Hacker's Diary

A rough account of what I did with Emacs recently.

August 23: Both Mac laptop and Mac Mini seem to have become incredibly sluggish. I did a quick nose around on the server and found an opendirectoryd process consuming half a gig of memory, so I killed it off (launchd picks it back up again). Checked the laptop, and there was a distnoted process doing roughly the same thing, so I applied the same cure. We'll see if this improves matters.

Hah. I noticed the public version of this site hadn't updated since the end of June, and couldn't figure out why. Turns out I installed an update which reset permissions on the website directory, and I never noticed.

August 15: Movie night! Catching Fire, second of the Hunger Games movies, is pretty much the book with some inconsequential omissions, almost to the point where you'd think the book was written as a novelisation. Fun and all, but not earth-shattering stuff.
August 10: Another round of Garmin abuse. Apparently the panacea fix is to connect your device, remove GarminDevice.xml from it, reboot it, reboot your computer, reboot any computers near you, flip a few circuit breakers, flush the toilet, empty the cat's litter, and then reconnect the Garmin. This seems to have worked. If the problem is that the application can't read the GarminDevice.xml file, why not (a) suggest this as the problem, along with a fix; (b) quietly delete / rename it and ask the user to reboot their GPS; (c) fix the application so it can cope with what looks like a perfectly OK file?

Visiting nephew: watched The Lego Movie a second time, also Flushed Away. The song from the Lego Movie is still stuck in my head.

August 4: Noodling a bit with the Finance::Bank::IE stuff, mainly trying to make it do more manual labour for me.

This was one of the fun moments from Sri Lanka:

The mahouts were a little disappointed to discover that, after they'd more or less shoved me down to this area and got me to splash water on - and then sit on - this elephant, I only had very, very small change on me to tip them with.

Rain! Sun! Make up your mind!