A rough account of what I did with Emacs recently.
November 26
Another fascinating discover-by-breaking Appleism: the default
mail server config rejects mail ... with an empty subject
line.
November 22
The latest incarnation of Apple's Apache Web Server, as provided
in their Server product, includes some sort of application
proxy. After a frustrating ten minutes where a Django app I run
kept losing its login credentials, I realised that the problem was
that I had another Django app on the same server - using a
different process pool, I should note - which was getting shunted
through the same proxy, and somehow invalidating the
logged-in app. The part of this that's really annoying is that
finding documentation on exactly what Apple is doing with Apache
is rarely easy and often the only sure way to proceed is to find
the configuration files and read them yourself, or just disable
the Apple-provided configuration entirely and build your own stack
instead.
November 21
Went to see Spectre this afternoon. It was a nice
piece of brain candy, but at the same time I came away from it
feeling it was all just a bit flat - like it was going through the
motions of a Bond movie without any real enthusiasm.
November 15
I've started re-reading Cryptonomicon, having
discovered that Amazon was willing to sell the Kindle version to
me cheaply because I'd previously bought the doorstop dead tree
version. It's better than I remember, but it's also dated pretty
badly in places (floppy disk to hold your private crypto key? not
a secure USB key?), and the mathematical exposition (using
Turing's damaged bike to illustrate how Enigma rotors work, for
example) is overcooked to the point of tedium because if you're
not interested, it's not advancing the plot, and if you
are interested, it's written at such an elementary level
that you just want to skip past it to the good bits. Still,
enjoying the retread through half-remembered passages of the
book.
November 11
Survived running 5k. First run in about 6 years, no prep (other
than that I cycle to and from work daily), and I managed to clock
in at about 31 and a half minutes. More to the point, I raised
about €375 for the charity, part of over €5,000 raised
by the office team. Go us, etc.
November 9
For those of you waiting for the DSPsrv to fall over again,
turning off the Completely Fair Scheduler (a thing wot controls
how data gets written to the disks) appears to have dramatically
cut back on the hardware errors I was seeing. Go figure.
This Wednesday, I'm doing a run - well, probably more of a fast
walk - for the first time since December 20089. I will be
participating in the Dublin Run in the Dark, and I am
fundraising as part of a company team over at JustGiving.com. Feel
free to chip in a few quid, if you are so inclined.
November 1
All FatWatch data now
uploaded to FitBit. Thanks,
FatWatch, you've been
great, but I don't need more than one place to keep my weight
data (it'd be nice if both FitBit and FatWatch integrated with
HealthKit so they could share the weight data, but there you
go). I've also put some comments in the upload script explaining
how to get it to work. It's still not exactly a user app,
though.
DSPsrv is back online again, and thanks to various handwavy things
I'm no wiser as to why it actually died. I've made some minor
tweaks - such as having it automatically reboot 30 seconds after a
kernel panic - which I hope will make it less likely to get into
an intervention-requiring state again, but I have some other
things I want to do in terms of monitoring its health and maybe
getting a better understanding of same. It doesn't help that
Dell's official diagnostic / management software has moved on from
this particular platform.