A rough account of what I did with Emacs recently.
December 31
I decided I'd have another look at Thunderbird's RSS
client. It's not really something I could seriously use, as one of
the main requirements for my RSS reading is an online browser so I
can access my feeds from anywhere. ("feeds". How very
Transmetropolitan.) In order to avoid manually importing all my
feeds, however, I first took the time to bolt on an OPML export to
my regular RSS toy. OPML: yet another poorly-planned RSS
misfeature. There's a Wikipedia article going into some detail
about what's wrong with it, but let me summarise briefly: it
sucks. A few rounds of "export from Thunderbird, export from
RSS toy, compare, tweak, import" and I had something
working. Then I started collating all the imported feeds into
approximate categories on Thunderbird. First thing I noticed is
that none of the imported stuff is set to automatically fetch new
articles... secondly, managing feeds in Thunderbird is
awful. Aside from the fact that there's no Copy/Paste context menu
in the Add Feed dialogue box (strangely, the shortcuts like Ctrl-C
work), you can't actually edit the folders in the feed management
window - you can only shuffle feeds from one folder to another. If
you want to edit the folders (e.g. title, whether it updates or
not) you have to do that from the main window. My guess at this
point is that the RSS reader was thrown together by someone as a
hack, and the responsible party then got distracted by all the
feeds he'd just imported. Frankly, even if it did allow me to keep
some sort of online tab on where my reading was at, I'd still not
want to use it.
End of year... I've not released RVP 1.0, sorry. But then Gaim 2.0
is still at beta5. I've not released the new MPLE code I've been
working on, not least because the API is still in flux and there's
a memory leak I've still not tracked down. I've not released BBDB
2.35/36 but then I've not released a version of that in, er, five
years? six years? Oh well. Maybe next month. Have a good year-end,
whatever you're at.
December 30
Went back to the random housecleaning. Rediscovered "Carpet
Level" in the bedroom, which is good, as it had been somewhat
obscured for a while. Admittedly a certain amount of the cleaning
has involved moving crap from pile A to pile B and back again, but
I've actually managed to jettison some stuff in the
general direction of the bin.
Had a quick shot at that SMS-box-as-IMAP idea I mentioned a while
back. Realised implementing an IMAP server was going to be far too
much effort for such a cheesy hack, so I opted for a POP server
instead. Got as far as figuring out I'd need to go and consult the
POE manual pages (by which point I'd done most of the STAT
command) before I got distracted by the aforementioned
cleaning.
December 29
Tried out the Line6-provided MIDI software for the POD. It's,
er. Bloody awful. After checking cables and what not I eventually
figured out it was trying to use the FM Synth instead of the MIDI
interface to talk to the POD. Then I couldn't get it to actually
scan for the POD on the MIDI interface (it keeps reverting to the
FM Synth), and I can't see an option under "manually add
device" that allows me to set the channel, plus I did a
loopback test on the interface and despite a 100% send/receive it
insisted the test had failed. The help either doesn't help or
doesn't match the UI, and the "check for updates to this
software" link winds up at ... Apple.com. Choice.
Fixed up some geocoding nonsense I wrote last year which uses
Maporama's search engine to find Lat/Long for whatever you're
looking for. Since I wrote it, the Maporama site changed a bit and
part of the change apparently includes applying More Stupidity; if
you get multiple results, it appears that you can't ever actually
progress beyond the list-of-results page, as it just loops back on
itself. Hurrah.
Eventually decided that what I really wanted to do was to
watch Casablanca. It's just such an
amazingly good piece of work. Plus, it's got all those lines you
thought you could quote, except you never get them quite
right...
December 28
Spent the day doing some random housecleaning, in part trying to
figure out if there's a useful arrangement of, er, three computer
desks or if I should just jettison one or more of them. So far the
conclusion seems to be in favour of ditching one, although there
may yet be a way to rearrange things comfortably.
Went to see Isotope at J. J. Smyths this evening. Totally awesome,
especially the drummer. In the company of Cathal for the evening,
and Lou dropped in for a bit too.
December 27
Found the stupidest bug ever in the MPLE code, and it's been
there for at least a year, possibly longer. The short version was
that I was checking to see if x + 1 was greater than
x, meaning a whole chunk of useful code never got
executed. This only came to light when I found a particularly
formatted MP3 file (the aforementioned multi-frequency file, which
it turns out wasn't multi-frequency unless you treated arbitrary
chunks of the ID3 data as actual MP3 frames) but I'm still
surprised it's been around for so long. Anyway, yay. Squashed THAT
bug.
