Hacker's Diary
A rough account of what I did with Emacs recently.
- November 25
- Dear useless credit card provider, this past weekend I attempted
to pay my bill online; your website, having asked me to verify my
details, provided me with a page indicating an error (along the
lines of "this page is not available right now"). You
utter monkeys. You could have told me before I entered my details,
or before the verification page. This stuff isn't hard, and you
persist in making it so. I have, as previously noted, moved almost
all my commerce off your crappy little bits of plastic and will
forthwith be closing my account and seeking refund for outstanding
credit balance.
LOVE, WAIDER. (p.s. I'm lying about the "LOVE"
part)
In other news, recently done with a week of jury duty. More anon,
maybe.
- November 23
- Weird. Some random recent iPhoto upgrade caused a bunch of
images to have their timestamps moved back by 21
seconds. Very peculiar.
- November 21
- The process of attempting to make a
compatible-with-my-existing-hackery Python script for handling RSS
feeds has lead me to discover several interesting problems with
the existing code that I hadn't really ever been aware of; today,
for example, I discovered that (once again) I was attempting to
work with data-as-served, which was gzip-compressed, instead of
data-as-intended, which is the uncompressed version; I also
discovered that someone out there is periodically generating
individual RSS entries in excess of 64k, which it turns out is the
size limit on the database field I chose to store this particular
thing in.
- November 20
- Hacking around on a "spare" Time Machine volume to try
and figure out how to persuade it I've got an extra backup, and I
run smack into the many, many permissions options available to you
on an Apple HFS+ volume: you've got your filesystem-level "is
it read-only or not?", you've got your standard Unix
read/write/execute bits, you've got your
may-be-interpreted-by-random-tools extended attributes, you've got
your file flags (immutability and what not) and you've
got your POSIX.1e ACLs. Figuring out which ones of these were
involved, and how to list them, was entertaining, especially when
I was confusing ACLs and flags (I know, stupid, right?). I've
still not figured out why the "Latest" backup symlink is
apparently protected from all manner of monkeying, and creating a
fake backup by hardlinking an existing one and creating or cloning
various flag and metadata files failed to result in my phantom
backup appearing in Time Machine's browse list. More archaeology
required, I guess.
- November 18
- Don't let your software devs write your customer-facing error
messages. Otherwise you get "calories_burned: ensure no more
than 0 decimal places" instead of something that a human
might say. (Full disclosure: my home-made web toys display
HTML-formatted stack traces)
So I thought that Adobe Flash was now able to silently update
itself. This doesn't explain the downloader that opened a new tab
and required manual launching, and that wanted to shut my browser.
Nice one, Adobe.
- November 17
- Hacking away at some Django stuff, including trying to convert
bits of the ol' RSS toy
to python (that link is actually the old, old RSS toy...)
and discovering just what a mess I'd made of character encoding,
since Perl is a lot more laissez-faire about it. In particular it
looks like I've got some doubly-encoded strings floating
about.
- November 16
- Real Steel turned out to be a whole
lot more fun than I was expecting; sure, it's Precocious Child
plus Deadbeat Dad plus Underdog vs. The Man, but it actually works
well (granted, you know almost exactly how the story is going to
pan out in advance) and has a lot of a feelgood stuff going on.
In other media, I recently finished John Sheridan's Paradise
Alley, a not-wholly-fictional novel about the part of Dublin
I live in. It's an excellent piece of work, with lots of heart,
lots of humour, and some keen insights into Dublin of the early
20th century. Do read this, it's worth it.
- November 10
- "Do you want to trust the website "www.your credit card.ie" to use
the "SharePoint Browser Plug-in" plug-in?" HELL NO. Who
thought that was a good idea?
(I'm actually slowly but surely removing all reason for me to use
these guys, i.e. finding all the places I registered those cards
and changing them to another card).
- November 7
- I had need of a plumber this week due to an unexpected water
pressure problem in the hot water circuit, coupled with the water
stoppages making it difficult to refill the system as there was
either no water or insufficient pressure. My previous plumber had
a major problem with timekeeping and, it turns out, did a number
of questionable things to my boiler, so I felt a new plumber was
necessary; of course, engaging the services of a new and unknown
tradesman is always a bit risky. A little googling turned up three
plumbing companies/collectives, two of whom have some variation of
"Dublin" and "Plumbing" in their name, and Plumb-Fix (spoiler: guess which
one I used). There were a few more, but, well, phone interaction
is not my favourite thing and these were people offering email or
web-form contacts.
