Hacker's Diary

A rough account of what I did with Emacs recently.

April 30

Software release. Go me!

April 29

Pub Quiz. We came, um, 8 of 13 or something like that.

April 28

Adaptation is, um. It's sort of a movie about a guy who can't write a movie, which didn't really work for me. It's kinda interesting in places, but mostly I was just waiting to see what the ending would be since it was sorta telegraphed. There were several quite pretty actresses in the movie, but this didn't save it.

I gave PilotManager's SyncAB conduit some abuse, and it now produces vCards that are pretty much identical to the ones that the Palm generates if you use the "Beam Address" option. I think I will package this up neatly and fling it back on the PilotManager mailing list.

April 27

Day at the Races in Punchestown with Dad. Much fun, even if we lost more than we won.

April 26

makerpm.pl now attempts to extract a usable specfile from the source, including trying to generate a specfile from a spec.in file.

April 25

So, Schu won, and pretty much without a fight, either. Minor altercation with Montoya, which Montoya's upset about, and following Button for 9 laps, but hey, after that he was in his own race.

April 24

Woo, I just noticed that Michael Xhaard has incorporated my patch to get my digicam working with the SPCA50x driver. Go me! (encore)

Holy... Jenson Button is on pole for the San Marino Grand Prix. That was somewhat unexpected.

Spent a while tooling around with my various capture toys under Windows; at one point I was broadcasting local TV over Yahoo's webcam thingy. Gnee!

Finally decided I should do something useful with the Mini-ITX box, so it's currently being upgraded to Fedora. I'm not sure that counts as useful, but it's a start. It does at least verify that the Fedora DVD I burned last week actually works, yay!

Justin Mason gave me some more goodies for mailman.pl last week: make it work with SpamAssassin 3.0, and also with Mailman 2.1.4. I'd been a little too busy to merge them in before now.

I set up a webcam. GNEE. It's temporary, so no URL, sorry.

April 23

Check out my lights over Dublin! Woo! Go me!

April 22

Modified the RTÉ RSS generator to use HTML::Entities, which means no more silly regexp nonsense. I need to drop the same fix into the RSS Toy, too.

April 21

Smarry is a genius:

In 1992, a crack programming unit was "internally reassigned" by an executive star chamber for a checkin they didn't commit. These nerds promptly escaped from a maximum-paperwork office to the cubicle underground. Today, still wanted to make others look good, they survive as authors of fortune(6). If you have a problem, if no one else can help, and if you can find them, maybe you can read the damn system manuals yourself, you NIMROD.

Pity it's a bit to long to squish into the .signatures file.

Igby Goes Down is an excellent movie. Possibly one for the purchase list. The dialogue is really sharp, and MMMM, CLAIRE DANES. Blonde Claire Danes. Mmmm.

April 20

John & Ruadhrí and me in the pub, woohoo. It's the Aspect reunion tour, or something. Well, actually, it was more like a fast-paced sitcom complete with running gags at times.

April 19

Another day of hardware abuse, pretty much. And that was the office, not at home.

April 18

Hmm, still some oddball problems with Mom's computer. Outlook under no circumstances can find the addressbook. Mom's installed Netscape 7.1 instead, but can't import the Outlook address book because Netscape cleverly asks Outlook where it is and doesn't provide you with, say, an Advanced User option to go digging in the filesystem for an aribtrary .wab file. There's some ickiness with ACPI/APM that I don't quite get either. On the plus side, VNC is the business for remote troubleshooting.

April 17

Tooling about with the digicam. I might yet make it work webcam-stylee under Linux...

April 16

My new phone data cable arrived today. It's a USB cable that provides a charger as well as the data connection, so it's ideal for abusing GPRS when I'm not in range of a landline. Because GPRS chews the hell out of the phone's battery.

April 15

Currency Conversion via bookmark for you Mozilla folk. Blame AjD.

Slight modification to makerpm.pl to properly detect a misnamed source directory, e.g. foo-1a in foo-1.tar.gz

Solaris (2002). Hmm. Well, I really liked Jeremy Davies' character, despite being bothered about who he was for the entire movie before consulting IMDb to discover he's the slimy little fecker in Saving Private Ryan. Great character in this movie. I don't know that I really got a handle on the movie itself, though. I guess reading the book and perhaps seeing the original version might help. Then again, it might not.

Ted T'so added learning support to mailman.pl, something that's been waiting on a delivery of round tuits here at Hacker Central. Thanks, Ted!

April 14

Worked from home on s00per d00per DSL. Yay!

April 13

Tweaked the feed generator for RTÉ to cope with their new layout, which among other errors features nested <font> tags. Nicely done, guys.

April 12

Alternated between conversing with previously-mentioned recalcitrant hardware (it now does all of section 2 of the manual, and some bits of section 3 which appear to be nonfunctional due to other issues) and hacking on my GTK2 "port" of xmms. As of now (00:42) it compiles with G_DISABLE_DEPRECATED, and has only font/text stuff preventing it from compiling with GDK_DISABLE_DEPRECATED. There are still some oddball things in the UI that I'm hoping a complete _DEPRECATED build will fix by side-effect, because otherwise I'm going to have to get busy with gdb. And I don't like gdb.

April 11

Happy Birthday, me!

April 10

Tooling around with Xfree86 4.4, xmms, and random perl scripts.

April 9

Big tweak on the films.pl script - it can now mark "now showing" items, and do a full TV listing. Still imperfect since I need to figure out a nice way to manage overlaps, but hey.

April 8

Yay! Got some recalcitrant hardware to talk to me!

April 7

WOOHOO! I HAVE DSL!

Ahem.

April 6

Micromail update... I watched Just Visiting, and wow. It's excellent; despite being a remake, and despite shifting the action from the original location (which I seem to recall being France) to America, it rocks. Go rent it.

April 5

In case you're wondering why you can't get calls through on your Vodafone mobile in Dublin today: ten cells went down, but they should all be back up by 6pm this evening. There is no mention of this on RTE News, ElectricNews.Net, Irish Times Breaking News, or, heck, even the Vodafone website itself. Despite the fact that they are no doubt getting flooded with customer complaints on the topic.

Oh, also. F1 in Bahrain went off without a hitch, and was one of the most exciting races I've seen in years. For the first three laps, the start-finish straight was full of overtaking cars, or at least cars trying to overtake. Christian Klein had a fun race on and off the track; Raikonnen exited the race with a ten-foot gout of flame out the back of his suddenly-defunct Mercedes engine; and Schumacher raced away at the front of it all, winding up with a good thirty seconds to spare before he backed off for a Ferrari formation finish.

Despite Vodafone's difficulties, I found out that Esat are going to call around on Wednesday morning to switch on my DSL. Yay!

Minor silliness: tweaked both browse-url and VM's URL handling to open a new tab before loading whatever I'm sending them. I've been meaning to do this for ages.

Other loose ends, having glanced back at the previous month's entries:

• Easy CD Creator 5 will not talk to the 32MAXX under any circumstances. This includes using the original disc (that came with the drive) and the official patch from the Memorex website. So, screw that, Nero it is. Actually, Easy CD Creator sucks so much that Roxio provide you with a completely separate tool to sandblast it forcibly off your machine.
• Outlook lost its addressbook and refused to accept my suggestions about where to find it. Typically, I discovered this when I was about to leave the machine behind. Typically further, the solution appears to be non-trivial, involving registry hacking and what not.
• Of course composite video output lacks audio. D'oh. So does S-Video, for that matter. Double d'oh. What I really need to do is just make the thing work and worry about the niceties later.

I think that about covers it.

April 4

In which my brother visited from Boston and we had a birthday party for Mom.

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