A rough account of what I did with Emacs recently.
October 31
It's Hallowe'en, by which I mean the locality looks and sounds
like a minor warzone, with flashes and explosions all over. In an
attempt to avoid the hordes of trick-or-treaters I'm hiding in the
pub.
October 30
Durrr. The reason RTÉ have been showing filler in the
Scrubs slot on Mondays is that, er, the season's over. The
cliffhanger ending I was expecting wasn't really that much of a
cliffhanger, which I guess is why I didn't realise it was the
season finale. Still, d'oh.
Last night's activites haven't really left me in a fit state to
hack on anything, so I've just been tinkering with the website
instead. I have far too many pages (i.e. more than one) which
suggest I might some day update them with current
information.
October 29
Saw most of The Last Debate, which I
initially thought was an episode of The West Wing or something
similar until someone swore... not a bad movie at all, all about a
bunch of journalists using a presidential debate to
character-assassinate one of the candidates, which another
journalist then investigates to find out why they did it. Nicely
contemporary.
Halloween Party at Dominic Street, wherein I
went as a zombie. Braaaaains! (do note that a stake through
the heart does not kill a zombie, it just annoys
them and gives them something to prop a beer on)
October 28
Tackled the Gaim 2.0 version of the plugin again, and managed to
wrestle it back into a clean build after an hour. File transfers
are, in fact, working, but a bit weirdly (the progress bar never
updates, and sending a 35MB file to a Windows machine failed
somewhere around half-way through, while sending the same file the
other way worked fine). Windows helpfully pre-declines files with
a .EXE suffix, I notice.
October 27
Took a day off work today to make myself a longer
weekend. Rather than do something about the beta4 build, I watched
a bunch of Scrubs
episodes, got a haircut, drank too many hot chocolates and
coffees, met up with Lou, met up with Cathal, and spent the
evening with the latter in my new favourite bar. Pity that my new
favourite bar is so damned far away from where I live, although on
the plus side I got a way cheap taxi ride
home.
October 26
Gaim 2.0 beta 4 is out. There are API changes. Things will
break. BAH.
October 25
Little Nicky was actually a lot
better than I expected, and if it wasn't for the voice Sandler
puts on for the title character I might even have enjoyed it. As
it was, there were a few good gags amid a mostly predictable
storyline, and that voice just kept irritating me.
Turns out last night's code was along the right track, but mostly
non-functional. I put together a slightly more functional version
tonight, so now when your single-user chat becomes a multi-user
chat, it discards the original single-user window. I'd much prefer
to reuse it, like MSIM does, but that looks to be non-trivial to
say the least. What I should at least look at is stuffing the
window history so you don't lose track of what you were gabbing
about.
October 24
So I think Lara
Croft, Tomb Raider: The Cradle Of Life is another one of those
movies I added to my wishlist just so I could say I'd seen
it. It's not awful, just bad. Right from the start. There's
nothing good about it, really; not even the soundtrack can save
it. Don't bother, even as a joke.
Had another look at the RVP bug. It's occurring with
"raw" Gaim 1.0.1, but not with 1.5.0-16.fc5, and Gaim
2.0 doesn't use the same dialogue box when you launch it with
--login so the problem has no way of showing up. So I'm no closer
to finding what's wrong, but I could always claim it's down to
unsupported versions of the client...
Half-heartedly attempted to implement one of the things on the RVP
to-do list, mainly because I've spent most of today tinkering with
C code and I'm not really in any fit shape to get my head around
another chunk of stuff. Plus, I need at least one more computer
running to test the code. I figured, hey, it compiles, I'll check
it in.
October 23
Dammit, what the hell are RTÉ doing with their Scrubs
schedule?
Christopher Brookmyre is a truly awesome writer. I am in fits of
giggles on his account right now.
October 22
Spent several hours looking for the aforementioned coredump
bug. It's rare enough that you probably won't ever encounter it,
but it annoys me that it's present and I can't find the cause of the
damn thing, despite single-stepping (and crashing gdb), removing
various chunks of code, comparing with non-crashing plugins, and
checking for memory trashing (which is what's happening) with
valgrind.
October 21
Kids was so-so. It reminds me a lot of a
music documentary I saw years ago on the New York New Wave scene,
particularly the fact that the dialogue is very loose and
slangy. Not a must-watch, but not terrible.
I didn't drop that tray, it was caught in a sudden gust of
gravity (attribution, dammit, meredith's quotes
file). Aside from that, a fun evening of live jazz at the Blue Note with Ray, Lou and
Elaine.
Also, happy birthday, Natalia!
October 20
Office Drinkies, whee!
October 19
Much as I had suspected, Killing Zoe was in part a
Bender/Tarantino production, although the latter didn't turn up in
a cameo role for once. It started out promising, went downhill
with an over-long pillow-talk scene in the first fifteen minutes,
followed by an over-long drink/drugs scene, and frankly by the
time it got to the heist (which I thought was the point of the
movie) I was already bored. Really, not worth wasting time on
unless you absolutely have to, although buying the soundtrack
wouldn't be a bad idea.
Moved some of my older MPLE code over to the
new library I've been slowly putting together. I've a few more
test files to play with so I can see how the v2 stuff is working,
maybe, but not tonight.
Had another go at dealing with the RVP
logout process. It's very simple: you get to choose between a race
condition (or possibly more than one) and an improper logout. I
really, REALLY wish Gaim's logout process allowed you to have a
"logout complete" flag or callback of some
sort.
Also, I've still not figured out the core dump I found last week
whereby if you fire it up with --login and no password saved, then
hit cancel, then quit, and blammo.
