Hacker's Diary

A rough account of what I did with Emacs recently.

December 31
It's the end of 2009... I've chucked a bunch of stuff from my del.icio.us feed and signed up to InstaPaper - the latter looks like it wants to be hooked to my RSS toy. Perhaps something to do tomorrow while I'm waiting for Doctor Who to start.


December 26
Watched L.A. Story for the first time in ages, and I'm convinced that Cary Elwes has a cameo in the L'Idiot restaurant scene. Or at least someone who looks very, very like him.

December 24
Some mucking about with the Vodafone and archive-my-phone stuff - long overdue, as is an overhaul of same.

December 23
It's a "threequel", but Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs is pretty good. There's a bit of the expected retreads of older jokes, addition of new characters, etc. but the bottom line is that it's a lot of fun and never really steps very far wrong (the Simon Pegg-voiced character is a little iffy at the start, but that's about it). Worth a look.


December 19
With a little bit of tweaking of my old config, I managed to resurrect my OpenVPN configuration. Slightly more interesting to work with when the server endpoint isn't fixed...


December 12
Frequently Asked Questions About Time Travel is sheer genius. I have no idea why I added it to my wishlist, but I'm glad I did, and now I think I'm going to buy a copy.

Hacked up a half-assed piece of code to interrogate the UPC modem - I've been pulling signal levels off it for a while and wanted to grab a few more bits, and while I've found a reasonable-looking UPNP module that I should be able to use I've not actually dug into it yet.

December 11
A Cock And Bull Story: amusing, but not as much as I'd expected.

December 7
Even knowing what the machine in the movie is before it's revealed, I still got confused by Primer. I think I'd like a diagram and a few more viewings before I get it.

December 6
Wow. Skype spam. That's a first.


December 5
I am hacking on the makerpm.pl script to make it more generic, i.e. make it understand Fink as well as RPM. Anyone who feels like telling me I'm reinventing some sort of rotary transport / load-bearing device can go to the back of the line.

Did my annual Jingle Bells 5k today. Race time was somewhere over 21 minutes, personal time was 20:57.88 - far better than I was expecting. I also collected €200 for charity, which was nice.

December 2
BankOfIreland.pm now allows you to activate a beneficiary, which I threw in as a step in moving my stuff away from BoI - the beneficiary that I used to test the code is my new non-BoI account.

Watched the rest of The Insider. It is a good story, but it's far too long, and needlessly so - there's a lot of arty camerawork that could really be cut without losing either the flow of the picture or any of the actual goodness. Plus, if you're going to run up two and a half hours of screen time, you shouldn't really leave glaring loose ends like "what happened to the Kentucky-based injunction?" (never mind that, here's a picture of a burning car). Worth a look if you have the time. And, of course, you should probably dig up the source material as well (Vanity Fair, May 1996, The Man Who Knew Too Much) since it's interesting.

December 1
Working on some proper tests for the banking modules; mainly so I can start writing one for my new online banking, but so far I've turned up ... not so much a bug as an inconvenience in the BoI code.

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And there goes 2009