Hacker's Diary
A rough account of what I did with Emacs recently.
- November 30
- Trying one of the other RVP efforts while I'm at it. Ick. I
thought my own autoconf hell was bad, but this is
insane.
- November 29
- People keep mailing me bits about the RVP stuff, so let me state
here: I'm aware of other efforts on this front. Right now I'm
waiting on *mumble* before I can either contribute to an existing
effort or offer what I've got for public consumption. So thanks,
and all, but.
- November 28
- Hacking on Apache2::AuthenNTLM a bit to try and make it more
closely match "real" NTLM.
- November 27
- Mostly faffing about with the RVP server code, which I really
should do something useful with. From which you may infer that I
wasn't doing anything useful with it.
- November 26
- Resurrected some old code. Discovered missing Perl
modules. Installed missing Perl modules only to discover old code
was broken anyway. NNNNGH.
- November 25
- Funny how "one in the pub after work" can turn into
"home after midnight, knackered on account of yesterday's
5:45am wakeup"...
- November 24
- Um. I went to some trouble to put a working-if-half-arsed
version of Digest authentication into the RVP code. Now it looks
like the Official Client doesn't actually support it - it doesn't
even try to talk to the server. Maybe it's just the set
of flags I'm using (no qop sent or expected).
I wish Zach Braff had spent as much time and effort on scripting
and polishing Garden State as he did collecting
music for it. The music production in general is so far ahead of
the movie as a whole that it's intrusive. It's funny to see
Natalie Portman looking almost like a complete newcomer, and I
spent the entire movie scratching my head over who Zach's dad is
(hint: Hobbit) and then kicking myself when I found out. The story
strikes me as unoriginal for some reason, in that I feel like I've
seen the same story told before, but I can't place my finger on
it. It's not a bad movie by any stretch, but Braff is no Kevin
Smith.
- November 23
- Hmm, I can see some problems with my super new asynchronous RVP
code. But hey, you can't. You might soon, because various bits of
procedure are in the process of being followed. In the meantime,
I'm not doing much beyond instrumenting bits of it for debugging
runs in an environment where I can't actually debug it.
- November 22
- Went to a table quiz tonight, wherein the questions were bloody
difficult and we were equally useless. We came out with 20 of 48,
the winners had 31 of 48. There were a couple we should've gotten
right and didn't, too (not mismarked, more that we should've known
the right answer...)
- November 21
- Started working on the RVP service-lookup caching, which, well,
I could do it the nice way, or the cheap way, and I'm opting for
cheap. Bwahah.
- November 20
- The worst part of using your inbox as a todo list is the
18-month old email that greets you every time you open it. Finally
got rid of the damned thing, along with some other ancient
mails. I'm now up to January 2005, woohoo!.
Laptop behaving oddly. It's happy to run on the battery, but the
ACPI core insists there isn't one present. Bizarre. Then again,
from my previous expeditions into ACPI land I know that it's not
the most robustly-coded areas of a computer.
Messing with site layout again, which brought to my notice the
fact that my diary tagline has been missing the word
"what" for a long, long time. D'oh.
- November 19
- Mozilla Sunbird:
downloaded it, fed it a calendar that I'm using in the current
version of the Calendar Plugin (which, incidentally, is also buggy
as hell) and watched as it produced a screen full of error boxes,
none of which said anything useful. Dear Mozilla Developers: if my
calendar file is formatted incorrectly, you could (a) collate the
errors into a single dialogue box, not one for every calendar
entry or one for every error or whatever you're doing now and (b)
do something a little more user-friendly than dumping a stack
trace into the error window. Stack traces are for developers, not
users.
I think about the only thing wrong with Shanghai Knights is Owen
Wilson. He brings nothing to the movie except the same drawn-out
unsubtle non-comedy he's done in previous movies, and you could
edit him out completely and not actually lose anything from the
plot. Other than that, it's pretty stock Jackie Chan fare;
excellently choreographed action sequences interspersed with
something that resembles a storyline, but mostly is a vehicle for
the action.
- November 18
- Spider-Man 2: characters by Stan
and Steve, heavy-handed script by George Eliot. Way too
slow-moving, and very much Laden With Symbolism And Metaphor
(Prounounced Slowly So You Don't Miss It). Oh well, I'll not have
those two hours back.
