Hacker's Diary
A rough account of what I did with Emacs recently.
- January 27
- SourceForge got hacked. Ouchee. Mainly this affects me because
that's where Fink is
hosted, and I can't say I'd be enthused about pulling system-level
code from a compromised server.
- January 21
- Serpico was good, particularly for
being made so soon after the end of the events described in the
movie, but suffered one minor problem in my eyes: too much story
and/or mismanaged pacing. Essentially I felt that the film's
tendency to have vignettes of slow-paced drama with months or
years between them was a little disorienting, particularly when
there were few cues to the fact that time had shifted forward
dramatically across a scene change. I don't want to
be spoonfed the timeline, but a hint or two here and there that
Time Has Passed wouldn't have hurt. Still, a good piece of work
and worth seeing.
- January 18
- After 15 years (!) I've finally decided to change my domain
registrar; should this website or my email vanish over the next
few days (a) you'll know why and (b) GMail works.
Of course, this is fraught with "humour"; the email
advising me of the transfer process is a misformatted
multipart/mixed with an attached RTF document that has a typo, and
the Irish Domain Registry's whois server directs you to a missing
web page when you try to expand a "person" NIC record;
and the registrar's site wants me to upload a scanned doc but
won't accept it if it exceeds 5MB, which it doesn't tell you until
after you've tried to upload. I should probably at least
point out the first to the relevant people.
- January 16
- Funny People mostly fails on both
counts. The main problem with the movie is that it doesn't have a
clear idea of what sort of movie it wants to be, and the
secondary problem is that it spends over two hours trying to
figure this out. Yes, there are laughs, yes, there are a long line
of impressive cameos, but really, there isn't a movie that I'd
recommend you watch. Which would seem to be a fairly crucial thing
to be lacking.
- January 15
- The Interpreter was decent
enough. Good plot, well executed, but I can't say I cared much
about (note, "about", not "for") the
much-hyped detail that it was filmed in OMG THE ACTUAL
U.N. BUILDING. In the movies, where, to quote Warren Ellis,
"every planet in the known universe [looks] like
Vancouver", actual physical shooting location is kinda
unimportant. Anyway, that's hair-splitting nonsense, the movie
itself is worth a watch.
- January 12
- New Moon: the continued tales of a
whiny teenager who makes incredibly poor decisions. Another
terrible movie: too much slow motion (again), dragging dialogue
(again), and possibly one of the worst cliff-hanger endings
ever.
- January 11
- Finally finished one of the books that's been dragging on my
reading list for the last several months. The "original"
King Arthur collection of stories is not exactly great literature,
and I can see why people would write abridged versions and polish
it up and what not before offering it for general consumption. Of
the remaining two books on the list, Darwin's Origin of
Species and Mueller's The Burghers, both are poorly
written, but at least the former has some historical context and
some actual structure. The latter is basically a collection of
poorly written articles, so not only is it unpleasant to read, it
also repeats itself a lot, so you get to the unpleasantness
multiple times. I think I need to read something a bit more fun
next.
- January 9
- Part of my continued attempts to move stuff off the Cube and
onto the Mac Mini included running into a bug in id3info, which I
can't currently trace because debugging a libtool-built piece of
code with gdb is too damned annoying, and doing so on MacOS is
doubly annoying. In addition to that, there's a bug in MP3::ID3Lib
which I should perhaps look into, too.
- January 8
- At least part of the book version of The Iron Man appeared in a
schoolbook of mine, probably during primary school. Before
watching the movie I could remember, vaguely, a description of a
tractor bitten in half, and the robot reassembling
itself. Watching the movie, it came back to me that the boy's name
had indeed been Hogarth, but I can't remember much else about the
book so I've no idea where the movie departed from it. It's good,
though, and makes me want to go and dig up the book again for
comparison if nothing else.
- January 7
- Another rewatch: Wall-E. Nice to snag it off BBC HD
for that extra bit of resolution!
- January 6
- I picked up a refurbished Mac Mini server just before Christmas
to take over from the Cube, and I'm finding the MacOS X Server
Tools to be a mixed blessing. It's really nice to be able to edit
mount points and such (although I couldn't get it to update the
NFS exports file and resorted to doing it by hand), but the DNS
and DHCP editing leave a lot to be desired. I run a split-view DNS
for historical reasons, and the DHCP server inserts forward and
reverse records into DNS, and there doesn't appear to be a useful
way to get the Server Tools to duplicate this setup. Which is
fine; I can just copy the files across. But my concern is that the
Server Tools will at some future date decide to stomp on my custom
config. I've been looking around to see if there are any docs on
how to write new service plugins for the Server Tools, but I've
not found anything as yet.
Kinda funny that Apple Product Security emails are signed with a
PGP key, which Mail.app doesn't support natively, instead of
S/MIME.
I read the first Twilight book about a year before I became aware
of the hype surrounding it, and didn't think it was anything other
than a bit of fluffy fiction. Twilight the movie is, on the other
hand, actively bad. Full of terrible dialogue, excessive
slow-motion, voiceovers - even the "highlight" of the
vampires' appearance, the whole sparkling-in-the-sunshine lark,
looked like rubbish. I couldn't recommend this even if the source
material wasn't flawed.
- January 4
- Installed the Skype v5 beta for MacOS. Not impressed with the
new layout as it wants far more screen realestate to just site
there with a buddy list.
- January 3
- When I was a young and impressionable lad, I read a story in Reader's Digest where God spoke on
the radio and as proof of his identity, he submerged the entire
continent of Australia for a minute. Or caused it to be
submerged. You get the idea. Being young and impressionable, I
took this as reporting rather than fiction, and at some point
found myself in a classroom vigourously insisting that God had, in
fact, submerged Australia, while the bemused teacher (the
headmaster of the school, as it happened) tried to talk me out of
it. I can't say I recall being embarrassed by the whole thing; I
think at the time I was ultimately convinced that I was right and
he was wrong, and by the time I figured out my error it was all
well in the past.
I mention this on account of the current quasi-submerged state of
said continent. Anyone heard any deities on the radio
recently?
(Actually, "quasi-submerged" is probably wildly
inaccurate, and reflects my reading only the headlines associated
with the current state of Oz rather than digging into the
articles)
- January 1
- Inadvisable stunt sysadmin to start the year: log into box,
switch to root, then update the UID of the user you initally
logged in (including chowning all those files). There will
possibly be a "Fix Permissions" episode after
this...
Well, that worked surprisingly well. Although I did reboot the
machine just to be on the safe side.
I didn't actually know there was a Hulk
"reboot" (what a terrible term), but I rather enjoyed
The Incredible Hulk, not
least because of the tie-in to Iron Man that pops up at
the end (a small but well-done detail). There are a few ropey bits
in the movie, but it's the sort of flick where you don't much care
about those because the rest of it works well enough.
Also went to the cinema to see Harry
Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 1; I'd seen a few
comments along the lines of "meh", but to be honest,
this delivered pretty much all I expected. I had one or two minor
gripes about what appear to have been editing choices (such as the
fact that we don't learn explicitly why the Potter crew go from
referring to Voldemort by name back to referring to him as
"You-Know-Who", even though it's hinted at in the
Lovegood scene) but on the whole, I enjoyed this and am looking
forward to the conclusion.
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