A rough account of what I did with Emacs recently.
July 27
Happy birthday, Selene!
On average I'd say the server upgrade for Mountain Lion has been
about as clunky as the previous iteration, which is annoying. It
appears that this time it "converts" your Server at
least partially back to a regular install; on adding the Server
package, it attempted to reconfigure my email and died with an
inscrutable error message. Looking at the server control panel
also suggests a worrying amount of stuff has either been hidden or
removed (at least I have a backup to restore from). It also
reissued my Push Notification certs, which didn't need reissuing
by my count.
More specifics:
I don't know what failed in the mail setup since the error
message was just "failed to set defaults". It looks
like the various things that should have happened after that
(binding to OD, for example) were simply skipped.
When manually configuring Mail I found it had discarded the
SSL cert I'd assigned to it. I reassigned the cert but it's
still not running on the SSL port. Or, come to that, any other
port. It would appear that despite what the Server panel is
saying, the mail server ain't running in any way that is
accessible. AWESOME JOB, GUYS. Oh wait, look, it's saying it's
switched off - maybe I did the "OFF-ON" thing too
quickly. Manually set back to "ON", observer a zillion
errors in system.log, SMTP is not running but IMAPS is (but my
Mail client won't connect to it). Eventually managed to fix it
by setting the authentication config on both ends, although
again the Server side appears to have taken my instruction -
Automatic - and done its own thing with it (it currently reads
"Custom").
The DNS control panel worrying lacks forwarders and, well,
anything I'd previously configured. This isn't a huge
deal as I'd been thinking about moving DNS back to the crappy
DSL box anyway, but still. Annoying if I were administering a
real domain, you know? Bizarrely, it's responding happily to
queries for those old DNS records, so it's perhaps just a
complete failure to gracefully handle the previous domain
configuration. Even more bizarrely, after an amount of clicking
around elsewhere, I went back to this panel and all my old
settings were present. Nice.
Not wholly related, but apropos since I'm using it to
view the server's screen: the new Remote Desktop Client seems
far more prone to leaving ghost overlays behind on the local
view after they've disappeared on the remote screen. XCode comes
with a "fake bad network" preference pane, so there's
no excuse for not testing this stuff. Plus I'm on a wired
100Mbit connection, so it shouldn't be a bad network connection
anyway.
Lots of RAAAAAGE about the missing DHCP service, which isn't
really missing, it's just been well hidden. The KB article isn't
terrificially helpful on how I should be setting it up.
My MRTG setup, such as it is, got completely hosed. The
directory it was writing to was nuked, and no trace remains in
/Previous System. Once I found the bits, it turns out I
need to install X11 to make it run (not Apple's fault - it's the
set of binaries I'm using).
Custom webserver: gone, at first glance. The server is
defaulting to its built-in installation instead of my waider.ie
clone. The files appear to be intact, however, just that they're
being ignored.
Server stats are still missing (they went missing on the
previous upgrade and I could never figure out why).
Server Admin Tools from my laptop: useless. I do hope
they're going to update this, as it's my preferred way to tinker
with the settings (not least because it's more powerful than the
native tools running on the server itself - go figure!)
WOW. Good reason to have backups - my entire mail
archive went missing. This is a pretty big deal and not the sort
of thing you want to screw up. I eventually found the missing
files in
/Library/Server/Previous/private/var/spool/imap/dovecot/mail/{UUID}/;
why they weren't left in /Previous System, or simply
where I'd put them, is beyond me, but it clued me in as to where
I might find my Webserver files as well. Now I just needed to
figure out how to safely restore those files: turn off the mail
server, rsync the files, turn the server back on.
Oh hey. pgrep. That's cool.
July 21
The Pianist is a pretty grim tale
of a Warsaw Jew during World War II, and the main thing I didn't
like about it was that the protagonist was presented as such an
overwhelmingly passive character. Reading the Wikipedia
summary of the memoir on which the story is based, it seems that
this facet might be more attributable to the director weaving his
own Holocaust story into the plot than it is to the original. That
aside, this is a pretty frank look at how the Jews were treated in
Poland, and it doesn't make for easy watching.
July 13
Happy birthday Síofra!
I found La Vie En Rose difficult to
follow, because it kept jumping back and forth around the timeline
of Piaf's life and I lost track of who was who and what exactly
was going on at multiple points. One reviewer described the film's
structure as reflecting the fleeting memories of a dying woman,
which I guess I can see, but I'd have appreciated a little more
narrative structure than was presented here. So, can't say I'd
recommend this one, really.
July 11
Exit Through The Gift
Shop is a great piece of work, and whatever
"controversy" there is about whether it's real or
just an extended prank, I really don't care. Definitely one to
see.
Happy birthday, Aoibheann!
July 10
Pffft. Apparently Perl 5.17 does something weird that makes my
currently valid code choke. Not something I'm likely to do
anything about in the near future since I don't think 5.17 is an
official release just yet.
July 9
BoI's new app is being advertised on the online banking login
page, which broke my getting-less-fragile Perl... I also had a fix
for OpenBSD builds to upload, albeit untested since I don't have
any OpenBSD to play with, but hopefully it all works just
fine. Finance::Bank::IE on a CPAN server near you.
July 4
Officially changed hats from Systems Engineer to Software
Development Engineer today. Hurrah!