Hacker's Diary

A rough account of what I did with Emacs recently.

March 23

EC2 instance recovered, and half a script written to do the recovery dance. I should clean it up and toss it in the workshop. A little more tweaking and I will most likely flip www.waider.ie from its current location to the EC2 version.

Skyfall completely overdid the whole Bond Is An Old Man Among Generally Old People side of things, but that aside this was probably one of the best Bond movies I've ever seen. There's little else to say about it, to be honest - go see it.

March 22

Web server is back in order but I've already exploited the power of Amazon Web Services to create a new host, set up a webserver and some other services on it, and ... break the sudoers file. D'OH.

March 21

As I write this, the server that hosts waider.ie is timing out SSH connections somewhere in the session setup stage, making it difficult to figure out what's up with it. I really, really need to move the hell off that server; it's not under my direct control, and I'm at the mercy of failures that interrupt connectivity.

March 17

Continuing to fiddle with family tree research, although I've given up on trying to build my own copy of Gramps. One thing I've noticed is that none of the genealogy tracking I've looked at incorporates what seems, to me, a critical feature: the ability to mark something you've found as not relevant. I have an ancestor named Murphy who, predictably, throws up all manner of matches on a variety of searches, and it'd be nice if I could flag a bunch of them as being irrelevant.

March 16

In The Name Of The Father was, regardless of what liberties it may have taken with the truth in search of a narrative, a good movie. Selene noted that Gerry Conlon as portrayed was the sort of person who'd eventually have been done for something else if he hadn't been incarcerated for the Guildford bombing; he seemed to simply stumble from one mishap to the next throughout the movie and there were times you'd just put your head in your hands and think, "Oh no he didn't, did he?". Anyway, definitely one to watch.

March 15

Dredd had some nice visual touches - Karl Urban managed to maintain Dredd's comic-book scowl throughout, and I recognised Anderson as Anderson based on having read one of the Judge Death storylines a long time ago - but there was some dross as well, such as the repeated use of slow motion. Yes, yes, the drug that slows your perception is a key part of the storyline, but really, it was like someone gave the director a high-speed camera for a present and he couldn't stop using it. Not a great movie, but good enough to pass the time.

March 9

I think the recommendation I got for Ghost World was actually from a Terry Zwigoff interview, so naturally he said it was a great movie and you should watch it and what not. I think it'd have sat better with me if I was still in college, or maybe a teenager, or possibly even an American, but as it was I had no real touchpoints in the movie and I kept waiting for something interesting to happen. Oh, and there were a few mildy amusing bits in it. I can't really recommend this movie, but mainly because it wasn't made for me.

March 5

Carnage is very obviously based on a one-set play, and to be honest about the only complaint I'd have about it is the ending, and since I'm not generally inclined towards handing out spoilers, I'm not going to elaboarte beyond noting that it seemd to just stop, rather than having a grand denoument. I was surprised at how good John C. Reilly was in this, since the bulk of what I've previously seen him do is the sort of Will Ferrell man-child routine, which I don't have much time for and indeed generally try to avoid; there's a bit of that here, but it's more nuanced, and it's not the blatant childishness of some of his other work.

March 1

On a hunch I rebooted the server, and magically Dropbox started working again. My best guess is either DNS weirdness or the caching server got unhappy. Or both.

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