Hacker's Diary
A rough account of I did with Emacs recently.
- October 31
- Happy Halloween, or something.
Ned
Kelly wasn't a bad movie, but it did seem
unnecessarily long.
I've entirely flushed out my Palm and I'm rebuilding
it from a clean PalmOS 4.1 install so I can discard a bunch of
crap that I wouldn't otherwise know to discard. This is ultimately
a good idea, although it'll be a pain in the ass getting it
sorted.
- October 30
- Hmm, that was painful; Grip now creates UTF8
CDDB files, which according to the latest version of the spec is
acceptable. Gronk still
prefers the ISO8859-1 versions. And I have no idea WHAT ended up
on the filesystem. I eventually had to use Perl to rename the damned file so
that the on-disc name matched the CDDB version to Gronk's liking.
- October 29
- Singles
was on MTV tonight. Damned funny. And that girl who played Linda
is rather cute.
- October 28
- Another oddball pub discussion of music, geeking and philosophy
with Ruadhrí and John. I should record one of these
conversations, if only to figure out just how many loose ends we
left because the topic keeps drifting.
- October 27
- Went hacking at OBEX a little and discovered that most of what
I'd written already actually works. Wow. After a little more
hacking I ended up with a chunk of code that listens on the IrDA
socket and churns out MIME versions of whatever comes in, complete
with headers.
- October 24-26
- Spent most of the last few days doing little more, geekily
speaking, than playing ShiSen-Sho and watching crap TV. I did put
Firefox and Thunderbird on Mom's computer, get my brother on the
way to rebuilding his desktop by providing him with a working CPU,
and finally cleaned up the mess that my networking had become to
the extent that I think I finally have some understanding of what
the various Red Hat
configuration bits do. Yay!
Oh yeah, and some time over the weekend Barrichello failed to
completely break his home track jinx, but did at least get a podiu
finish. Yay!
- October 23
- In
America is unashamedly sentimental, and if you're feeling at
all cynical when you watch it you'll hate every second. But damn I
enjoyed it.
Finally went off and diagnosed the brokenness in Mail::Folder. It
appears that it fails make test because the form of
maildir foldering it does seems to use filenames rather than
numbers (which is what I thought "real" maildir used) so
that if you rearrange items in a folder - e.g. using
refile - the rearranging will be lost if you close and
reopen the folder.
Finally made rss-fetch.pl read a damned config file
instead of having all the RSS feeds hardcoded in. It still has 'em
hardcoded, just that it can ignore the list in favour of reading
in a file now.
- October 22
- I finally got fed up with dealing with PilotManager
today. It's slow, development on it has stopped, and the
underlying library - pilot-link - can't handle
passworded records and is restricting access to the source because
they say they've been ripped off by people not respecting the
GPL. Well, you know, restricting access to the source is also not
respecting the GPL, regardless of the reasons for doing
so.
Heh, neat. After some reading about prelinking and executable
stacks and what not, I just plugged prelink
/usr/bin/mplayer into a root window and shazam, working
WMVs. Cool.
- October 21
- Finished cleaning up CDDB mess, and added some patches to Gronk - one to do the
remapping I mentioned below, and one to cope with the occaisonally
seen CDDB record where the artist and the title are identical and
thus you get DTITLE=NAME instead of DTITLE=NAME /
NAME.
- October 20
- More cleanup of CDDB mess for Gronk. Damn. Not only are
there mismatches between music and CDDB files, there are also few
missing directories which I suspect I deleted while tooling around
with Windows Media Player.
- October 19
- Decided to install the new version of Gronk. Decided to do it as
cleanly as I could, which means (1) putting it in a RPM and (2)
making my MP3 tree conform to its expectations. The latter's the
bigger job, but I may just about have a patch to allow
check-files.pl to remap your MP3 tree into something Gronk is happy with. Oh, and
I discovered that a file in the distro has my name on it. Go
me!
Note, I am not helped by the fact that I've trashed my .cddb
directory more than once.
- October 18
- Still faffing about with the XMLTV stuff. It seems that either
my output's wrong or the display toy I'm using doesn't properly
cope with crossing midnight.
- October 17
- Seems like a good day for figuring out what these old backup
files contain... the idea is that I restore them to a spare
partition, rpm -e everything and then check what's
left.
Ok, well, that's just wrong. I send my DVD writer off to burn a
DVD, which it duly does; then I try a test mount, and the system
sits there trying to mount a DVD which is plainly not cooperating
for (checks clock) at least the last ten minutes with no sign of
stopping. I may have to bounce the damned box to get it to give
up.
Wahey. Tried testing the same disc using dd in one of the
laptops, which duly rebooted. Impressive. The disc wot kills
machines.
Modified the films.pl
script to spit out XMLTV-friendly output. Not sure it's exactly
right yet, but it's kinda working.
Oh, and I discovered that there are alternative IMDB interfaces that
don't involve scraping the website. Cool! Too bad I'd already
written code to do so...
- October 16
- Had a look at Straw,
allegedly one of the better RSS readers for Linux.
