Hacker's Diary
A rough account of what I did with Emacs recently.
- April 27
- Booked my NCT, finally. My choices were either 8 weeks from now,
or "a cancellation tomorrow". Opted for the former as
there's no way I'd have gotten myself in order for the
latter.
- April 26
- Back from Boston. And you didn't even know I was
gone!
(Which, incidentally, is the reason behind the problem I was
having with the anchors and dates not matching on this page;
apparently the elisp I
hacked up uses different methods to generate the anchor and the
date. D'oh.)
On the plane back, I watched two and half movies; one was The Spirit, which was so hammy that I think my
sinuses were filled with bacon by the time it was over, and that
was the airplane cut, too; the second full movie I watched I can't
even remember the name of, but it was another one that was on my
"wouldn't mind seeing but don't want to rent" list; and
the half was Cadillac Records, which
actually looks interesting enough to rent out and see the uncut
version of.
- April 23
- The NCT site is now down to telling people to use the phone line
only. Fabulous service, this.
Bananaz is a little like
Gorillaz: I enjoyed bits of it, but a lot of the time I
wasn't entirely clear on what was going on. The low volume level
of the documentary as presented by whichever "no, WE'RE the
future of Internet Video" website is currently hosting it
didn't help. Still, interesting to see some of the creative
background to the band.
- April 22
- Aha. Despite bundling a library for the P2K stuff, it seems
moto4lin
has its own embedded version of the same thing. The question is,
why does it work when the p2kmoto library
doesn't?
- April 20
- The Department of Transport recently indicated that cars without
a valid roadworthiness cert would incur three penalty points for
the registered owner of that car, and five if the car proved to be
unsafe. Shortly thereafter, the NCT site put up a notice on the
front page saying people might experience delays on the phonelines
due to the increased volume of calls. Shortly after that,
the website was reduced to just the notice - everything else,
including the online booking facility, has been removed. I guess
Access databases really don't scale that well...
Curiously, despite the fact that I can't make the test program
work, the moto4lin
binary appears to be happily functioning. This is mildly annoying
and requires further investigation.
- April 18
- After a few false starts, I got a newer libusb built; the major
stumbling block was that the Fink autoconf
installation seemed to be having trouble with the
AC_LANG_CPLUSPLUS macro; replacing it with
AC_PROG_CXX solved the problem, but I'm not clear on why
this is, and trying to debug anything autoconf-related
makes my head hurt.
Anyway, even with the new library in place, the P2K calls are
still timing out. I have no idea what's going on
here.
- April 17
- I reactivated my account on Twitter in order to try it out
as a newsfeed and follow updates from people I'm interested
in. I'm using Nambu as a
client, and it's pretty slick, but... some of the feeds I was
hoping to make use of don't quite seem to get the point. You've
got 140 characters in which to put, let's say, your news headline;
additionally, if you're a news-publising organisation, you'll want
to squeeze in a link to your "original" story, using one
of the URL-shortening services. Of the feeds I picked as a
starting point, I ditched CNN when the first updates I saw were
about some daft "collect a bunch of followers on
Twitter" contest, while far more newsworthy things were going
on; the Irish Times, RTÉ, and - much to my surprise - the
BBC feeds all appear to be repackaged versions of the RSS feeds,
which means that the "teaser text" for the story is
frequently truncated, usually mid-word; and the New York Times
feed appears to steer in the opposite direction, using short,
pithy headlines (occasionally including the name of some section
of the paper or site, presumably for context) which ultimately
serves to underinform me.
I think I'll go back to relying on RSS feeds. I'm not hip enough
for this technology.
(And now I find an update on the RTÉ feed that has the
URL truncated, so you can't actually chase it back to the original
story. Choice.)
- April 16
- Odd. For some reason the elisp I use to maintain this
page has started inserting the wrong anchor tag for the daily
entries. Although as I type this I think I know why.
Spent some more time today fiddling around with p2kmoto, which is
a library to talk to Motorola phones in P2K mode; the version
bundled with Moto4lin had
the beginnings of OSX integration in it but it was
incomplete. I've been tooling around with trying to make it work,
and having fixed the basic problems (such as the fact that the OSX
version of libusb doesn't appear to have a way of telling
the kernel to get the hell away from a given USB device) it's
failing on talking to the device after switching it to P2K
mode. I'm not entirely clear why. There's an updated version of
the 0.x release of libusb available independant from the main
libusb site; there's also a 0.x compatibility layer with the
libusb 1.x release. Obviously what I need to do is install one of
these and then get distracted by some other abandoned
project.
- April 14
- Redid the OpenVPN stuff
using TLS keys, after I found my CA key from my old server (hurrah
for backups). I was going to set up a bridging VPN, but (a) the
HOWTO doesn't have anything that addresses MacOS directly and (b)
there was a non-zero chance of me knocking my server off the net
through incautious configuration, so I left it be.
Semi-Pro is the sort of movie my Dad
would call "harmless". Mostly, the laughs are giggles or
chuckles, although there are a few places where it gets funnier,
and Will Ferrell is mainly playing his "overwrought dumb
guy" character. Not worth renting, but probably worth sitting
around for if it shows up on TV.
- April 13
- 101 Reykjavik was mildly
interesting, but I was mainly looking out for locations that I'd
recognise from my trip to Iceland in 2006. And I did find
some. The movie's an oddball sort of thing, full of quirkiness and
a repeated cheesy instrumental cover of The Kinks' Lola,
but enjoyable for all that.
- April 12
- Spent some more time fiddling with the MP3/Perl stuff,
and came to the conclusion that the code I'd wanted to use (a Perl
wrapper for ID3lib) is
essentially unusable because it's wrapping ID3lib's C interface which isn't
quite comprehensive enough, and it'd be easier to rewrite the module
entirely than to try and coerce it into something wrapping the C++
interface. I also recall attempting this before and abandoning it,
but that was possibly because I was too slack to read up on how to
deal properly with Perl's internals.
- April 11
- Happy birthday to me!
- April 10
- Found a bug in mailman.pl
whereby it ran out of files, because I wasn't calling
finish() on the object returned by parse(). This
might well make the script perform better, too.
Been experimenting with OpenVPN - I used have a PPTP
setup but that went away when I moved my server to the Cube. I got
a VPN working this morning, and immediately decided to download
the Tunnelblick
client; disappointingly, it doesn't appear to work with static
key configurations, and more to the point it fails
silently.
More movies: Wall-E is excellent, in only the
way Pixar can be, and I definitely want to see it again; The
Librarian: The Curse of the Judas Chalice is absolute rubbish,
but I watched it anyway; and I gave up on The Wrestler after about an hour
in because the version I was watching was very obviously cut, so
I'll put it on the wishlist for something to watch on DVD
later.
- April 9
- Hacking on phone backup toys again, which inevitably means
arguing with someone else's Perl for
handling mailbox files. I think I've managed to kill the major
annoyances in the Mail::Folder::Mbox module, which has
been unmaintained for most of the time I've known about it and is
probably deprecated in favour of doing things more cleverly, but
it's code I know how to work with so I tend to stick with
it.
Wall-E was a lot of fun.
- April 7
- Watched V for Vendetta again. Yes, they
tweaked the storyline, and put in some Hollywood ick, but I still
really like this movie.
- April 5
- Burn After Reading: not as
funny as I was expecting, and in places jarringly violent, but on
the whole an enjoyable movie.
- April 1
- Ireland played Italy at soccer tonight, and came away with
another glorious draw; it really wasn't a reflection of talent or
anything else but pure chance. Not that that's stopping the
pundits from lionising the greens again.
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