A rough account of what I did with Emacs recently.
March 31
Wow. I did not think it was possible for Vodafone's customer
abuse to go downhill from the last time I used it, but no: I
logged a request through their website this morning, and at around
5pm this evening I got an automated reply telling me I'd
get a response in 24 hours. You know, the sort of automated reply
you should receive immediately to fob you off for a day. I look
forward to seeing the actual response.
March 30
The Guardian seems to have updated both the style and volume of
its RSS feed, and neither is for the better. Some of the
"articles" are little more than a paragraph of
throw-away text, and some of the headlines are clearly just
linkbait.
March 24
I can kind of understand why duplicating a picture in iPhoto and
then cropping individual bits out of it results in a bunch of
pictures you can't break into separate events, but it's a bit
annoying. This would be a great place to have copy-on-write
functionality.
March 23
Started watching, of all things, Downton Abbey (which seems to
have multiple IMDb entries). I am somewhat surprised to find it's
very entertaining and very engaging. Maggie Smith looks to be
having an absolute blast.
March 22
Clouds and silver linings. The server upgrade was such a mishap
that I wound up rebooting it, and lo, backups work
again.
Updating a cert on my EC2 instance; I'd forgotten how to do this,
but fortunately all the command-line history was there from last
time. It's an unfortunate chain of copying, pasting, openssl
usage, certutil usage, verifying things, swearing, undoing
everything, repeating, and so on.
Yet another depressingly clunky server upgrade on the Mac
Mini. Really, it'd be nice just once to click on, "Sure,
upgrade my server" and not have to spend some followup time
unscrewing things.
March 19
Fixing the broken journal stuff turned out to be a matter of
adding two zeros to a list which could very reasonably have added
them itself.
March 7
Upgraded Emacs. Somehow
broke the stuff that helps me write this journal. Bah.
I was expecting Joss Wheedon's Much Ado About Nothing to be
in the same vein as Baz Luhrman's shot at Shakespeare, but it
wasn't, really, in so many ways. And that kinda disappointed me at
the start, but I soon forgot that I was disappointed, and in the
end it was a really, really great piece of work. Worth
seeing.
March 5
Signed up to Greyhound as apparently the bye-laws that have been
in effect since Jan 2014 require every household to be registered
with an approved waste collector, even if, like me, you use bin
tags and recycling bags. In the sign-up I included a very clear
statement: no marketing, no giving my details to third parties. My
sign-up was acknowledged via an email sent through a third-party
email management company (so I suppose I can at least take
comfort that if my data goes astray, it will have done so
professionally) and today I get a SMS reminder that it's
bin day tomorrow, which I have been opted in for without
asking. This is, after all, the same company at whom we express
surprise when our rubbish is actually collected, and as is far too
usual for my liking there are no alternatives available for where
we live.
Python-based RSS feed scraper is doing well; there are some
encoding issues, but this kinda goes back to the database setup as
much as anything else, and I'm going to have to figure out how to
manipulate the database for a variety of reasons, not least of
which is to convert everything to "native" unicode/UTF-8
support so that all those pesky accented characters come out
right. A certain amount of this is, of course, of a similar nature
to the classic, "How do I get to ...? " "I wouldn't
start from here."
March 3
Finally bit the bullet and switched the fetching & parsing
side of the RSS
Toy over to the Django-based stuff I've been playing with. In
the process I discovered that my noddy little database apparently
has too many records to permit me to alter the table structure
(about 800k records, and when I try an ALTER TABLE the
connection eventually times out). Oh well.