A rough account of what I did with Emacs recently.
September 23
A Serious Man is
described in IMDb (among other places) as "a black
comedy"; either this ignores the absence of a crucial element
- said comedy - or the comedy is in people watching this movie
hoping that it will make some sort of point before the credits
roll around (spoiler: there isn't one. Give up now.) Reviews I've
looked at describe this movie as a labour of love and other such
things which indicate that, as far as cinematography and what not
go, this is truly brilliant, but I was hoping for something I
could sit down and enjoy for a couple of hours, and frankly this
ain't it. If you're in film school, great, watch this, otherwise,
AVOID.
September 22
The King's Speech was
more enjoyable, I think, for its portrayal of the Royals as
"normal" people than for the historical context - which,
apparently, was bent a bit out of shape to improve the
narrative. The dynamic between Firth and Rush is believable as
that between a patient and his therapist, and Colin Firth ripping
into a swearing fit is one of the funnier moments of the film. I
can't quite say I felt it was Oscar material (I think it picked up
4!) but it's definitely worth a look.
September 21
Jury still out on the backups thing. The laptop is
quieting down a bit, but it's also spending a lot of time doing
the backups and putting a good deal of error messages into the
system log.
September 17
We got a cat. We wanted a cat that was housetrained, sociable,
happy to be indoors, and, if possible, a little stupid. Somehow,
that's exactly what we found: last night, Bonzo lay on the edge of
the sofa, lost her balance, fell off, and did the "I totally
meant that" bit. Twice. As for the rest of it, she seems
happy enough indoors, she's definitely housetrained, and she's so
sociable that she likes one of us to be near her when she's
eating, and will "walk to heel" around the
house.
We got her from the Dublin
SPCA, who have an amazing facility on the southern edge of
Dublin city, and who very obviously took excellent care of this
cat for the three months she was living there.
I made another attempt to solve the problem I've been having with
my Time Machine backups; it seems like the laptop has gotten stuck
in some unspecified way on indexing, so what I did was shut off
all the indexing, then remounted the backup volume on the Mac Mini
(where it actually lives - it's network shared to the laptop),
then reran an indexing on it there. So far this appears to have
stopped my laptop from running its fan at maximum RPM, but I
thought I'd fixed it before and the problem came back so I'll
withhold my judgement just yet.
Groundhog Day is one of those
movies released while I was in college without a VCR and/or money
for the cinema, so I never saw it back when it was doing the
rounds, and somehow have managed to not see it until now. It's
pretty good; some bits of it are definitely laugh-out-loud, some
of it is the same sort of shtick as Ghostbusters, which is hardly
surprising considering the Ramis/Murray presence in both. Worth a
look.
September 11
Salt is... humdrum. There's nothing
particularly wrong with it, for its genre (action movie, things
blow up, people get shot, etc.), but there's nothing outstanding
about it - there's a half-dozen movies just like it that you could
equally well watch with the same brain-shutdown, popcorn-consuming
attitude and not actually miss anything.
Did a bit more hacking on the Java version of the RSS toy. It
seems like Eclipse gets a bit upset if you don't run it for a
while; typically, my interaction with it involves a period of
work, a period of ignoring it, and then a long, long period of
clicking things randomly (like refresh, and various properties)
until it starts working again. Anyway, I've managed to rip out a
bunch of stuff I wrote as plain JDBC SQL and replaced it with some
Hibernate stuff, which makes for a whole lot more tidiness.
I got distracted a little (no!) from the Java hackery by the
question of the character set in use by the database, prompted by
a comment from one of my random newsfeeds which directed me to a
page on making sure your entire web-based app uses UTF8 from top
to bottom. It's actually proving to be quite tricky, not least
because I had naively used String in places where
byte[] might have been more appropriate such as in
password hashes.
September 10
I've had persistent trouble lately with Spotlight indexing on
the laptop's backup drive; the general symptom is that the laptop
spins its fans up to maximum RPM and stays that way until I get
fed up and put it to sleep. Today I've forcibly removed all trace
of Spotlight files from the various partitions, sparsebundles,
etc., restarted both the laptop and the Mac Mini where the backup
drive lives, and now it's off rebuilding the index from scratch (I
assume). It would be really nice of the Spotlight interrogation
tool (mdutil) gave me more information, like "I'm
reindexing this disk for the fifth time because I keep getting
stuck on this one file; maybe you could delete
it?"
September 8
Forgot one movie from the list: It's Complicated which,
well, if you've seen the trailer, you've seen all the good
bits. Alec Baldwin is sleazy, Meryl Streep is apparently
asthmatic, and the scriptwriters are AWOL. Don't
bother.
September 5
Been a bit swamped since the last update, but there's a bunch of
movies in the backlog:
Harry
Potter 7.2, which I can't fault but which I also unfortunately
found to be a bit of an exercise in ticking boxes - it probably
works a good deal better if you've not read the book, I
imagine.
Atonement was fine up until the third
act (which wasn't even that, it was more like act three, final
scene) wherein the author, and thus the director, chose to have
both the happy and the sad endings. Really, the whole
jump-to-present-day thing felt jarringly wrong.
Flyboys is slated in various reviews
for having crap dialogue and messing with history. I had no
previous knowledge of the history, and I watched it dubbed in
Spanish (which I don't speak much of), so neither point bothered
me, and the dogfight sequences were all sorts of fun. I did take
issue with people taking mortal upper torso hits from
large-calibre weaponry and apparently surviving without any
shattered scapula, but that was a minor complaint, all things
considered.
Airplane! I hadn't seen in years, and
Selene had never seen, and it's still as funny as I remember it
(i.e. very). It's not highbrow, but it's not zero-IQ toilet humour
either. I think we'll need to rent a few more from the ZAZ
stable.