Hacker's Diary
A rough account of I did with Emacs recently.
- September 30
- Trying to figure out a long-standing bug in my malsync setup. Really I
should probably just ditch AvantGo since I rarely use it any
more.
WWW::Mechanize is my new favourite Perl module.
- September 29
- Showed John x2vnc, which I've not used since I worked in
Arklow. Quite the fun toy, although I don't currently have a
plausible use for it.
- September 28
- A little light HTML editing over lunch resulted in the first
four months of the geek diary validating as HTML 4.01 Strict
compliant. I'm still inclined to do something completely different
with them, such as turn them all into XML and invent a shiny new
rotational load-bearing device which I shall call
"wheel".
Investigated a Palm program called "MyCar" which is
supposed to help you keep track of your car's mileage,
etc. Unfortunately it's more like a miniature fleet management
program, which is way overkill for what I want (simply tracking
mileage).
- September 27
- From the Stupid Perl Hacks department:
perl -l -e
'eval "require $ARGV[0]; print \$$ARGV[0]::VERSION" or print
$ARGV[0] . " not installed?";'
- allows you to
instantly check what version of a module you've got
installed. Because I get tired of typing this sort of crap in by
hand, or looking for version strings in files.
cpan-to-rpm.pl,
my nasty hack for automatically building RPMs from CPAN objects, now supports being
passed a filename of the form
N/NN/NNNNN/Object-version.tar.gz so you can request
something other than the latest version of a given
module. Of course, if you've not used CPAN in anger you probably have no
idea what I'm on about.
- September 26
- Once Upon
A Time In Mexico was enormously fun, especially Johnny Depp's
character. I preferred Desperado,
though. The extras on the DVD for the former are excellent, mind
you, and they include a cooking lesson from
Mr. Rodriguez.
As a result of my travelling shenanigans I missed the Chinese GP -
both qualifying and the race itself. From the bits of the
highlights I saw, it looks like the Gods of GP have now decided
that Schumacher has had quite enough luck and it's time to give
him his share of the bad luck. A season's worth. In one
go.
- September 25
- Fun day with Bob & Gem, following on from a fun evening with
some classmates.
Somewhat surprised to discover that the rescaling code I'd dumped
into the mapping toy mostly works. Amazing.
- September 24
- It took about half-an-hour, but the mapping toy now talks to
GPSD. Thus equipped, I'm off to Limerick for the weekend.
- September 23
- And more with the work.
- September 22
- Work work work. Sorry, can't tell you about it.
- September 21
- Net result of browser arguments: Mozilla crashed on a page with
Flash. I couldn't trace it to diagnose it. I put in the latest
version of Flash, no change. GRR. So then I ran it from a terminal
to see if it'd crash and lo, it ran. Turns out that
artsdsp with --mmap is no longer the correct
thing to use, if it ever was. Now if only Mozilla natively recognised
aRTs (as, say, mplayer does) without my having to resort to this
stupidity.
- September 20
- Woo! I'm now part of the WWW FAQ section
on RSS!
I tried out the latest version of Firefox. After an amount of
browsing, it was taking up 88MB (40ish resident) and then it fell
over and died. Yes, it's mostly faster, yes it looks nicer, but
Mozilla's been pretty good about not dying on me recently, and
it's not very good salesmanship for the browser to fall over on
the first day I use it.
So for good measure I upgraded to a newer Mozilla (1.7.2) and
we'll see how that pans out. So far it's behaving itself and
appears to have a smaller resident footprint.
- September 19
- I figured out part of why Skype wasn't showing up on the
correct FVWM page; they've done
an amount of renaming of various things and the tag I'd set up no
longer matched the Skype window. Having fixed that I found it was
still not locating correctly within the page, so I wrote a FVWM
function to fix that. Then I wrote a POE-based wrapper for starting
Skype which triggers the fix via FvwmCommand. It's all very
horrible, and it works. One side effect is that I can now trap
incoming instant messages and fling them elsewhere, once I've
figured out where it is I want to fling them. Alas, I apparently
can't use XSendEvent to talk back to the client as I'd hoped, so
for now it's one-way communication only.
- September 18
- Discovered that the ACPI-to-APM code I've been using for the
last year or two was actually incorrect. Discovered this due to
porting it to Emacs lisp. Go
figure.
It seems that yum in its current incarnation can't resolve
dependancies "backwards" - case in point, I want to
install transcode. Transcode wants libfame 0.9.0. The two yum
repositories I'm using provide libfame 0.9.0 and 0.9.1. yum cannot
resolve the dependency, since it automatically discards the 0.9.0
version as soon as it sees the 0.9.1 version.
SWAT
was fun. Colin Farrell can't keep the Irish out of his accent,
mind.
- September 17
- Kill
Bill: Vol 1 was, hmm. It's easier to say what it's
not; it's not a bad movie. It's not the best or worst
martial arts movie ever made. It's not the best or worst action
movie ever made. I didn't feel like it was a waste of time or
anything. But I wasn't sitting up straight and going,
"Woah!" either.
- September 16
- Wrote a drop-in ACPI driver for battery.el. On battery power, on
the flight home. Gnee, dammit.
Other stuff I played with this week: Mono,
powersaved, Kismet, and Racer. Fun!
- September 12-15
- In Barcelona for Novell Brainshare
Europe
- September 11
- Mostly spent trying to sort stuff out for a trip to
Barcelona.
- September 10
- Not a lot going on chez Waider. Friday night, time for a
beer!
- September 9
- Minor tweak to the Micromail
website.
- September 8
- Minor fix to BBDB docstuff thanks to a helpful list user.
Made some tweaks to my office timesheet client.
- September 7
- Tomorrow
Never Dies is pretty rough, as Bond movies go, but not quite
as silly as Die Another
Day; I didn't particularly intend to watch the former, but it
was on TV while I was doing some other stuff, and as they say, one
thing led to another...
- September 6
- Continued tooling with the RSS Toy; now it can zap
chunks of stuff that you've already seen. It's sprawling towards
the point where I may have to (shudder) involve a database, or
even spend some time actually working out what I'm
doing.
Aaaand, Micromail site
update.
- September 5
- Puckoon
was everything I hoped it'd be, other than the gratuitious
namechange of the main character (why, in the movie of a book by
Spike Milligan would you change the main character's name from
Milligan to Madigan?) and is definitely well worth
owning. Amusingly, the two negative reviews on IMDB appear to be
from people who aren't aware of either the book, or the nature of
Spike Milligan's humour. You need one of those, at least,
preferably the latter.
- September 4
- Hacked up a chunk of code to download a CPAN module and pack it into an RPM. Seems to be roughly
working.
Half-watched The
Defender, which was really badly dubbed. And I've a certain
dislike for gratuitous slow-motion sequences and jump
cuts. Still, pretty fight choreography.
- September 3
- Someone's switched off a box that was doing periodic ETRN duty
against our mail server. Not smart.
Played around with DVD
Rentals website a bit, too. With scripts, of
course.
- September 2
- Continuing to tool around with the mp3namer thing. It's the
usual collection of heuristic nonsense that I love fiddling
with.
- September 1
- Hey, cool. Someone has finally done what I kept putting off
finishing: a Perl interface to
id3lib. Go fetch MP3::ID3Lib from your nearest CPAN mirror.
Happy Birthday, Donal!
The doohickey I'm using to correct MP3 titles is getting rather
scary, plus made me contribute a patch or two to Rocco for the
CDDB module. Gnee!
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