- November 17
- Windows 2k's Hibernate mode continues to amuse me. Every so
often, I resume from hibernate and it immediately hibernates
again. Other times, it pops up a dialogue box every thirty seconds
telling me it can't adjust performance (this'd be the SpeedStep
applet) and I need to reboot the machine to fix it. Brilliant
stuff.
- November 16
- Woah. Flood of FC4 updates. I thought FC4 was pretty much
end-of-life at this point.
- November 15
- The RVP stuff is stuck at the moment while various handwaving
goes on. Just in case you were wondering. It's also marginally
hampered by the fact that I can't trivially build something quite
as annoying as a real RVP server. Mind, it's not helped by my
uncanny ability to spot a bug and fix it by changing a completely
unrelated piece of code which then causes a SEGV. D'oh.
- November 14
- I, Robot was quite a bit better than I
expected, although some of the effects were almost like looking at
2001: A Space Oddessey's
matte paintings, and all the cars looked like poorly-disguised
Audi A4's (hello, product placement!). Still, though, it
moved along at a nice clip, the storyline was neat enough, and
Will Smith got his act on (yo) well enough without resorting to
the cartoonish capers of some of his previous movies. Worth
watching, I think, although I can't say how it stacks up against
Asimov's original since I've not read it.
- November 13
- Back to Dublin in about half the time it took me to get to
Ballyvaughan, which was nice.
- November 12
- Ireland gets hammered by New Zealand (rugby). Most of us are too
hung over to do much by way of acknowledging this.
- November 11
- Off to "De Wesht" for a birthday party, by which I
mean a weekend of drinking silliness.
- November 10
- Some more minor tweaks to the NTLM auth stuff. I'm still not
entirely happy with how it all hangs together, and I still don't
have a proper testbed for it.
- November 9
- D'oh. Yes, I was indeed missing something. You can't free up a
pointer to a block of data and then search that pointer for a
Connection: close header...
Happy Birthday, John!
- November 8
- NTLM Negotiate still not working. I'm missing something here,
amn't I?
- November 7
- Damn but NTLM is just the most annoying thing ever. Not content
with layering a connection-oriented protocol on top of a
connectionless one, the first thing it does when negotiating to
use NTLM auth in the first place is... it
disconnects. GAH.
Decrypting an encrypted drive so I can run fsck on it. There's
something wrong with that. It actually kinda hurts my head to do,
effectively, "read from drive, feed to decryption,
destructively overwrite what you've just read". It just goes
against my sense of right despite the fact that there's
nothing wrong with it.
- November 6
- Hacked the Auth thing into shape by getting it to skip the
Negotiate header. Screw it, it'll suffice for now. Also beat
Digest Auth into shape. Currently trying to learn XPath as it
should make response parsing a little less painful. I think,
anyway. I'll be very peeved if it turns out to be as
ugly.
Did some more work on the ACL parsing; I gave up on XPath in
favour of actually getting the code done. Might go back to XPath
at some point because I think it'll tidy up a lot of the
code.
- November 5
- They Live is a bit clunky, but
fun. Very much in the mold of, say, Repo Man; cheap effects, brutal
script, awful delivery, but still fun. And it is, after all, an
eighties classic. I can remember when it was released, but this is
the first time I've actually seen it, so now I can send it back to
the nice people at DVD
Rentals and never think about it again.
Added a funds transfer feature to my BoI module; currently just
for third-party payments in a highly clunky fashion, but I'll
clean it up and release a new version later on.
- November 4
- Aha. My Auth code needs to understand the Negotiate
option. D'oh.
- November 3
- Undaunted, I continue to hack on my own RVP code, of
course. I do actually have a better reason than Not Invented Here
(after all, I'm essentially just rewriting someone else's code, so
I can hardly claim invention thereof).
Wrote most of a chunk of Digest auth. Failed to understand
Apache's insistence that headers present in the response were
missing. Gave up, went to bed.
Someone was using my DNS server for a DDoS attack
today. Naughty. I was alerted by Esat to this. The funny part is
that I hadn't even realised I was offering DNS service, since the
authoritative servers for my domain live elsewhere. I took the
opportunity to finally set up views on the server so that stuff
inside my network gets a different set of options to stuff outside
my network.
- November 2
- In case you're waiting for my RVP code to actually appear: someone's
got another plug available.
- November 1
- Tried to compile my code on another box. Discovered libxml2
version troubles. Bah.
Fixed libxml2 version troubles in local copy, will test on other
box as and when available. Hating autoconf more than
ever.
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