories (that's Debian's updating tool). Cool!

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