Last day at work this year, whee!
December 26
Trying to figure out what I did wrong with the RSS toy
exactly. The main difficulty I have is that any time I figure I'll
adjust the code, I end up throwing away my entire reading history
and in some cases the whole database, because it's too awkward to
figure out any cleaner way to fix things up. So then there's a
protracted period of "read that... read that... read
that..." while I catch back up to where I was. Mainly, all
this grief is caused by the fact that there's so much crap out
there in RSS-land - most of the code I've written for this is an
attempt to clean up and datestamp feeds before handing them off to
a simple reader.
any2dvd is still messing with me. There's another place where it
looks for Arial.ttf, and that one appears to ignore your config
file. Fortunately now that I've got VOB files generated I can just
tell it to skip the whole transcoding mess and go straight to DVD
generation. Eventually I just gave up and dropped an Arial.ttf
file into the appropriate directory.
I'm pretty sure someone told me that Meet The Fockers was worth
watching. It's not. It's barely funny at the best of times, it's
entirely predictable, it's too long - in short, it's Yet Another
Ben Stiller Movie. Go and watch some grass grow instead, it'll be
more entertaining.
December 25
Merry Christmas!
Novel. Poking at the MPLE stuff I discover that I am in possession
of what appears to be a variable sample frequency MP3
file - frequencies ranging from 8 to 48KHz. What the
hell?
March of the Penguins
taught me many interesting things about penguins, such as the fact
that they're plainly nuts - unsatisfied with simply living in the
coldest place on earth, they have a complex and danger-filled
species-continuation strategy; they're ungainly on land when
they're adults; and they're insanely cute as chicks. Worth a
look.
Broke my RSS toy somewhat. Grr.
December 24
More inconsequential loafing. Figured out the any2vob problem,
so now I can use any2dvd properly: the former expects you to have
Arial.ttf somewhere in /usr/share/fonts, and breaks when you
don't. any2dvd doesn't notice and wanders off into a holding
pattern, waiting for input that's not coming. To fix: either
install windows fonts in /usr/share/fonts, or specify a font on
the command line or the in the config file.
Spent the evening with Lou and Elaine and several bottles of
wine. Putting the "Merry" in "Merry
Christmas", if you will.
December 23
Spent most of the day doing some non-Christmas shopping,
reading, and watching whatever TV threw at me, which included
about half of Hook - which I saw on its cinema release,
with a similarly-aged friend, in a matinee screening that was
otherwise full of kids - and about half of Pirates of
the Caribbean. The computer mainly spent the day transcoding a
file with any2vob so I can find out where it
breaks.
December 22
Oook. Sudden attack of some sort of cold or something. Where did
that come from? Anyway, last day in the office before Christmas
today. So I can sleep for the weekend.
Merged in Pete's patch, but still haven't considered Robert's as
I'm a bit out of practice with hacking lisp lately...
December 21
Spent the evening out with Lou, so those patches for RVP
(thanks, Pete) and BBDB (thanks, Robert) will have to wait for
another day...
December 20
Well, the plan was that tonight was my "quiet night"
to catch up on a couple of movies and sleep, but I got a call to
take up a spare ticket to see The Stunning, and boy was it well
worth while. I even met up with an ex-girlfriend who I haven't
seen in about seven years.
December 19
Donal's last day in
Ireland, so of course we had an evening in the pub.
My Christmas present "to me, from me" was waiting on my
desk when I got back: a Line6 Pod that I bought on ebay. I tooled
around with it for a bit while Donal checked email before the
aforementioned pub incident.
Oh, and. Someone please tell the gphoto developers that "lock
keys failed" is not a meaningful error message to us mere
mortals. More to the point, I'm not clear on why failing to
"lock" the "keys" is a fatal error when all
I'm trying to do is list the contents of the camera. And further,
I'm curious as to why the camera was misdetected when the camera
list claimed to have drivers/detection for the correct model... in
the end, I left Donal offload the pictures onto his laptop, and
then hauled 'em across to mine via good old ethernet.
December 18
I've been away for a few days - my sister got married. Congrats,
sis!
December 13
Requiem is the same story as The Exorcism Of Emily
Rose, except with a smaller budget, I guess - I've not seen
the latter, but I'd not even heard of the former until
Lou asked me if I wanted to go see it. It's another one of those
movies that you can't exactly be said to have enjoyed, per se; the
subject matter is pretty grim. But it's well-made, and the lead
actress turns in an amazing (and convincing)
performance.
December 12
Sitting in my favourite bar with my favourite person listening
to my favourite music. It doesn't really get better than that, I
guess.
