Hacker's Diary
A rough account of what I did with Emacs recently.
- May 26
- I can see why there's so much talk about Coraline being a scary movie for kids,
but my niece (9) watched it and thought it was great, so it seems
like it's scaring adults more than kids. It's a fantastic piece of
work, and all the more so when you consider that it's traditional
stop-motion animation rather than computer-generated. Definitely
one to see.
- May 25
- Spent some more time banging my head against iCal and
timezones. It looks vaguely like it's treating on-disk and
downloaded iCal files differently, which is annoying.
The batcave will shortly be relocating, which means there may be a
brief outage on this server while I move things around. I'll try
and maintain continuity on the email end of things, but you can
always contact the obvious gmail address.
In other Apple app news, Mail vs. flaky wireless generally goes in
favour of the flaky wireless. I have had Mail repeatedly wedge on
me, and crash outright on one occasion, because it's trying to
talk to a dead connection or something along those lines. It's
tempting to use netcat or similar to just send a bunch of
RST's to the open connections and see what happens. Why the
wireless is flaky is an entirely other issue.
- May 23
- Happy Birthday, Patrick!
- May 20
- Gave up on figuring out how to coerce the WEP key on the Palm in
favour of changing the key on the router instead. Radical idea,
eh?
- May 17
- Ran the Dublin 5-mile classic today. Not one of my better times,
but I still came in under 35 minutes without dying (much). Mainly
I blame a recent spate of activity which prevented me from
training much. (Update: finished 124th of 542 in a time of
34:38 on the clock, about 34:36 on my watch.)
Interesting - and annoying - nerd discovery: the Palm T|X Wi-Fi
config won't accept a hex key that's all zeros. It claims there's
something non-specifically wrong with the key. For bonus points,
it's not clear where it stores the key and it definitely appears
to be kept in an opaque format that prevents casual browsing
(unlike, say, your GPRS APN password...)
- May 14
- Happy Birthday, Dad!
Fiddling with iCal, specifically trying to figure out why it
completely ignores my timezone specification. While doing a copy
and paste from a known-good specification, the target Macintosh
froze up (not related to the hacking at hand) which is highly
frustrating. And you know it's frozen when the Force-Quit
window won't respond.
- May 9
- Man on Wire is a fascinating
documentary about the guy who walked a wire between the two WTC
towers. It covers his previous exploits, the preparation for the
WTC, and the actual event. The only thing I found lacking was, to
be honest, a little geeky: I wanted to see how they actually got
the rigging in place. They went into a good deal of detail about
getting the wire across, but nothing was said about how it was
secured. A minor quibble, to be honest: you have to watch
this.
Pineapple Express is
distinctly odd. On one hand, it's a fine piece of comedy; on the
other hand, it occasionally runs into Violent Thriller territory,
frequently without warning. Still, I definitely enjoyed it,
despite being unclear on why or when I'd added it to my
wishlist.
- May 8
- While in Boston, I stumbled upon filming of a Costner/Affleck
movie rather unimaginatively based on people losing their jobs;
the last two mornings, I've wandered past filming in the Grafton
Street / Stephens Green area, and this morning in particular
noticed Colm Meaney standing around chatting to someone. I don't
see anything on IMDB that looks a likely candidate for his
involvement, so he may just have been in the area visiting the set
or something.
- May 7
- Also recently (re)watched: Flushed Away which, if you haven't
seen it, you need to go out and find; and this week I am mostly
watching The Muppet
Show. It's kinda weird looking at a show I grew up with and
trying to understand how it got made - parts of it are clearly
aimed at a particular type of adult (typically the straight-faced
variety show act by the show's guest), parts of it are very
kid-friendly (basically, anything involving muppets), and parts of
it are aimed at the sort of corny jokes people make when they
first discover puns. It's an odd mix, and I don't think it'd
actually get past a pitch to a studio today.
- May 4
- X-Men Origins:
Wolverine was rather excellent and not at all deserving of the
bad reports I'd heard; the only fault I found with it was that it
seemed a little rushed towards the end, as if they were trying to
squeeze in a few extras before the closing credits.
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