Hacker's Diary
A rough account of I did with Emacs recently.
- December 31
- Off to Ballina again for New Year's Partying.
- December 30
- Oh the humanity. Turns out that the reason I have no flow
control is that I bought the nasty-ass cheap cable instead of the
highly expensive contains-more-wires offical one. It appears that
I should be able to do proper, flow-controlled transfers over I/R,
though.
w00t! I've figured out that flow control works better if you tell
the phone to use it (AT&K3), but more to the point
I've managed to decipher most of the file structure that the phone
gives you if you ask it for a JPEG. It would, of course, be far
too easy to simply OFFER YOU THE DAMNED JPEG. Instead you get a
file header which includes the name of the jpeg, then you get a
phone-screen-sized thumbnail, then you get the actual
image.
The flow control seems to be hugely flaky even with the above
setup, mind you. It can take several attempts to pull an intact
file off the phone.
Also, various things seem to upset the phone, by which I mean at
one point sending it any serial data would cause it to
reset its communications stack including the GSM
connection. I had to cold-boot it to sort that out.
Anyway, after way too much hacking I now have most of a LUFS module to allow
the phone to be mounted as a filesystem. GNEE! All that's left is
to move the actual data-transfer routines from my experimental
toys, and to clean up all the places where I've been slack about
return codes and memory allocation. Oh, and there's some
state-based thing where I need to be able to tell LUFS to reset the
connection, too.
- December 29
- The more I try to do useful things with my phone, the more it
upsets me: currently trying to use the undocumented AT
commands interface to retrieve images off it, and discovering that
the serial port is almost as flaky as the OBEX implementation. In
particular, it appears to randomly drop out crap if run at speeds
over 38k4, and it doesn't appear to support any sort of flow
control.
- December 28
- Spent the day in town with visiting Swissfolk.
- December 27
- Back in Dublin... note to self: emacs and lufs do not get
on. I already knew this, I just keep forgetting.
- December 24 - 26
- With my folks for Christmas
- December 23
- Final run at Micromail
for 2004; I've tweaked a few things on the site, in addition to
doing a catalogue update.
- December 22
- Continued adventures with spam cleanup. There are a lot of MTAs
out there that should be seen to with, say, a hammer or a pipe
wrench.
Did a little poking around with the Micromail update scripts also,
as usual when some new data broke them. I now have one more tiny
piece of up-front error detection.
- December 21
- Added a bit to my livejournal client (a bastard offshoot of
lj-update) which makes it easier for me to put images in
posts. It's not perfect, but it'll do for now.
- December 20
- Mainly tooling with the folder processor in lieu of doing useful
things.
- December 19
- And now I have a script to process a folder full of bounce
messages and throw away any that are replies to joe-job spam
runs. I need to combine this with the clamav toy, I
think. At this rate, all my mail will be read by
scripts.
I've put the clamav client
into the workshop so folks can play with it. It's a little
convoluted, but for now you can just install the modules it needs
- POE, basically - and plug it straight into procmail using a
commandline similar to that which invokes spamc. It'll put an
X-CLAMAV: scanned header into all the mails it scans, and
ones with viruses will be marked X-CLAMAV: found
<virusname>.
- December 18
- Playing with clamav; the client/server stuff is nice but would
be nicer if it came with a SpamAssassin-style inline
filter. So, gnee gnee, I wrote one, then broke it, then left it
spend a few hours considering a file with 30,000 mail messages in
it...
The
Corruptor was on TV, so I watched it. Mmm. Not bad, but not
quite the ass-kicking movie I was expecting given the presence of
Chow Yun Fat on the cast list.
- December 17
- Woohoo! I'm officially on Christmas Vacation (aside from the
minor matter of helping out with a release if required next
week).
- December 16
- Company Christmas Drinks. 'nuff said.
- December 15
- Some experimentation with manually moving the mapping toy around
leads me to believe that my scaling factors will only work for
Ireland, and even then they go out of whack towards the west. I am
suspecting that this is down to projections, the inaccuracy
thereof, and the distortions created by same.
Torque
might not be the worst movie ever made, but it's definitely one of
the worst I've ever seen. The whole endpiece-as-videogame is
absolutely rubbish, the movie attempts to be self-referentially
ironic at several points (dumb, dumb, dumb) and there's not even a
hint of gratuituous nudity to ease the pain of watching this
mess.
- December 14
- Since I now have two MBNA cards, the Finance::Bank::IE code
recognises this fact, but doesn't yet parse the multiple
accounts. Once I've sorted that out I'll post a new
release. I also need to take the config file reading stuff out of
the module(s) as it doesn't really belong there except maybe as a
convenience function.
- December 13
- Table quiz. Not much geekery, therefore.
- December 12
- Dazed and
Confused also doesn't have much by way of a storyline, but it
was fun; cast-spotting was fun, too. Ben Affleck, Joey Lauren
Adams, and Jason London (Jeremy's twin brother) provided a pretty
solid Kevin Smith link; it also starred Matthew McConaughey and
Milla Jovovich and, what is it with twins and this movie, Marissa
Ribisi, twin sister of Giovanni. I didn't actually recognise the
latter two, mind.