I didn't think much of it, to be honest. It's not easy to add
feeds, it didn't understand its own exported OPML file, it opened
a new browser window when I asked it to fetch the webpage version
of an article.
Ok, so Paycheck
actually worked out pretty well, although is somewhat laden with
the problems of any storyline that dinks with the space-time
continuum. Big Fish
on the other hand had me, pardon the expression, hook, line and
sinker. Great story, great portrayal of the story.
- October 15
- My sister and her boyfriend visited, so we had a mad chat in the
pub involving Quantum Physics for reasons that I can't recall but
it was certainly fascinating stuff.
- October 14
- Watched the first hour of Paycheck
before John arrived in and dragged me kicking and screaming (yeah
right) to the bar. The premise is good, but the execution's a
little shaky. In particular, Uma Thurman's onscreen time so far
has been pretty weak.
- October 13
- Finally got rid of the buttons on my toolbar to start and stop
the dialup connection that I've not had since May.
New version of Finance::Bank::IE;
I've migrated the Bank Of Ireland
module to WWW::Mechanize, and enabled the MBNA module to
cope with the infrequently-occurring "Please update your
e-mail address" page.
Made some long-overdue updates to BBDB, filing off another
couple of entries from the mail bucket.
Managed to build newer versions of faad2 (without XMMS plugin),
transcode, and avidemux2. Remains to be seen if they're actually
useful. I'm beginning to think I should upgrade something
to Fedora Core, or switch the MiniITX box (which is currently
being a Win2K machine) back to FC2. Or maybe even
SuSE.
- October 12
- Played around with the movie stuff a little more. I'm still not
entirely clear on what I'm attempting to do, in part because the
idea keeps getting bigger every time I think about it.
Spent some time trying to rebuild a few video-related RPMs from
Dag's repository since he doesn't appear to be keeping the Red Hat
9 ones up to date any more. Unfortunately this mostly involved
firing off a build and then trying to figure out why it
broke.
- October 11
- My Amélie
and El
Mariachi/Desperado/Once Upon A
Time In Mexico DVDs turned up today, hooray!
Spent some time tooling about with command-line access to Dublin
Bus timetables, but nothing great to show for it so far. The
various pages are actually a bit non-standard, so I think maybe
I'll end up scraping them on an as-needed basis rather than having
live access.
- October 10
- Finance::Bank::IE: Contains modules to get your balance from Bank Of Ireland's online banking,
and also from MBNA, although the latter currently only caters for
one card. Since that's all I own.
Also, I missed the Japanese F1 due mainly to the time difference
and a profound sense of apathy. Schuie won it; alas, I'd picked
Rubeño to win for the first time this season (given that he
took the last two races, I thought this was a reasonable
gamble).
- October 9
- In which Ireland play France in Paris (soccer) and fail to get
beaten. Yay! Also fail to win. Boo!
Jersey
Girl is GREAT. Definitely purchase material. It's so
not Kevin Smith, and yet you can see his fingerprints all
over it.
- October 8
- Yesterday's bruise-inducing coupled with some more today finally
produced results. Yay!
- October 7
- Spent a very large part of the working day repeatedly shoving my
arm behind a heavy metal cover to get at the device underneath,
resulting in some rather dubious-looking bruises. Which made for a
story in the pub later on, of course.
- October 6
- A quick hack over lunch: yet another WWW::Mechanize script, this
one to grab special offer listings off a few sites.
Kyle Jones has reappeared after something of a sabbatical, which
means VM development
is back on track. Woohoo! I switched over to VM 7.19 yesterday and
immediately forgot about it until I happened to glance at the
version number on the toolbar today. So I guess it's
working.
Intermission
is bloody excellent. I love it when someone makes an
unapologetically Irish movie.
- October 5
- Wahey. System Rescue CD
not only allows interactive resizing of NTFS partitions, it can
deal with allegedly unmoveable files, too. Let's go
SuSE!
Oddity: when you set the proxy during SuSE's install, it tells you
how things like YaST will use it but other stuff may not. YaST
then goes ahead and attempts to connect directly to port 80 of
www.suse.com in order to fetch release
notes. "Oops".
- October 4
- Minor bugfix to diary code: entries used get the wrong anchor
name under certain circumstances. No more!
- October 3
- Lots of hacking on my movie-prodding scripts. Nothing useful to
show for it yet as it was all module-based work.
- October 2
- Went shopping, mostly. I am now the proud (?) owner of a Kenwood
food processor. I am perplexed as to why these things have so many
corners, nooks and crannies for food to hide in. Particularly
since their raison d'être is to turn food into very
small chunks and fling it about the place at high
velocity.
- October 1
- Made a failed attempt to shoehorn SuSE onto a Windows XP-bearing
laptop. I'm sure there's a good reason for Windows to write
unmovable files right at the end of the disk partition, other than
to prevent you from repartitioning post-install. And none of the
tools I tried would move the files, not even the one that runs at
bootup so it can move files that would otherwise be locked by the
OS.
previous month | current month | next month