Also, congrats to Stella on her big news!
December 11
The New World could best be
described as "ponderous". It's a complete waste of time,
and frankly I found debugging autoconf macros more
entertaining.
RVP fun and games: firstly, I managed to get a successful build on
a 64-bit Linux box (thanks, Dave!) albeit with a few warnings
where I'm casting pointers to integers. No cookies for me -
literally, since it's in the cookie code. Secondly, I didn't
actually manage to test messaging with said client as for some
reason attempting to log in to my half-assed RVP server from two
different networks (my home net and Dave's home net) resulted in
one of the connections inexplicably hanging until the timeout
kicked in. Well, at least I know the timeout works. The downside
to all this is that I've got two bug reports that I can't
reproduce, which makes them kinda hard to fix.
Oh yeah, and the craziness with autoconf. I run autoupdate to
update the configure files, and it turns AM_CONFIG_HEADERS into
AC_CONFIG_HEADERS. I look in the manual and it says that this is
correct. I build it locally, and it all works. Schlep it over to
the 64-bit box, and it complains that AC_CONFIG_HEADERS should be
AM_CONFIG_HEADERS. Uh, ok. So I switch it back, and autoconf
complains that AM_CONFIG_HEADERS is undefined. So I figure that
hey, autoupdate will know what to do, run it on the 64bit box,
and, uh. Yeah. Still broken. Stupid autoconf. This, remember,
makes things easier.
One of the machines in the cupboard sounds like it's about to
throw a fan. Yay. I'm more bothered by the annoying noise than the
fact that there's a server fixin' to melt, really.
December 10
Slow day... there appears to have been some sort of Tom
Hanks/Gary Sinise-fest on TV, as I caught bits of Apollo 13
and Forrest Gump. However I'd received
two more discs from Screenclick so I wound up
watching Lolita at some point in the evening. It
sticks pretty closely to the source material, although Humbert's
first marriage is skipped and there's a few other bits here and
there cut out - and it's still a long movie. About the only thing
that didn't quite gel for me was the closing scene with
Quilty; I seem to recall the book being slightly more madcap from
the start, and never with Quilty in any genuine fear - although
granted I could be misremembering. I did like the fact that the
humour of the book is carried through, even if it's occasionally
done with a little slapstick. I'm now curious to see Kubrick's
version for the sake of comparison.
December 9
Fiddled with some junkmail handling crap I've had sitting around
for a while, trying to make it leave stuff on a server folder via
IMAP rather than dumping it locally. The fact that it's written in
Perl and uses a no-longer-maintained module to deal with mailboxes
made this a little trickier than it sounds. Not like I'd have been
inclined to do it in any sort of an easier fashion...
The evening was taken up with the office Christmas party, which I
have no photographs of due to not bringing a camera. I'd intended
to, but forgot. D'oh.
December 8
Ooof. Plans and reality didn't quite coincide, meaning I ended
up with a little more alcohol and a little less food than I'd
planned. On the plus side, I didn't have to spend two hours
getting home and back into town again...
December 7
Beers with Ruadhrí to celebrate the aforementioned
birthday, and in advance of Christmas, and because it's Thursday,
I guess.
December 6
Aha, found the phishing bug in BankOfIreland.pm: I was matching
on the link text instead of the URL. D'oh.
Also, the usual Wednesday evening beer and chat with Stella.
Got an excellent bug report for a core dump in librvp; it included
the Gaim version, plugin version, exact sequence to reproduce the
bug, and the debug output. It looks like something I've possibly
already got a bandaid for if not an outright fix, but still. Let
that be an example to you all.
More by accident than anything else I ended up watching A Time To Kill, which I'm pretty
sure I've seen before; it's a pretty powerful courtroom drama with
a rather impressive cast. I'm still not a John Grisham fan, mind
you.
December 5
Happy Birthday, Ruadhrí!
I'd intended doing a bit of work on librvp this
evening, except that I broke my Samba install, which in turn
breaks my fake RVP server. I'm not even sure how I broke
my Samba install, it just, er, broke. So I'm rebuilding my little
domain from scratch with the latest Samba version since it's
broken anyway and I'm not overly concerned about losing
credentials, etc.
Hurrah, it's (mostly) working again. All I had to do was build the
latest version of Samba, throw away all my config, rejoin the
various bits to the domain, restart Apache... on the plus side, I
can finally take advantage of a patch I submitted ages back that
allows you to use wbinfo to pull an entire passwd-style record for
a user, which in turn means my cheesy RVP server can now spit out
real names to match user accounts. Small but useful
improvement.