- December 11
- Impromptu trip to Ballina to collect my repaired car. Watched Paulie,
which was a pretty harmless kid's movie that nonetheless was done
well, and Hearts In
Atlantis which was well made but seemed to be lacking in an
actual story, in that by the end of the movie nothing much
appeared to have happened. Possibly not helped by the fact that we
got distracted by the contents of the jar of nuts being passed
around ("Smoke extract? what the hell is that? Ash?",
"Er. It says, "Chicken Derivatives", too") and
various other interruptions.
- December 10
- More poking around with the Giant Movie idea. Some of the basic
ideas I had about it seem a little wrongheaded at this point so I
may have to rework parts of it.
- December 9
- Tooling around with my Google advert placement. Hence
the above right block.
Did far too much PHP geeking. Especially since I don't like
PHP. Results may be visible here tomorrow once I
finish.
- December 8
- Along
Came Polly kinda reminds me of another Ben Stiller outing,
Starsky and
Hutch; it tries to be serious and funny at the same time and
winds up being neither. To take a simple example, Phillip Seymour
Hoffman's last scene in the movie - it could've been played for
laughs, or it could have been played completely straight, and
instead it tries for a point between the two and winds up being
pretty flat. There were a few grins in the movie - Hank Azaria was
excellent - but on the whole don't pay money to see
this.
- December 7
- Another silly script tweak: if I'm listening to my own streaming
audio server, the script that identifies what music I'm listening
to (for LiveJournal use)
will parse album and artist out of the displayed
metadata. Tied firmly to my own stream as there isn't a standard
for tagging metadata and, as I explained to someone recently, even
if there were, the metadata format itself is so heinously
underfeatured that you're better off pretending it didn't
happen. I guess I could always try hooking the UDP metadata, but
that's not always available to me.
- December 6
- Did some more digging for info on my Phonecam and eventually
found, among other things, a Perl script which downloads stuff
from the phone. This tipped me off to the fact that some of the
stuff the phone lists can't actually be downloaded -
firmware-based images, basically. Of course, I tried it and it
didn't work, so I'll have to do some more geeking.
Tweaked the lisp IMDB search to cope with the case where a single
result is returned, i.e. IMDB bounces you to directly to the page
for the movie you're trying to find.
- December 5
- Company Christmas Party = Teh R0xx0r once again. Yay Doolin!
Eventually drove The Boat back to Dublin. Wallow
wallow. Ow, you have 500 messages in your spambox.
Half-watched Murder In The
First which I saw before. Not bad. Kevin Bacon is brilliant in
it.
- December 4
- Down to Doolin via an, er, entertaining route (i.e. I got
briefly lost) in the Escort, which I am referring to as The Boat
due to its sound and general handling. Company Christmas Party,
woohoo!
- December 3
- Eeep the second. The only available loaner car is... a 1998
Longford-registered Ford Escort. Estate. Ow.
- December 2
- Eeep. Bad news on the car front: it's waiting for parts, only
half of which arrived. So I may end up driving around in a loaned
Opel of some description for a few days in order to get to the
company Christmas party and what not, depending on how long the
missing bits take to show up.
- December 1
- Boy, it's freezing today. By which I mean, before my Canadian
friends start at me, it is somewhat colder than the
minimum-double-digit-celsius temperature I prefer.
Modified the RPM toy to use CList instead of List. Doesn't help a
whole lot.
Tweaked the auto-proxy-setup stuff to take into account whether
there's actually a live network connection present. Next, I need
to get it figure out if there's a local proxy on said connection;
if there's not an immediately obvious one, I can have it fall back
to using the local Apache for a proxy, although that's kinda
completely unnecessary.
Two more movies: The
Incredibles and U-571. The
Incredibles didn't give me as many laugh-out-loud moments as, say,
Shrek 2
or Toy
Story 2, but it was certianly fun and had a few genuinely
hilarous sequences. Well worth seeing. And U-571, despite the
Hollywood History slant, was actually a pretty good submarine
movie, complete with all the Submarine Movie Clichés -
near-miss torpedoes, waiting for depth charges, nerve-wracking
dives to unprecedented depths, saboteurs, etc. etc. As long as
you're not too concerned about the historical placement of the
movie, it's another good one to watch.
During U-571's ad breaks and after it had ended, we watched bits
and pieces of Romantic
Comedy 101. It's certainly got potential for irritation; the
gimmick (given that I missed the setup) appears to be a guy
selling the canonical rom-com script to his girlfriend's dad. The
script, realised as the meat of the movie, is thus pretty
formulaic, and at key points cuts to narrator voiceovers from the
two metacharacters; sometimes this works, sometimes it lives up to
the irritation potential. More irritating was the use of
fast-forward/rewind sequences to do, respectively, "skip this
bit" and "no, that's not how it happens". It's
very, very hard (in fact, it may be impossible) to do a good
meta-movie, and I don't think this succeeded, really. Probably
just as well I didn't see the whole thing.
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