A rough account of what I did with Emacs recently.
February 28
Dropbox has spontaneously stopped working on one of the
Mactops. I am somewhat at a loss as to why; a clean reinstall even
using a different user account makes no difference, which suggests
it's a system-level problem, but damned if I can see what. The Mac
Mini on the same network (i.e. with the same route to the
Internet) is having no problems. In digging I discovered that
Dropbox is made at least partly with Python, so I thought maybe my
Gramps hacking had done some damage; comparing with a backup of
when it was last working, I do indeed see some modified .pyc
files, but nuking them doesn't appear to have fixed
things. Perhaps a point restore of system level files is the next
step. I wish these things would either Just Work, or Break
Verbosely.
February 17
Source build of Gramps is proving to be
a two-steps-forward, two back process; right now, for the third or
fourth time, I've decided things are sufficiently muddled to
require a reset and do-over.
February 16
The Bourne Legacy is another
fourth-outing movie that's surprisingly good. Proably what makes
it work is that while they've abandoned Matt Damon, more or less,
they still weave it into the fabric of the existing Bourne
mythology - the movie version, at least, since Ludlum's version
disappeared around about the first ten minutes of the second movie
- and while it's hard to place it exactly at least part of this
movie is contemporary with the others - which is a nice trick. All
that aside, this movie stands on its own merits, for the most part
- I was a little disappointed with the inevitable demise of the
"super hitman" who was introduced, fleetingly, towards
the end of the movie, and who disappears with an equally fleeting
glimpse of his ending, making him really little more than a
cardboard prop to wind up the story. But that was the only thing I
didn't much like - the rest of it is a good solid action
movie. Indeed, the first 30 minutes of the movie is so densely
packed with detail that I thought a good deal more time had
passed. Watch this one.
February 13
As noted I've been tooling around with the family tree
lately. I'm using a piece of software called Gramps, which is a bit
clunky (it uses Gtk as a one-GUI-fits-all toolkit, which works
about as well as one-size-fits-all pants...) but is working
sufficiently for me not to be too bothered. I did want to try
building it from source to see if I could address some of the more
annoying bugs, like the fact that selecting text in an edit window
causes a stack-trace dialogue box to appear with some complaint
about the clipboard, but so far I've completely failed to get
their Wiki directions working. Part of the problem seems to be
system libraries pretending to fulfill dependencies that they
don't actually fulfill, alas.
February 9
I "taped" (DVR'd? Time-shifted? What do the kids these
days say, aside from "torrented"?) Knowing a good while back, and only got around to
watching it now. Basically it's a pile of mediocrity, with Nic
Cage at the helm (some would argue that he's also mediocre, but
I'll leave that be). With about 30 minutes left to run, she and I
were wondering how they were going to fill the time; answer:
poorly. It's one of those movies that on the face of it is barely
acceptable, but as soon as you start thinking about the premise,
or delve below the surface of the plot, you start getting into all
sorts of difficulty and eventually conclude that the movie doesn't
have anything below the surfce, it's just all surface. Oh
well. I've seen worse.
February 8
Ice Age 4: Continental
Drift: you'd expect a movie franchise on its fourth outing to
be getting a little stale, but this still keeps up the quality of
its predecessors. There are some great laugh-out-loud moments, a
good general story line, and little reliance on tried-and-tested
gags from the earlier movies. Worth seeing.
February 4
Looking for Richard has
been on my list of things to watch for years, and I can't even
remember at this point why that might be. However, it turned up
during the week when, coincidentally, English historians are
revealing that a body they dug up is that of the Richard of the
title, Richard III of England. It's a documentary of sorts, but
it's also Shakespeare's play; the point is to explain the plot to
you, interwoven with Al Pacino and (some very big-name) friends
apparently making a movie of the play, although I'm not 100% sure
if the movie ever got made (IMDb will reveal all) so it feels a
bit like Man of La Mancha in that respect. It's funny,
it's engaging, they do bits of vox pop about Shakespeare and
consult experts in both drama and royal history, and really this
is a complete blast. Definitely worth waiting around
for.
February 1
Tinker, Tailor, Soldier,
Spy was terribly disappointing. If I'd not read the book (and
an excellent read it is), I'd have had no clue what was going
on. Granted, there's a relatively large dramatis
personae, but what hurts this movie is the disjoint way in
which it's put together. Yes, it's about digging in the past, but
perhaps doing that via constant flashbacks wasn't the best
approach. Added to that, I noticed at least one instance of sloppy
editing (where the Russian Voice asks if the switch is off, and
unless you've read the book you won't know what he's talking about
or why the person he's asking though it was off), and the whole
bit about making a character gay when it really added nothing to
the story, or the character, was just a pointless distraction
particularly given the other gay relationship already present in
the story. Ultimately, this was a huge waste of both acting talent
and source material, and I want to see the TV adaptation
now to see if it's any better.