A rough account of what I did with Emacs recently.
November 28
Elysium is done by the guy who
did District 9, and this much is fairly obvious from the
look and feel of the thing. There are some Game-of-Thrones-y
"wait, did you just kill that person I thought would last to
the end of the movie?" bits, and the director sure likes him
some messy gore. The plot is fairly straightforward and
not unlike a million and one other (Not So) Bad Guy Comes Good
movies you may have seen. I do like the gritty feel of the
spacecraft, though - that's nicely done, and pretty much entirely
convincing (although we will not talk about things reaching escape
velocity with no visible means of doing so, nor any other space
glitches). Enjoyable enough movie as long as you don't think too
hard about it or look for any deeper meaning.
Oh, and you built a super-secure offworld habititat for your rich
people, and used a stock Intel PC as its master control
system?
November 26
Email certificate renewal time again. Apple no longer supports
"Web Sharing", so my previous directions on how to do
this no longer quite work, and other things that should work also
don't, and by the time I resorted to something that did work I'd
forgotten the transient password I put on the export file at the
start of the process.
For the record:
Get a new cert from wherever. I use StartCom for mine.
The certificate probably winds up in your keychain. Open
Keychain Access to get at it.
Find the cert, right-click (control-click) and select the
Export option.
Select Personal Information Exchange (.p12) format (it's the
default), and somewhere to save the file.
Give it a password. Try not to forget this, even though
you'll only need it for a brief period. Also, make it a strong
password, because you'll be moving your private key around in
a file.
DropBox? Doesn't work. AirDrop? Nope. How about... email?
Yes. Email the file to yourself. (This is stupid, and
annoying, but there you go). If you've got a webserver handy,
you can put the file on that, or if you feel like taking the
time to figure out how to get Web Sharing working again in the
absence of the control panel options (not hard, just tedious),
do that, and use that to export your file.
You took the easy option (eventually) and used email. You've
now got an email with a .p12 attachment in it in your mailbox,
which you can access from ALL THE PLACES (iPhone, iPad, the
copy of Thunderbird you run in the office, etc.)
Open the attachment. Following instructions are for iOS
devices; for other things, you'll need to experiment, wait
for me to deliver a writeup, or use Google to find an existing
one.
Tapping the attachment should open your settings app, on a
page that says, "Install Profile" at the top. Tap
"Install" (top right)
You may need to enter your passcode here if you have one set
on the iDevice.
"The profile is not signed.", it says, Yeah
yeah. Move along (Tap "Install" again)
...and again. Seriously, Apple?
Enter the password you used to export the cert. You've
forgotten it, haven't you? (note, pressing "return"
inserts a literal newline into the password box, it doesn't
submit your password. Just type the password, then tap on the
"Next" on the top right.)
Profile Installed! Sweet! (tap on "Done")
You still need to tell Mail to actually use that new cert, but
I'll get back to that. Or, you know, Google.
November 23
I just crashed Scratch
while fiddling about with something for a Coder Dojo class I'm
running next week. I guess I'll leave that off the lesson
plan. Spent an entertaining couple of hours playing with Scratch,
however, and learned a few things about it.
November 22
End of Season Five of The
Sopranos. This is the end of the penultimate season, and I
should be on tenterhooks to find out what's going to happen next,
but to be honest it really wound up on a low-key note and if it
wasn't for a lack of closure I'd just give up on the series at
this point. I don't know why this got such rave reviews as I'm
really not feeling particularly engaged with it: it's a bunch of
unsympathetic disfunctional characters who keep making the same
mistakes over and over, and the only limiting factor on how often
this happens is that they're gradually being wiped out. I was
wondering if someone had done a chart of who kills who (and maybe
coupled with who's related to who) in the series. I was wondering
this during the episode, which tells you how engaged I
am.
November 21
Cloud Atlas is an epic movie, and
by all accounts not universally acclaimed, but it was enjoyed Chez
Waider. The "small cast plays many roles" works
surprisingly well and provides an odd sort of continuity through
the different segments.
November 16
Resurrecting old bits of code for amusement value. Nothing to
see here, move along...
November 15
Another day of failed technology at Chez Waider. Mac wouldn't
connect to wireless network. Reboot Mac. No luck. Reboot wireless
router (UPC-provided Scientific Atlantic Cisco EPC2425). No
luck, and now the phone won't talk to the wireless
either. Power-cycle router. Finally, connectivity. Look at Mac,
Finder has crashed, as has Dropbox, and the disk is churning, and
the machine seems to be running hot even though I've just rebooted
it. Check the logs, and it turns out that Dropbox is trying to
upgrade itself, and something called DesktopService is chewing 90%
of the CPU. Try to start a Terminal, and the normally sedate
bouncing icon is jumping like a kangaroo. Try to start Emacs, and
it just spins up a process that never shows a window, just
consumes 50% CPU (I've seen Emacs do this regularly on Mac,
however, and often - but not always - the solution is to
reinstall, or install the latest version, or just kill the rogue
process and start it again). Clearly I've been punished more
harshly than usual for installing an Apple ".0"
version.
