Hacker's Diary

A rough account of what I did with Emacs recently.

July 31
TA-DA. That is all.

July 30
Found three problems with locally-installed MRTG hackery today:
  1. UPNP-monitoring script attempting to invoke missing binary. Part of my username fiddling which is still incomplete.
  2. All MRTG scripts running twice. Caused by setting MRTG up as a LaunchAgent rather than a LaunchDaemon, and having two accounts logged into the server.
  3. OMG DISK 111% FULL caused by a combination of the above filling up an unrotated logfile with stderr messages. The file was ... large.



July 21
I've started watching The Sopranos, and after two episodes, I am thinking a) the music is incredibly good; b) I could happily never see another scene involving Tony's mother; c) it seems inevitable that the upstart nephew will not last. (Obviously, no spoilers, please).

Finished the whole Martin Beck series - Swedish crime novels from long before Girls with Dragon Tattoos. There's only one real flat note in the series, and that's the discovery of the murderer in the ninth novel - instead of being through the skill and dedication of the police, it's pure luck - but that aside this is a really good series of books that has aged particularly well. Much as I've never noted the absence of cellphones in Neuromancer, something that is apparently a glaring clanger for a lot of people, I didn't notice in this series that noone had a cellphone or a computer and indeed I was a good way into the first of the books I read (the 7th in the series, which I received as a birthday gift) before I started wondering what era it was set in.


July 13
The only thing I found noteworthy about Haywire is that the scenes filmed in Dublin are geographically accurate (as best I can tell, anyway), rather than the sort of jump-cut geography that sometimes happens in movies. Aside from that this is a dull thriller, which seems to principally hope that if they interrupt things to have the female lead kick someone's ass every so often then it'll all turn out ok. Alas, no. Oh, and whoever wrote on IMDb trivia that they used the wrong sirens for the Garda cars clearly hasn't been in Dublin in the last decade, but I do think the armed response unit's SUVs and SWAT-like outfits might have taken a few liberties.


July 6
Quartet is fairly light and a bit of fun. Billy Connolly plays, basically, Billy Connolly, and while he's not the centre of the cast, he does tend to steal the show whenever he's on-screen. Not by any means a taxing movie; something to pass the time pleasantly.

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And into the second half.