Now I'm getting two password prompts from Gaim. WTF?
Ok, if this is working how I think it's working, then the two
prompts are because (a) I specified --login on the command line
and (b) because the account in question is also marked
"auto-login". This seems like insanely stupid behaviour,
but on the other hand it's Gaim 1.0.1.
So I've still definitely got some sort of issue with idling, but
it's not clear to me if there's a problem with the aforementioned
cheesy server that's contributing. Oh well, punt for
now.
December 4
Tooling around with some DVD-creation software in addition to
further phone abuse. I'm somewhat annoyed by the fact that there
are now several programs for Windows which basically bundle stuff
like mplayer behind what I presume is a Visual Basic front-end:
the annoyance stems from the fact that I can't seem to find a
single corresponding Linux tool, despite the fact that all the
backend bundled bits are generally Linux-native to start
with. QDVDAuthor looked briefly hopeful, but left a trail of
errors which it insisted weren't important despite the lack of a
DVD at the end of the run.
The phone abuse was equally fruitless. After once again doing
battle with Windows' idea of driver installation, I finally got
one of the tools to talk to the phone, at which point it said,
"oh, nice phone, fetching file list.... communication
timeout". Yay. Helpful message, that.
December 3
Mostly inconsequential tooling around with the phone, plus a
side order of sorting out some old files. Cleaning up a filesystem
is, for me, a lot like cleaning a room: you move stuff around a
lot without actually throwing away anything. Of course, the
filesystem requires a lot less physical effort...
My watching of Walk The Line was interrupted
about ninety minutes in by a text message telling me there was
some really good music going on in my local. For those of you not
familiar with the bar, this is the sort of place where it's not
uncommon to hear barstaff telling people that singing isn't
allowed in the bar - so much so that when I managed to finagle my
way into borrowing the guitar and playing when Best Barman Ever
left a while back, I figured it was a one-off chance to play
there. The guys in the bar played, among other songs, Folsom
Prison Blues, Ring of Fire, That's All Right Momma (which Elvis
plays in Walk The Line) and Whole Lotta Shakin' Goin' On,
which isn't on the soundtrack but is a Jerry Lee Lewis track and
he's in the movie too. It's a fantastic movie. Just... just
excellent. I can't say enough good about it, really. Both leads
are totally convincing in their roles, and the music is just
amazing. Better still if you watch it with DTS and somewhere that
the neighbours aren't going to bang on the walls, because when it
cuts into the Folsom Prison gig or one of the tour scenes
mid-movie, you're going to be drowned in LOUD MUSIC. I
particularly loved the jam session with Waylon Jennings, Jerry Lee
Lewis, Johnny Cash, and whoever the hell else was with them; it's
the sort of thing that someone should've been earwigging with a
tape deck for posterity. I don't even care if it was a fictional
creation for the movie, really. If you've not seen this, you're
missing out.
December 2
Gaim 2.0 beta 5 is out, and once again the network API has
changed. GRR. Yes, I've done little enough with the RVP
code lately (handwaving reasons) but this is still annoying.
Yet more noodling with the NW lib. Sorted out the metadata
problems rather messily, but I'm gradually dragging the API into
some sort of shape I'm actually happy with. I've now made the main
device structure opaque, which has highlighted a few more
buglets.
Ok, so the gaim change isn't huge: gaim_proxy_connect now has one
more parameter, which convention appears to be putting the
GaimConnection struct into. Easy peasy.
Spent some time tooling around with my phone and figuring out (a)
what commands it supports and (b) what those commands actually do;
information that's painfully scarce on the ground (and the
net). Ultimately I found that it's got a
read-but-don't-mark-as-read option for SMS messages, which is
nice; doing a full list of messages results in an ERROR code for
reasons I can't determine; MMS messages come out as some garbled
rubbish, while messages including Motorola's built-in graphics
don't show up in the message listings at all; there's apparently
no way to pull the sent-message status, so you can't find out when
it was actually sent; and so on. I've this crazy idea that I could
throw together an IMAP server for the phone so that I can pull the
messages into a standard mail client.
December 1
Jarhead is sort of in the same category
as Buffalo Soldiers: it's an
unorthodox look at the Marines, focused around the first Gulf
"War". It's pretty engaging, beautifully shot, well
played, and the music is really, really good. Ultimately it didn't
really tell me anything new, but hey. It's
entertainment.
More noodling with the NW lib. The metadata is getting lost in
some cases, and I'm trying to figure out where, and in the process
realising that some of the MPLE-specific code could be dragged
back into the main library.