Hacker's Diary

A rough account of what I did with Emacs recently.

April 30: Watched The Princess Bride again for the benefit of someone who hadn't seen it and was curious about my t-shirt bearing Inigo's little speech as Gaeilge.
April 29: Despicable Me is very funny and well plotted, too. I think this one goes in the "Buy Me" bucket.
April 27: Attempting to keep up with the hibernate stuff I'm learning; it falls out of my head if I'm not using it, which unfortunately means that right now I'm trying to remember what I was doing with it. Also discovering how bad my database schema is.
April 26: Er, what?
Installed Snow Leopard Font Update
Done.

You have installed one or more updates that requires that you restart your
computer. Please restart immediately.

Did someone just install Windows on my Mac?
April 25: Finally released the in-progress version of Finance::Bank::IE, mainly on account of being cheesed off with tweaking. There's a few fairly major changes: there's now a master module (Finance::Bank::IE) which the various per-bank modules subclass; there's a reasonably comprehensive test suite (although it's missing some stuff still, I just got fed up as noted above); and I've started restructuring the code so that I can maybe make a bit more of it common to the master module. Enjoy!
April 24: And another recorded film: Planet of the Apes, wherein Charlton Heston and Troy McClure are revealed to be one and the same (at least as far as delivery goes), the apes are fairly straightfaced because prosthetics weren't advanced enough to make them more expressive, and the dialogue in general is fairly wooden and appalling. Mainly watching this out of a sense of "it is (or was) a classic"; I suggest you treat it similarly...

April 23: One more from the recorded-it-ages-back pile: the original Italian Job (last watched in July 2003) wherein Mr. Caine and associates take some Mini Coopers for a spin in Turin. Lots of fun, and strangely I don't find that it's particularly dated beyond the obvious things like the makes of car or the computers with huge tape drives - I guess the story itself is pretty solid.
April 22: Picked up Mirrormask on DVD during the week. Last watched in January 2007; it's odd that I had completely forgotten about the setup (including the circus) but I still enjoyed it as much as the first time. The extras on the DVD include interviews with Dave McKean and Neil Gaiman, watching which led me to conclude that in gaining a fantastic visual artist and an equally fantastic writer, the world has been somewhat deprived of a fantastic comedy duo. If you rent this on DVD, be sure to check out the extras before sending it back.
April 21: TRON: Legacy: kinda meh. Even the pretty pictures (and technically somewhat accurate nerd fodder) don't make up for the fairly rubbish storyline and poor dialogue. Worse, I can't currently lay hands on the original movie so I can remind myself if it was better, or if I'm just doing the rose-tinted-glasses bit.

Hacked a bit on the Banking modules, which I should really bundle up and release since there are some outstanding bugs that prevent the current release working as-is. It's just that I've got a bunch of test files right now that either aren't properly bundled, or aren't properly scrubbed for personal info.

April 16: Much hijinks on the LAN this morning. Wireless dropping packets, NFS server not responding... perhaps the wireless doodad needs rebooting again. In fact, perhaps I should reboot it regularly to forestall this sort of silliness.

Selene hadn't ever seen Dead Poets Society, and I hadn't seen it in a long time, so we added it to the ScreenClick list and it turned up during the week. It holds up pretty well, given that when I can last recall enjoying it I would have been as impressed with Keating and the poetry as the students in the story; and even knowing how the story pans out, it's still got a decent emotional tug to it. Worth watching.
April 11: Happy birthday to ... me!
April 10: "Thanks for your feedback. Over time, this information helps us deliver more relevant adverts to you."
Thanks, facebook, that's lovely, but why am I still getting adverts for the "Dublin Bucket List" (which seems to primarily consist of adverts featuring bikini-clad women, none of whom look like they're in Dublin).

Shrek Forever After: still plenty laughs despite the fact that I've lost count of how many movies this franchise has generated. This one's pretty dark in places; I guess aimed less at the kids and more at the adults, or maybe trying to capture the interest of those who were kids when the first one came out. It's not classic cinema, but it's good fun.

April 9: Minor weirdness with iTunes (what is it with my Mac? Am I not giving it enough attention?) where it lost half the software that allows it to back up the iPhone. After some poking around on the net I just reinstalled iTunes and everything worked. The problem may have been caused by installing XCode + iOS SDK yesterday, but really now.
April 8: Very odd. My Mac's power supply appears to have died. Fortunately I have another to hand.
April 5: Trying to understand how to use Hibernate. Easier said than done.
April 3: Hmm. It would appear that for the second time, I've dropped my wallet while cycling, and this time I think I've actually managed to lose it. Bah.

April 2: Dug out one of the DVDs: Crazy Heart. We may have seen a trailer for this and decided it was worth picking up. Actually, it's not bad at all, not least because Jeff Bridges sells both the "washed-up" and "country singer" parts of "washed-up country singer". Colin Farrell (!) is good when singing, but when not, his accent is all over the place. The story is a fairly clichéd retread of something you've seen a thousand times before, but like I always say, clichéd plots are fine if the execution is good, and the execution here is good. I wouldn't suggest running out and renting this immediately, but it's worth a look if it shows up on TV.
April 1: Added MP4 metadata extraction to the toy I use to generate podcasts out of random crap I've downloaded from the Internet.

Watched Man About Dog again. Enjoyed it again. Still ignoring the two DVDs sitting on the shelf.

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April Fish!