Plumbers #1 never got back to me. Plumb-Fix took a day to get back
to me on email, by which time I'd engaged the services of Plumbers
#2. Good, I thought, took only three hours to respond to an online
query, did so by email, fair enough.
Failed, of course, to respond to further enquiries. Eventually
turned up at five to six, had a bombastic "I'm the
knowledgable one" attitude, and left after a few minutes
having determined the problem to be a ruptured expansion vessel
which he would replace the following day. I was waiting on a
go/no-go for a meeting which would require my presence in the
office, so he said to let him know the following day when he could
call. I said in any event, after 2pm would be fine.
The following morning: emailed the guy early as I'd got word that
I didn't need to be physically present in the office. Followed up
an hour later with a text message. At lunchtime, having had no
response, I reluctantly resorted to phoning; much tooth-sucking
noise and hedging and "I should be around between 4:30 and 5
this evening". You know how this ends. 5:45, the guy texts to
say he can't make it, and will Saturday do? (This is Thursday, and
the fault means we wake up in a cold house each morning with no
hot water.) Reluctantly I agree - by text - and enquire when on
Saturday he might call. No response, again. Right, I say to
myself, I need a new plumber. Maybe that guy from Plumb-Fix who
got back to me a day late.
9am Friday, phoned Plumb-Fix. Got an answering machine that didn't
appear to have an outgoing message. Le sigh, looks like I'm stuck
with Plumber McScrewYou. Five minutes later my phone rings, and
it's John from Plumb-Fix. Armed with the knowledge that I need an
expansion vessel fitted - for which I've noted the capacity and
model details - I tell him what's up, and he says he'll be around
that day at 3pm. Right then. 2:50 pm, the doorbell rings, and
there's John and his apprentice ready to go. Half an hour of
poking around the boiler and the job's done - he's even taken
effort to swap the expansion vessel without draining the entire
system so it's a good deal faster to get everything back up and
running. He's also put some leak sealant in the system - as there
has been a trickle leak in it for some time - and says to keep an
eye on the pressure, and if it hasn't sorted itself by Sunday let
him know. By Sunday the system has settled, and as I'm writing
this some days later it has been running without a hitch.
So, need a plumber in the Dublin area? John Harding at Plumb-Fix
is your man. Those others that have websites asking you how you
can be sure you've found a good Dublin plumber,
etc. etc. (i.e. filling their websites with SEO spam)? Don't
bother, wasting your time.
- November 6
- Further to the Time Machine stuff mentioned yesterday I've
hacked together something to try out my crazy theory, but now I
need to figure out how I'm going to test it - without, you know,
destroying a backup.
- November 4
- Two of my three lost SSL certs from the Great Server
Crash of 2013 have finally expired, so I can renew them for free
(I use Startcom's free certificate service). The third will be up
for renewal in a couple of months, I think.
Found today: discussion on the use of directory hard links in
MacOS' Time Machine, along with a dinky commandline tool to create
and remove such things. I have the same question as a whole bunch
of people - how do I merge two Time Machine backups for the same
damned machine which TM in its great wisdom chose to make into
separate entities - and I suspect a little bit of experimentation
with this tool may reveal the answer.
- November 3
- Finished watching Sopranos
season 2. People I wanted written out who were written out: two -
well, one of them permanently, so there's always the risk of the
other returning, boo. People I was expecting to be written out who
were: three. No loss there. People I was expecting to be written out
who weren't: one, but I understand the actress died in real life,
so I can possibly be assured that there are no further occurrences
of this particular character. And here, at the end of season 2,
I'm still not finding this compelling. Given the demise of a
somewhat major, but expected to be dead, character at the end of
this season, it's interesting to try and pick out who might
survive to the end of the series, but I know that David Crane is
no George R. R. Martin, so I'm fully expecting a bunch of people
to survive simply to carry the franchise if nothing
else.
- November 1
- Iron Man Three was another fun
movie, although the whole post-Avengers-without-the-Avengers bit
felt like something of a gaping plot hole - if Tony Stark is part
of this team of super buddies, where the hell are they all when
he's under threat? It works just fine as a standalone plot,
though. Also, as you'd expect, stuff explodes, everyone cracks
wise, etc. etc.
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