Hacker's Diary
A rough account of what I did with Emacs recently.
- December 30
- Another rewatch: Juno. It's better the second time around
because you know that the snappy dialogue isn't all that the film
has going for it.
- December 29
- After some minor restructuring and a lot of testing, the PTSB
module in Finance::Bank::IE now sports 100% code coverage
in testing. I've also knocked together some code to anonymise
pages saved off the site so that they can be bundled as a test
suite with the code. It's a bit ugly in places, but it's a start,
and I intend to use it as a basis for refactoring the code into
something a bit more structured. Ironically, three of the current
tests don't actually work if you test against the live PTSB
website, for handwavy reasons.
Possibly one of the most useful Cook's Aid websites I've ever
stumbled across: The Cook's
Thesaurus. I'm only sorry it's not an iPhone app for those
times when you can't find that one thing when you're shopping and
want to know what you can use instead.
It's been long enough since I read the book that I'm not sure if
The 39 Steps took liberties with the
story, although I do recall noting that the book lacked any sort
of twist while this particular screen version comes with at least
one and arguably more. I'm also not convinced that the love
interest in the book was quite so strongly played up, and looking
at plot notes from other versions of the film it seems that quite
a few more significant changes were made somewhere along the
line. But that's not to say that I didn't enjoy it - it's a decent
piece of work.
We also started watching Time Bandits but, eh, I think you really need
to be a complete Gilliam fanboy to watch this. Abandoned after
about half an hour when it didn't seem like it was going to
improve.
- December 27
- Linkfarm code appears to be
exhibiting signs of senility, which may have something to do with
my choice of storage mechanism (NDBM + Storable, last time I
looked). I should probably look into that.
Rewatched a couple more movies: Die Hard 4 was one of them and
Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal
Skull was the other.
- December 25
- Can't quite recall what we watched in the post-Christmas-Dinner
food coma, other than the Doctor Who special, which we'll be
watching again in HD tomorrow since it's on our only HD channel
then.
- December 24
- More RSS toy hacking, or rather hacking in support of the RSS
toy. Some time back I'd made some small changes to my
Fink installation to
allow it to recognise that there's a good deal more installed in
the native Perl than Fink currently declares, which in turn
allowed me to work around the problem of Fink
installing a version of libxml2 that Just. Doesn't. Work. Since
then, I've upgraded Fink, which overwrote my changes, but I didn't
notice because I tend to leave months go by without making
significant changes to the RSS toy. Yesterday I discovered it was
broken and rather than trying to fix the Perl 5.10.0 installation
up, I figured I'd backtrack and use the Perl 5.8.8 distribution
which Fink hauls around with it. Except that ran into some
long-ago tweaking I'd done on an individual package to allow me to
install XML::RSS... it took about an hour of poking to figure this
out, in the course of which another toy got a minor update, but
really I'm thinking it might be time to redo the RSS toy in Java,
if only as a learning exercise for myself.
Yes, Java. I need to work with it for handwavy reasons anyway, and
it's always better to have a project to play with.
Man. Every time I try doing something with Eclipse I wind up
spending more time downloading and attempting to understand what's
going on than I actually spend on the original task. This time
around I thought I'd try out Maven, since I'm told it's a
convenient way to handle external dependencies like, say,
Hibernate; it installed as advertised, but the big shiny link it
dropped on the splash page is a 404, and when I tried following
the quickstart demo the build failed with a missing class and no
indication of who's supposed to provide it. AWESOME STUFF,
GUYS. It's almost as much fun as Gentoo.
- December 23
- Taking Woodstock is
kinda fun, although it seems to have suffered at the hands of the
critics for not showing more of Woodstock itself (to which I'd
say, wasn't there some other movie you could have watched if
that's what you wanted?). I can't say it's a must-watch, but I
mostly enjoyed it.
I'm moving stuff around on the home network, so right now I have
MySQL replication set up. Which is nice, as I'd been curious about
how to do that.
Also tweaking some of the RSS toy internals, mainly because it's
been spewing an error every half hour for the past, er, month or
two because Certain People are not serving parsable RSS in their
RSS feeds, and it's broken enough that my previous attempts to
work around this failed.
- December 22
- Watched most of Enemy at the Gates and Armageddon on account of them
being on TV. Both previously watched; the former is good albeit
occasionally draggingly slow, and the latter is exactly what you'd
expect from a blockbuster: things explode, people crack wise, and
physics is abandonded as being no fun in these sorts of situations
(Except Where Required By Plot).
- December 19
- Somehow, I'd never seen The Sting; not even excerpts. And it
turns out that a little bit of hammy acting and an awful Irish
accent aside, it's quite the excellent movie. Of course, as I said
before, the problem with watching a con movie is that you suspect
that everything is a con; for this movie, that doesn't quite pan
out, but there's certainly a few things on the go aside from the
obvious one. Watch this if you get the chance.
- December 14
- Got my AirPrint working last night. Printing from either iPhone,
or the iPad. It's almost as if someone said, "hey, these
things should Just Work" (no thanks to Stripey Fruit Computer
Company that I had to download a third-party app to cause this to
happen).
- December 12
- Christmas Shopping 2010: order gift online. Discover that vendor
doesn't do gift wrap. Email recipient(s) to warn them not to open
the box when it arrives. Repeat.
- December 6
- How very first-world. I have internet and cable TV and gas and
hot water and central heating, but my cold water feed is on the
blink.
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