Hacker's Diary
A rough account of what I did with Emacs recently.
- February 28
- Watched Dead Man and Intolerable Cruelty from my
vast DVD library. The former is a quirky Jim Jarmusch piece with a
a surprisingly long list of "name" actors, and Gary
Farmer's Native American is a hoot. The latter is classic Coen
brothers, with George Clooney doing an absolute star turn as a
highly successful divorce lawyer who may have met his match. Both
well worth seeing.
- February 24
- All I can say about Scrubs season 7 is,
"damn you, writers' strike". Eleven episodes instead of
twenty or more, leaving a big hole in what we'll loosely refer to
as the "plot". Oh well, roll on season 8.
- February 22
- I saw My Cousin Vinny in the cinema
when it was released, and my abiding memory of it was that the
entire cinema was laughing so much at the first half-hour or
so that we almost missed chunks of dialogue. Re-watching it on my
own some seventeen(!) years on, I'm not sure I can even pick out
the bits that caused so much hilarity, although I'm guessing the
double entendre-laden conversation in the jail had a lot
to do with it. That's not to say I didn't enjoy the movie the
second time around; it's a solid piece of comedy courtroom drama,
and definitely something I'd happily watch a few more
times.
I downloaded VirtualBox, Sun's entry into the VM arena, some time
back, but for some reason it had trouble with a Fedora
installation, failing at the DHCP stage every time. I've just now
installed the latest version and it's successfully churned its way
through a Fedora 8 install quite happily. Now to figure out if
I've actually got a use for it, or if it was just something I
wanted to tool around with in lieu of clearing down various to-do
lists...
- February 21
- Doomsday is a reasonable apocalyptic
movie; nothing special, sprinkled with plot holes (why do they
bother with full-on environmental suits when they don't have an
airlock in the APCs?) and - as you'd expect from the guy who made
Dog Soldiers - lots of splatter. Whiled away my Saturday
afternoon nicely, but I wouldn't say it's one to rush out and
rent.
One of my coworkers loaned me In the Shadow of the Moon, a
documentary about the Apollo programme told by some of the
participating astronauts. It's not bad, although it's a shame they
couldn't have persuaded Armstrong to appear in it. Mike Collins
would, I suspect, make an entertaining storyteller for the entire
thing all by himself - very expressive, funny, and
self-deprecating. Nice little touch at the end where they got each
of the participants to address the question of the landings being
faked; I do like the story I heard about Aldrin punching
someone who confronted him with that some time in the last few
years! Worth a look if you're at all interested in the moon
landings. Also, there's about an hour of extra footage on the DVD
that's in some cases better than what they included in the main
feature.
- February 20
- I started watching The Brylcreem Boys during
the week, and only got around to watching the rest of it
tonight. It's one of the many movies that was so long in coming to
me via the rentals queue that I'd forgotten why I'd added it to
said queue in the first place; within about ten minutes I was
giggling at Gabriel Byrne hamming it up as the commander of No. 2 Internment
Camp during WWII. The paddywhackery is strongly played up, and
Jean Butler of the original Riverdance performance takes a turn on
the floor at the local céidlídh, but it's easy to
forgive the clichés as intentional fun. Well worth
watching.
- February 15
- Ok, that's just freaky. I took the CPU fan off the crashy ITX
box because it's sufficiently aged and worn to make grindy noises,
and the box stopped crashing. I will be quite peeved if it turns
out the magical fix I couldn't find was simply to disconnect the
damned fan.
- February 12
- So if you take an action movie, and remove anything that isn't
an action sequence, you get Shoot 'Em Up. It's pretty
ridiculous, the dialogue is crap, and it's just not as good as
The Transporter which went for a similar all-action style
but actually carried it off. I have no idea why Clive Owen would
sign up for something as bad as this, but I guess he has to pay
the bills somehow. Not really worth seeing, but probably not so
bad that it needs to be actively avoided.
- February 9
- While He's Just Not That Into
You was less "chick flick" than I expected (not so
many tearful/romantic/romantically-tearful scenes, basically) it
was still definitely in chick-flick territory. However, it was
also a lot of fun, and very funny in places, and there's a whole
lot of "Wow. That is so true.". Not quite the
female version of High Fidelity, but certainly in the
ballpark.
- February 8
- Webserver backup solved in a really grungy way: a loop which
just tries to remote-login and sync the files to my backup
drive. The remote login has an activity timeout of 30 seconds so
if the box dies (as it's continuing to do) the loop just kicks
back in again when the box reappears. This is working surprisingly
well.
