Hacker's Diary

A rough account of what I did with Emacs recently.

September 30
Continued broken: wifi sync appears to be failing intermittently, my laptop is having trouble holding open a remote desktop connection to the Mac Mini, webserver still can't be logged into due to busted ssh (if we were less diligent about keeping it patched, we might have a back door to exploit...).

September 29
The only thing I didn't much like about The Descendants was Sid's character, as really he seemed both superfluous and incongruent. Aside from that, a decent movie.

September 25
Mountain Lion upgrade had further spectacular failures (I think trying to upgrade the thing that provides DNS, using DNS, is probably root cause) but bizarrely the email server magically started working again.

Kerberos appears to be broken, though. Swings, roundabouts.

iOS 6 appears to have broken iTunes sync on the iPad. Only suggestion I've seen so far is to use a third-party tool to remove a file from the iPad, and then resync.

Started scrubbing files off the old MacBook. I've been holding off migrating things off it until I can figure out how to set up network accounts on the server properly, but that hasn't happened so far and the laptop's just sitting here waiting for me to tidy up.

September 24
So last week I discovered that the server that handles my email wound up on a blacklist for reasons that are unclear. I had a brief look over the weekend and then noticed that it was no longer blacklisted, possibly because it auto-expired or possibly because someone clicked things. Then I started getting email about a PHP process that wouldn't start due to a missing shared library, and now the ssh server isn't letting anyone in (which means, incidentally, that if you can read this either the problem has been solved or I've moved servers). Oh, and my ISP appears to have decided that today's a good day to refuse outbound email that doesn't come with a From: header for their own customer email domain.t

Oh, and it's raining.

September 23
A bunch of logfile analysis leads me to conclude that a whole bunch of popular email software (exim, dovecot, mailman to name but three) whines a lot about things that don't really matter.

Attempting to install some updates on Mrs. Waider's computer, and it tells me it's successfully installed them even though it hasn't, and the "Fix It" tool won't actually run. Quite awesome user experience, this.

September 18
Got a sizeable chunk of Finance::Bank::IE refactoring sorted out, after a couple of days of missing a very obvious failure to check a return code. Some would say it serves me right for coding in Perl. Now I need to figure out why my git push isn't working.

September 16
Killers was better than I was expecting, which is to say I actually laughed at it a few times and got reasonably engaged in the story for a bit. However, this poor retread of Mr. & Mrs. Smith territory has a few notable failings, not least of which is that I couldn't take Ashton Kutcher seriously as a spy/action hero type. Also, don't try to think about the plot after you've watched it, because you'll just get annoyed at the sheer stupidity of the implications.

September 15
Someone needs to explain to me why so many cyclists seem to think that going slowly through a red light makes it ok. Do they think green shift occurs or something?

September 14
I haven't seen The Commitments since its cinema release, and Selene had never seen it. Great entertainment without getting too much into the paddywhackery. Poking around IMDb afterwards I discovered that the Corrs, who featured more or less as extras in the movie, essentially launched their career from here.

September 9
Doing some rearchitecture work on the Banking stuff, which is revealing the enormous benefits of the (incomplete) test suite. Although annoyingly right now I'm looking at tests that fail while the code works fine against the live sites (I took shortcuts with my test harness, basically).

September 8
Went to the Irish Craft Beer festival. Ate Pie. Drank Moonbeam, Alternator, Chameleon (two kinds), and a stout (not either of the ones I wanted). Tasted a few more. Ate Pork. Walked home. Hung over.

September 6
Emacs input problem solved:
(custom-set-variables '(ns-right-alternate-modifier (quote none)))
Obvious, right?

I switched the database for the RSS Toy to a RDS t1.micro instance (from whatever the previous low-budget option was) and there are two immediately obvious effects: the performance has plummeted, and the price on the first month of using it is down by about 40%. I'm okay with the crap performance as it's an incentive to spend a bit more time tinkering with the SQL queries, although my intermittent work on porting it to Java leads me to believe I might be better off rearchitecting the whole thing. In summary, if you need a toy database, this is actually a pretty cheap option.

September 5
It would appear that changes somewhere along the way (new Mac, new OS, new Emacs version) prevent me from typing the "#" character in Emacs - something of a pain for scripting - as it winds up being interpreted by the last as Meta-3, or "do next thing 3 times". I may have to use an alternative Emacs build.


...such as AquaMACS? Still looks to have the same problem, alas.

September 4
Still haven't moved All The Things to the new Mac. I have:
September 1
Happy Birthday, Doey!

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September? Already?