A rough account of what I did with Emacs recently.
April 30
Fiddling with RSS toy to make it more iPhone friendly based on
some reading I'm doing - mainly through adding some CSS styling. I
do need to get back to my project to convert it to Java,
however.
Cycling incident this morning, thankfully not directly involving
me: cyclist overtakes me, continues on ahead of me in the middle
of the taxi lane I'm occupying the left side of. I hear honking
behind me, then a taxi passes. Cyclist ahead of me pulls in, then
as the taxi draws level, he spits at the taxi (stupid,
really). Taxi swerves at him and forces him onto the
pavement. Pavement, at this point, is separated from road by a
wall; fortunately for the cyclist there's a gap he can go
through. Cyclist continues on the pavement; I accelerate to note
the taxi's license plate. As the wall comes to an end and the
cyclist on the pavement approaches that point, taxi swerves in
again, mounts the pavement, and cuts into a side street in front
of the cyclist. Cyclist dismounts. Taxi stops some way down the
side street; driver gets out to hurl abuse at both errant cyclist
and me, then gets back in his taxi and drives off. Errant cyclist
declines my offer to support a report to the police. I go and
report it to the police anyway. Police response: can't do anything
much unless either the cyclist involved or the taxi driver make a
complaint; at best they can contact the taxi driver and,
"talk to him about his attitude". Taxi drivers, I am
told, "have a bad attitude".
So, if a taxi driver attempts to maim or kill you with his taxi in
response to something stupid you did, please do report it - I'm
not joking about this. That cyclist this morning, stupid and all
as he was in his actions, did not deserve a risk of serious
injury; hurling a few hundred kilos of metal at someone on a bike
is not a proportionate response to any action on
the part of the cyclist short of life-threatening activity. And
since he chose not to report it, the taxi driver gets to do this
again the next time he feels annoyed at one of us.
The other thing I'll say about this is that I can understand to
some extent the police point of view: there's a lot happening in
the city centre, and following up on a near miss with no injuries
reported by a third party isn't necessarily the best use of
resources. I may follow up with the carriage office instead once I
can verify that I got the taxi's license number correctly, because
I stupidly, stupidly did not think to detach my phone from my belt
and snap a picture of the offending vehicle. So that's lesson two:
if you're carrying a camera, use it. Don't rely on
memory.
April 29
Super 8 was all manner of
fun. Predictable, sure, but all manner of fun. The train wreck
set-piece was pretty awesome, too, although it kinda went on to
the point where I'd have been checking my watch if I wore
one.
April 28
Went to see The Subways at The Academy on account of tickets I
won back in January. Support #1, Neon Wolf: totally
rocked. Support #2, whose name I didn't get and don't really want:
miserable both in demeanour and quality. Main act: dull. Sounded
like they were phoning it in, or perhaps miming to a
recording. Left after two songs.
April 27
I vaguely recall Cars 2 getting some bad reviews, but I
don't really know why - herself will attest to the fact that I was
giggling happily for most of the movie. It's silly and predictable
and a whole lot of fun.
April 23
After a little more than four years (and a cycle count of 187,
whatever that actually means in the context of almost
always-on-mains-power), my MacBook's battery is enquiring politely
if I'd consider replacing it. Unlike the Compaq that preceeded it,
it doesn't appear to have come to a screeching halt in terms of
holding a charge (and I'm pretty sure I went through at least two
Compaq batteries in a similar timeframe).
April 20
X-Men: First Class is not as
bad as I had expected or was led to believe. It does take a bit of
time to get going, as everyone needs to be introduced; the whole
token black guy thing is painful, as is the "mutant =
gay" allegory given by Beast's introduction as a mutant; but
those aside, it's a fun enough brain-candy
extravaganza.
April 13
Converted airprint-republish.pl
to Python. Needs some exception handling, but mainly it actually
seems to work, and works as I'd intended to modify the Perl one: a
thread listening for mDNS printer broadcasts which generates
AirPrint versions and republishes them in separate threads using
dns-sd (because dns-sd -R never exits, or rather when it does it
takes its advertised record with it).
April 12
Irony: cleaning out stuff from my Instapaper backlog, I found
an
article on the Python os module, which, the article
header tells us, provides "Portable access to operating
system specific features.". A little further down the page,
you'll find this note:
Note Some of the example code
below will only work on Unix-like operating
systems.
And off goes Finance::Bank::IE 0.26 to the PAUSE
server. I think the next task with this code will be a massive
refactoring of some sort.
April 11
If today is your birthday, you share a birthday with ... ME.
After much digging around with unhelpful web pages, unhelpful
tools, and unhelpful error messages, I finally managed to connect
from laptop to Mac Mini using Kerberos. I had vague plans of
writing up the process, since this is something that apparently
causes much wailing and gnashing in the Mac community, but at this
point I'm not wholly sure what I did that worked. Key points to
note, however: if it's telling you that you can't use a principal
as a server, use kadmin to remove the disallow-svr attribute from
the record in question. There's also some weirdness around
creation of such records in the first place: it seems that kadmin
refuses to create them (complaining, unhelpfully, "Principal
does not exist") but they're required for ssh to
work.
After some more digging around, it looks like the presence of a record
of the form "shorthostname$" will cause this. I
think these get created when you bind a client to a server. I used
the Workgroup Manager to delete the offending record, then used
kadmin to add a new one using the FQDN, and it
worked.
Finally managed to restore the funds transfer code to
F::B::I::BoI, but there are caveats (well, there were caveats with
the old code as well). Once I've hacked up the tests to match the
new code, I'll have a release.
April 10
Restored another bit of the Finance::Bank::IE::BankOfIreland
functionality that was broken by the makeover.
April 6
In Time was kinda mindless fun. Don't
pay attention to the plot holes or the unbelievable bits, just
roll with it. Nice cars, too, shame about the engine
noises.
April 4
An S/MIME oddity: sending an encrypted, signed mail from
Mail.app via an Exchange server results in a message that's
encrypted and signed, but it's also a multipart MIME email so none
of my mail clients actually show the various little crypto glyphs
(padlocks and seals and what not). That aside, I'm impressed with
the clean integration of S/MIME into my normal email workflow and
I'd recommend it to anyone who's looking nervously at the current
proposed legislation in the UK to scan everything
electronic.
April 2
Finance::Bank::IE has been a bit neglected of, er, late (looks
at the date of last release) to say the least. Part of this is
because I'd just got payments working for PTSB when they revamped
the whole payments thing to require a good deal more work, and
partly it's because BoI did a full site revamp that broke
everything. I've managed to restore some of what's
missing to both, but I'd like to try and get a few more bits in
place before I post an update. The fact that rt.cpan.org isn't
full of bug reports suggests I don't have an audience on
tenterhooks anyway.