Hacker's Diary

A rough account of what I did with Emacs recently.

June 30

The Next Three Days had a little bit of silliness in terms of plausiblity, but on the whole it was fairly straightforward to buy into the whole thing if you bought into any of it. A few bits of the final plan weren't telegraphed sufficiently that I could guess what was going to happen, and I certainly didn't forsee the trick to get across the border. I think the only thing I thought didn't fit in was that if the mother was so upset at the prospect of not seeing her child for an unspecified but finite length of time, why the dramatic moment in the car when they hit the freeway? That aside, no complaints.

June 29

Daybreakers was something I'd started watching on a flight somewhere, and gave up once the extent of the cutting they'd done on it was obvious without ever having seen the movie. Turns out it's not a bad little action/thriller, although there's a little too much reliance on spring-loaded cats bats, vampires, etc. for my liking, and some of the dialogue was clearly written by someone who thought they were some sort of erudite gift to comedy - nothing sounds worse than a hackneyed one-liner wedged needlessly into dialogue. Well, except maybe romantic dialogue written by the Wachoskis, but I digress. This is, on the whole, an ok piece of work in spite of the aforementioned gags and some minor plot issues, but I think if you're going to take the vampire plot as read (burns, nay, explodes in sunlight; explodes if staked through the heart; has no reflection - that sort of thing) then I don't think you really have any place to complain about anything else that's done.

June 20

I seem to have gotten rid of some Spotlight errors by removing the mdimporter instances that showed up in the logfile errors: one was an empty directory, and the other was part of the Google Earth plugin which I nuked in its entirety as I don't use it.

The Queen was nicely made and Helen Mirren nailed the title role, but I still can't quite see what all the fuss was about. Selene also points out the irony of a movie titled thusly which is actually as much, if not more, about Diana.

June 19

If you haven't been to Dublin Zoo, you should go. That is all.

June 17

Today I bought a CROWBAR and used it to DEMOLISH a deck. That was fun. Of course, now I have to get rid of the evidence debris.

I think I probably last saw Jackie Brown around about when it was released; certainly long enough ago that I couldn't remember much of the plot and had completely forgotten it starred De Niro. And Samuel Jackson. And Chris Tucker. In fact, I think Pam Grier is the only star I recalled, and I couldn't quite remember what she looked like. It's a good movie, nicely paced, surprisingly non-violent for a Tarantino piece (yes, I know, I was a bit surprised by Inglourious Basterds in this respect also) and with some very catchy music going on. Worth watching, definitely.

June 15

I'm not much of an art-movies person, being far more inclined towards things that explode, but there's something hypnotic about Wim Wenders' Wings of Desire that just drew me in. There were whole sequences in it that I'd have happily sat through for hours despite there being no appreciable activity beyond a voiceover, typically in German, and a generally monochrome image of whatever Wenders had chosen to shoot. Hard to recommend given that it may have a very personal sort of appeal, but I definitely enjoyed it.

June 13

Laptop has gone back to running insanely CPU-heavy mdworker processes more-or-less constantly. I thought I fixed this problem long ago, but apparently not.

Noted lots of mdworker errors in the system log. Turned off all metadata indexing. Used launchctl to stop the indexers. Indexers promptly started up again and declared the index on one of the volumes to be out of date, and they're off reindexing again. However, at least they're not spewing the same errors this time. Possibly an updated I applied without rebooting or some such resulted in inconsistency between running process and the stuff it expected to find on disk.

June 12

How to kill your dev platform from day one:

Yes. There is an annual membership fee. Membership classes and their respective fees are as follows: 1) Basic $129 [...]

There's a free tier, but you don't get access to the developer environment without paying, which basically means no casual development, which means dead dev platform.

June 11

You gotta love credit card merchant categories:

AMAZON MKTPLACE PMTS AMZN.COM/BILL Merchant category name: MISC/SPECIALTY RETAIL (FIREWRKS, TROPHIES, GRAVESTONES)

June 9

So aside from the somewhat unpleasant business with the scalping, Inglourious Basterds was surprisingly less messy than I'd expected and quite a good flick to boot. Worth seeing.

June 8

Lies and Illusions starts off reasonably, and then gets progressively more mediocre. Avoid.

I thought The Butterfly Effect was a good premise let down by pacing (in essence, I felt it dragged through what was actually a pretty good story). Quite a dark film, too.

June 3

While down in Galway a few weekends back, I sampled Metalman Brewing's Lime & Ginger Chameleon brew. Rather tasty. They had another variant of it there which, I was told, was finished with "nugget". I do hope they weren't talking about this:

Dream House: it was doing ok until the bit where the figments of the guy's imagination caused a door to open and wind chimes to ring.

The Astronaut's Wife: clearly noone in this version of America has heard of ELCBs.

(In other words, nothing to see here, move along).

June 2

Update: In yesterday's entry I said "2 million", which should have been "1.5 million". I also said "10 years", which should have been "10 minutes".

June 1

So apparently about 2 million people didn't bother to vote, which means one third of the electorate just got to decide on a constitutional amendment that materially affects the future of the country.

Mind, those two million will be happy to tell you in ten years why the outcome of the vote was wrong.

One Day was a nice idea and reasonably well put together but when the big surprise came I found myself surprisingly uncaring about the characters - you'd think at that point in the movie you'd be totally invested in their stories. Not sure what the problem was since I'm normally a sucker for this sort of thing, but anyway. It's well made, the aforementioned surprise does make the last third of the movie a bit of "not what you'd expected", and I kept thinking to myself that the set and costume designers must have had all manner of fun digging through their old wardrobes and prop rooms to pull out the appropriate items for each year.

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