Mainly being Mr. Domestic today, but I did watch a bit of the
Scotland/Wales match, wherein Scotland threw away several
near-misses in favour of being defeated by the
visitors.
- February 7
- A "d'oh" moment: spent ages trying to figure out why
the changes I was making to my mod_perl setup were having
no apparent effect, before realising I should've been making the
changes to mod_cgi's setup...
Spent some more time trying to figure out if it's possible to set
up iSync to talk to my phone. Even the much shopped-around advice
to take an existing Motorola iSync plugin and tweak it came to
nothing.
Six Nations Rubgy is back! Half-watched the England/Italy match,
in which a poorly-performing England beat a more poorly-performing
Italy, and then was pretty much glued to the Ireland/France
match in which both teams excelled but Ireland ultimately claimed
victory. A good solid win to start the tournament, let's hope we
can keep it up.
Further attempts to try and make the old webserver stay running
long enough to copy files off look to be doomed to failure. It's
rebooting fairly reliably on network access at this point. On a
hunch, I tried disabling the onboard ethernet and
sticking in a PCI card, but it didn't even get to the login
prompt before crashing.
Southland Tales: great music,
seriously awful movie. I mean, parts of it almost approached
"so bad it's good" B-movie territory.
- February 5
- Apparently adding Google Gears to my browser should get me
GeoIP-based location support. Except, well, it didn't, and it
didn't even give me an error message; it just quietly failed. Not
a very impressive result, really.
Back to trying to get my Apache 2 setup working on the
laptop, so I can hammer out the bugs before putting it onto The
Cube. Got my RSS toy up and running fairly quickly, and it's
actually rather speedy when not quite so hampered by having the
database and the webserver competing for scarce
resources. On the whole it looks like it should be a fairly clean
drop-in replacement for the existing setup. I've set the relevant
Fink builds running,
which is probably killing the webserver somewhat right now.
Also, I am mildly irritated to discover that MacOS 10.5 comes
with a command-line tool for investigating which bits of software
belong to which package (pkgutil), but 10.4 does not,
despite using (as best I can tell) an identical file format for
the relevant data.
Huh, odd "feature" in Apache's logging: if you define a
logging format using LogFormat, and you misspell the name
of the format either there or on the subsequent CustomLog
line, all you get in the logging is whatever word you put at the
end of that CustomLog line. Discovered on laptop rather
than server, at least (server is still building things).
- February 4
- Had a look at Google Latitude. Not supported in Ireland, and
surprisingly apparently no GeoIP support. Pressed a few buttons
and possibly sent "Please Join Google Latitude" to a
whole bunch of people, so sorry if you got one of those, I'm
trying to figure out how to cancel all of
them. Sheesh.
My usual candidate for Best Customer Service Ever (which
admittedly is a fairly easy contest to win in Ireland) is
ScreenClick, aka Them Wot Sends Me DVDs In The Post. Today they
sent me some promo email for their sponsorship of the Jameson Film
Festival which, to the best of my recollection, is the first time
they've sent me something that could best be classed as spam. A
shame, really. The bigger shame, however, was that the unsubscribe
link - run via a company who I'm not linking to as they're an
email marketing firm and that's not something I support - was
broken when I tried it, perhaps from the flood of irritated
customers attempting to unsubscribe. Tut tut.
- February 3
- Trying to recopy some stuff off the old webserver - the one that
successfully ran hardware tests for a day - and it's back to its
old crashy ways again. Pfft.
The Spiderwick
Chronicles was kinda fun. A bit like Inkheart in terms of
target audience - young adult, essentially - and a little younger
in storyline and theme, but I enjoyed the hour and a half it took
to watch it. There's constantly a dark edge to it throughout, and
what humour there is in it is coloured by this constant foreboding
- and the humour is fairly skimpy, anyway. Worth a
look.
- February 1
- The spelling mistake in the title of The Pursuit of
Happyness bothered me when the posters for the cinema release
were all over the place, but of course it's a reference to part
of the story. The story itself is fairly predictable; I wonder how
much it differs from the story on which it's based, as the version
presented here is fairly standard Man Triumphs Over Adversity fare
complete with moments of false hope and subsequent
knock-backs. Nice way to while away a couple of hours on Sunday,
but it's hardly must-see stuff.
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