Hacker's Diary

A rough account of what I did with Emacs recently.

August 28
Finally saw Inception, which quite a few people have been raving about; it's good, but I'm not sure it's take-you-by-the-scruff-of-the-neck-and-shake-you good that the raving I've been hearing has implied. Still, a good movie, definitely worth watching.

August 25
On the recommendation of coworkers I have switched off the "flood prevention" feature on the UPC modem, since by all accounts it doesn't work and only causes problems like the ones I'm seeing. Of course, I've already put a cheap MRTG monitor in place and haven't seen a single problem.

August 24
Sneakers found... behind the sofa. This is the universe laughing at me for asking people if they've found stuff they're looking for "down behind the sofa", I imagine.

UPC's 15MB broadband is all well and good, but they appear to suffer from periodic terrible DNS performance. I'm not sure why it's limited to DNS, or perhaps I'm diagnosing incorrectly, but it seems like I can ping things just fine in the middle of this sort of episode while being completely unable to resolve hostnames using either UPC's own servers or the Google public servers (yes, small sample set, but hey). I guess I should augment my MRTG setup to include some DNS resolver testing.


August 21
Shooter was good enough, but the ending feels like it was tacked on in response to negative reception of the preceding scene, which would have been the original ending. Hard to say without reading the source, of course, but still.

August 17
I've been living here for more than two weeks now, and I still haven't found my damned sneakers.

August 15
I've asked the Waze guys to set up an Irish Waze Forum, and got myself an Area Manager hat for the Dublin area. Lotsa cleanup to do, but there's another user also just snagged an AM hat for a slightly larger area overlapping mine, so I figure it should gradually start to look a bit better.


August 13
Classic Microsoft and their Macintosh love: Launch Word. Select "Check for Updates". This launches the Autoupdater tool, which in turn tells you there's an update. Ok, install the update. The update then pops up a dialogue box asking you to close all open Office tools... including the Autoupdater.

August 11
Miranda is ... odd. It's almost as if they came up with that hysterically funny breadboard quote that comes near the end of the movie, and then tried to construct something to fit around it. It's slow, and there are a few self-conciously arty shots that you find yourself looking at because, well, nothing's happening, but it passes the time well enough.

August 10
The fridge magnet poetry has been rediscovered. Muahahahah!

August 9
Back on cable for the first time in about a week or more. I have, in the interim, signed up for Vodafone's mobile broadband, but I'm not exactly thrilled with it. New connection is apparently fibre-backed so I've got 15MB down (albeit a paltry 1MB back up again).

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Q3 is in early this year...