October 18
Finished updating the captions on the Iceland
Photos. Not much else happening; met up with Stella for a
beer, and stopped by the local to try the new Guinness brew, but
that's about it.
October 17
Met up with my parents - who are on their way to
another holiday, this time in Vienna - for dinner, and
then caught up with Zed and Jennifer for a few drinks before they
head back across the pond.
October 16
Debian are apparently winding up for a release that includes the
as-yet-unreleased Gaim 2.0. To this end, I'm kicking out a 0.9.5
release of librvp,
which is the version that includes the work I've done to support
Gaim 2. Note that there are still some untested bits on this, in
particular the file transfers; my main focus is on finishing off
the rough edges and the Gaim 2 port was sort of a sidetrack from
that. Having said that, I run the development codebase myself on a
daily basis, so it's still definitely very much functional for
Gaim 1.x. Download away!
South Park:
Bigger, Longer, & Uncut made me chuckle. Once. I think I
lost interest in South Park somewhere in the middle of season
two. Oh well, another one scratched off the list of things people
tell me I should see.
Captioned about half of the Iceland
photos, so now you know what you're looking at.
October 15
More fun and games with banking modules: BoI have taken to
stuffing an interstitial page about phishing into their site,
which requires you to click a button to get past, and failing to
do so prevents you from accessing the rest of the site. Stupid,
and not really something I like to have to code around, but
whatever. Version 0.08 pushed to CPAN.
In another occurrence of "eleven years ago, there was a
party, and the results are still coming in", I met up
with Zed and his wife Jennifer today and proceeded to show them
some of the nicer parts of Dalkey (Mugs coffee shop, Killiney
Hill, the Vico Road) with attendant chatter. They're in town for a
few more days, so no doubt there will probably be a pub trip
between now and their departure.
Happy Birthday, Elaine! Well, I don't know if today's the day, but
today's certainly when we went and had a few beers, so.
October 14
Ok, it's done. I'll need to proof and probably edit, but all the
salient (and sordid) details are in. Iceland
Trip Report, final draft.
Oh, and I still haven't captioned any of the pictures, but the
text might help you figure out some of the less obvious
ones.
October 13
The Devil Wears Prada
turns out to be a very well-made movie that does an excellent job
of Not Messing Up despite the huge potential for same in the
plot. I was rather surprised at how much I enjoyed it; I was
expecting amusement, but not the laugh-out-loud moments I
encountered. The plot itself isn't anything new or exciting, but
that doesn't detract in the least from the film. Worth
seeing.
October 12
Wouldn't you know it, I get network logging and network console
set up for the laptop, and it fails to hang. Bah.
Met up with Lou after work for a drink. Or two. Or, wait, what
time is it?
October 11
For the last two mornings my laptop has been in an unhealthy
state when I've checked on it; it's as if the hard drive is gone
to sleep and won't wake up. Since it wasn't doing this in Iceland
I can only assume it's got something to do with the nightly backup
job. And of course netdump isn't working on the laptop so I can't
get any sort of useful error message...
Stella's back doing her jewelry course near where I work, so I met
up with her this evening for a drink. While I was gadding about
Iceland she and her boyfriend were doing a 1,000-mile tour
through, as she put it, all the countries in the British
Isles. Yow.
Knocked out a bit more of the Iceland
Trip Report, plus in lieu of actually doing anything useful
with the photos I've thumbnailed them all and put up the Iceland
Photos page. You can guess what various things are while you
wait for me to add captions and assemble panormas and what
not.
My main problem with Knockaround Guys is that only
one of the main cast (Barry Pepper) had a suitably convincing
accent. John Malkovich, bless him, is a great actor and all, but
he can't do Goombah, especially not with that hint of a
lisp. Barry Pepper, on the other hand, could pass for Christopher
Walken's son both in looks and voice. The movie itself is a bit
slow to get going, but worth watching for the
dénouement.
October 10
I think the plot explanation in Identity is revealed a bit too soon,
and the twist wasn't wholly necessary but wasn't terrible, but the
movie as a whole is pretty well put together. In particular, it's
interesting to see John C. McGinley, scourge of newbie interns on
the set of Scrubs, playing a really passive character with
something verging on OCD. You'd almost describe him as wimpy
except for the fact that he's built like the proverbial brick
outhouse. The cast list is pretty impressive, too. One to see,
definitely.
More typing has resulted in the conclusion of day one and the
"a funny thing happened in the bar" story from day two,
but still no pictures. Plus, the notes get progressively flakier
from here on as I spend more time partying and less time doing
anything interesting (that I'm willing to talk to strangers about)
so you may wait for the complete saga, or you can have a look at
the still work-in-progress Iceland
Trip Report.
October 9
I have a ton of photos, and lots of notes on where I went and
what I did, but the latter are neither all in one place (I found
some more on my PDA this evening) nor quite in a form I'm happy
with, so editing is required. However, it's Monday night, meaning
Scrubs is on, so that comes first. Plus another coffee
meet-up with Lou, and a bit of running, and, well, yeah. I'll get
around to this eventually, I promise.
In geek news, traffic on the BBDB list burst into life
a day or two after I'd left. This list is usually almost
completely dormant.
Okay, so it's now almost midnight and I've only barely written up
the first day of the trip. Here's the Iceland
Trip Report so far.
October 8
Met up with Lou for a coffee, and later Sheila called around to
chat and borrow the spare room. As a result I haven't touched
much, if anything of such things as "how I spent the last two
weeks" or "what I took photos of", so you'll just
have to wait.
October 7
I am returned from a 2-week trip to Reykjavik. However, normal
service is not yet available.