Hacker's Diary

A rough account of what I did with Emacs recently.

September 29

Cool. PTSB code can now successfully log in. That's always the fun part to get working because if you screw it up badly enough you get locked out.

September 28

Well, so much for Manly Night: replacing the dishwasher element went perfectly, but it appears that the problem may actually be with the thermostat, and I can't find anyone carrying an appropriate spare; and the airbed appears to have another puncture besides the one I patched, and I've not located it.

Did some work (finally) on getting my Perl banking code talking to Permanent TSB's online stuff. In doing so, I am trying to avoid a giant re-engineering of the existing code, but it's plucking at my sleeve and I've an idea for it that would be rather more elegant than the current stuff. Still, I think I can hold out until I get this working.

September 27

Well, that was kinda fun. I plugged my iPhone into the iPad keyboard dock using an extender cable, and then logged into the laptop using iSSH and ran up emacs. Meta-keys didn't work, and either the app crashed or I inadvertently triggered the home key, but I had a good couple of minutes giggling at the technology abuse. I am also amused that all the special keys on the keyboard appear to work, such as the one to bring up an on-screen keyboard and the one to lock the device.

In other news, tonight was Manly Night: fixing a dishwasher (hopefully) and fixing an airbed with duct tape. The latter only has to last until the weekend when we take delivery of an actual piece of furniture, so fingers crossed.

September 26

The single most annoying thing I've encountered on Mr. Job's shiny new invention is the absence of printing capabilities of any sort. You can't even, say, save a web page as an image or a PDF (no, taking a screenshot does not count, particularly if the page you want to print extends over multiple screens) and instead you're left with hacky solutions like a printer app with an embedded web browser. I do hope this is something that gets some attention in a future release as it's a distinct hobble on certain iPad-based activities.

September 24

I've started pulling movies out of ScreenClick's "Classic Movies of (some decade), mainly ones I've not seen, and the first of those was Rollerball which, well, er. Yes. I'd like that two hours back, please. It's not that it's dated or cheesy or whatever, it's that I can't figure out what point the movie was trying to make. And two hours is quite a long time to put up with that level of ambiguity. Oh well.

Today's activities also included two attempts at making banana bread, and a trip on the Big Wheel beside the Point DepotO₂. The latter was pretty cool, and I'm only sorry I didn't bring a proper camera - I took a few pics with the iPhone, but the low light meant that they all had at least a little motion blur. Boooo!

September 19

Today is the fifth anniversary of this. For this I will get a new badge.

And speaking of anniversaries, whose idea was it to invite an actual lama to speak on the same day as a marketing gimmick whose TV advert includes the exclamation, "to llamas!"?

We are very pleased to announce that Lama Ole Nydahl will arrive in Dublin on Thursday 23rd of September 2010... (from Diamond Way Buddhism)

September 14

For work-related reasons, I installed Eclipse on the Mac this evening, and then spent an inordinate amount of time trying to figure out how to get JUnit to work with a basic test (short version: remove extends TestCase from the test class declaration) before working on what I'd intended to work on.

(no, I am not writing work-related code on a non-work laptop. That would be silly. I'm writing personal development-related code on a non-work laptop.)

September 12

Pride and Glory is a pretty solid corrupt-cop movie; interesting in that you get to find out the bad guys pretty quickly and the hook in the movie is chasing them down. Which is funny, because I think it was a Warren Ellis I read recently about how hard it is to write an episode of something like Columbo where the whodunnit is revealed at the start and the show is all about the cat-and-mouse dance between Columbo and the perpetrator. I'd definitely recommend Pride and Glory; it's well-made and draws you in without resorting to any cheap tricks.

September 9

Updates have been thin on the ground here. I plan on taking a weekend of slacking off to rectify that: movies to watch, perhaps an update to the books being read, that sort of craziness.

September 3

I think I was expecting Take The Lead to be a bit more like Step Up, but I didn't know it was actually based on some semblance of reality which I guess makes it a more interesting story somewhat. It's not actually bad or anything, just that I somehow expected a bit more oomph.

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