Right, this time Emacs needed: kill, relaunch, kill, relaunch,
kill, upgrade, relaunch, kill, relaunch. I think that's a new
record for continuous brokenness.
November 14
And so Die Another Day, the last of
the Brosnan Bond movies. You know you've done something wrong when
Roger Moore says the gadgets are overdone and the effects
are crappy. It's actually somewhat surprising how bad the
composite shots are in places - several are clearly "I am on
a bluescreen with the background patched in in post"
including several sequences which could have plausibly been done
in camera. The nonsense with the invisible car, using the ejector
seat to flip it over, the electrified glove which only turns on
its user at the critical juncture, and so on, this is really the
movie where they threw away the story in favour of the
stupidity. Nice that they did recognise this and somewhat return
to basics for the next in the series (Casino Royale) but
a shame that it wasn't recognised before this was released. To be
fair, it's not all bad: as an action movie it works well enough in
between the gadget silliness; the "Q storeroom" with all
the nods to the previous movies is a nice touch, as is making John
Cleese more Q and less Python; the swordfight sequence, while
completely gratuituous, is a whole lot of fun, and my memory of
this movie's overuse of gadgets is a lot worse than the
reality.
November 9
GoldenEye: I seem to recall that I
first saw this in Leicester Square in London around the time of
its release, but I can't figure out why I'd have been in London at
that point, so I may actually have seen it at a cinema in
Swindon. I do recall there being a round of applause after the
plane pulls out of the dive in the opening
sequence. Anyway. Brosnan looks so young in this compared
to the later movies; Famke Janssen is (pardon the pun) completely
over the top; the tank chase is one of the best Bond gags ever;
and the gadgets are tolerable. Last of the Brosnan Bond movies to
reach us, Die Another Day, does not (by my recollection)
have this feature; we'll be watching that this week at some
point.
November 8
Mac Mail on Yosemite (or OSX 10.10 if you prefer) is noticeably
more flaky than its predecessor. Two bugs I've noticed so far:
getting permanently but silently wedged while trying to sync IMAP
accounts, and merging two unrelated threads into each
other. I'm sure it's my own fault for running this as soon as it
was launched.
Also flaky: Home Sharing. I have a Mac Mini running iTunes 24x7,
and an Apple TV. Every time I've tried to access the Mac Mini from
the Apple TV, it's told me that it can't find it and maybe I
forgot to turn on home sharing. Usually it takes a variety of
restarts - iTunes, Apple TV, or both - to get things back in
sync. Surely this is basic failure of intended
operation?
November 6
Updating certs on the website... apparently I didn't write this
down the last time. If you want to import certificates
and private keys to a NSS database, you need to first
export them to a PKCS#12 file, then use pk12util to import them to
NSS. Despite appearances, certutil will not actually do what you
want in this case.
(Hopefully I'll remember to look here next year when the current
cert expires.)
November 4
EC2 instance had a hiccup and had to be manually recovered. One
of my coworkers asked me why I didn't just fail my website over to
another AZ... yes, we're all this funny at the office.
November 2
Forced to use Excel on a Mac for some office-related things. My
first thought was that I'd do up a CSV file and import it. This
foundered on the following: Import -> CSV -> select formatting
etc. -> Select destination: current spreadsheet, cell A2 and
onward; Excel shifted the entire spreadsheet one row to the right
and then inserted my data at the new column zero. Just now I am
thinking I might have figured out why this happened, but if my
theory is correct it's about as far from the Principle of Least
User Surprise as you could make it. Aside from this mishap,
dealing with comments in Excel for Mac is incredibly bad: enabling
Show All Comments for the current workbook appears to carry over
to subsequently-opened workbooks (the checkbox remains checked)
but the comments won't actually show in the new workbooks - you
have to toggle the option off and on to make it work. Editing the
comments themselves is a nightmare: the resize/move handles for
the comment boxes are impossible to find, and when you do find
them the slightest error in dragging means the spreadsheet
underneath goes scrolling wildly and next thing you know you've
got a 300-row-tall comment box with two lines of text in it. Of
course, if the comment box would auto-scroll to follow the cursor
as you typed, this wouldn't be an issue. Such a disaster of a
feature, I don't know why they even bothered including
it.
November 1
Permissions problem arose again. VERY strange. Either
I've got some periodic process that's causing this, or it's some
sort of malicious action to stop me from running
Python... militant Perl programmer, maybe?
(this could also be related to my attempts to clean up some old
backups, which I've just noticed have symlinks into the real
filesystem...)
Ah yes, it is indeed my cleanup process getting overzealous with
link-following. D'oh.