Hacker's Diary
A rough account of what I did with Emacs recently.
- January 31
- mailman.pl is my
most popular script ever, it seems. I got TWO bits of mail about
it today, and apparently it's finding plenty use with the
IETF. Maybe I should put it up on Freshmeat...
Spent the afternoon adding bits to my DVDRentals "make site
less painful" script: I can now grab my entire rental
history, plus a list of all the movies that are on offer. More to
come.
WindTalkers
is another Pacific Theatre WWII movie, but it's far gritter than
The Thin Red Line. Curiously it seemed to largely ignore the supposed
subject matter - the Navajo Indians and their code - in favour of,
well, a Buddy Movie. Still, quite enjoyable.
- January 30
- LDAP is actually tricky enough to set up. Especially using old
and weak servers.
Forgot about this:
| Customer
Service Summary for week ending 30/1/2004 |
| Eircom | No paperwork.
Much to my amusement, the
limbo-like state of my account apparently means I can't
pay my bill. |
| Aer Lingus | No response to
website complaint. Will try customer service desk
next. |
- January 29
- Watched some of the extras from the Pirates of the Caribbean DVD. Johnny Depp truly is an awesome
actor.
- January 28
- Slightly bemused by the standard image preload script I've seen
in countless Dreamweaver-generated pages; slightly bemused
becasuse I seem to recall them going to a lot of trouble to keep
track of all the images using an array. I'm in the luxurious
position of having control over the client for the stuff I'm
working on, so I just need to make sure the images get loaded into
the cache, which cuts my image preload down to a one-line
function.
Lethal Weapon 4 was on TV while I was doing other stuff. Better than
I remembered, but probably because I wasn't paying attention to
the whole thing.
- January 27
- This took me an inordinately long time to find: Siemens ADR (Address
Book) file format. I'd halfway reverse-engineered the 5F02
file as it was.
Casino
is very much a Goodfellas
clone, and staring Pesci and De Niro to boot. Goodfellas
in Vegas, maybe. I pretty much enjoyed it, but I've never really
liked Pesci's characters, except his role in My Cousin Vinny which is the only movie I can remember where the entire
audience spent the entire first half-hour laughing
helplessly.
- January 26
- Released software. Yay me!
- January 25
- Fairly uneventful flight home, mildly delayed, but that's about
it. Watched The Thin Red Line when I got home; it's beautifully shot, but seems to
lack focus somehow.
- January 24
- Hanging about in Morecambe, and steadfastly refusing to even
look at a computer.
- January 23
- Off to Northern England (Morecambe, to be precise) to visit
Lockhart.
- January 22
- Applied a patch to BBDB only to discover that
the SourceForge CVS
servers were down for maintenance. D'oh.
- January 21
- Met an old friend for a few beers, which turned into more beers
than we'd intended due to fascinating conversation.
- January 20
- Found a silly bug in snorq whereby it
wouldn't correctly handle chopping up jpegs with more than 256
colours. I'm amazed that I've not seen this before, since snorq has been
around for several years now.
Trying to make more use of my IrDA port has led to the discovery
that when you do a "Send All" on the Palm Addressbok, it
packs everything up in one giant VCF, while the same operation on
a Siemens S45 sends individual VCFs. This would explain why
they're unhappy talking directly to each other, I guess. It also
requires some hacking on my part to make the OBEX server toy work
with the S45.
- January 19
- Another big disk cleanup. For the first time in a long time my
laptop has more than 15% free.
Happy Birthday Hannah!
Scooby Doo was, enh. Light. Vaguely amusing. I couldn't get with the
casting, aside from Shaggy's voice and Velma's
character.
- January 18
- Office Space is inspired. Anyone who's ever worked a cube job is
OBLIGED to see it. And Dark City
isn't quite the crapfest I'd heard it was, aside from the Let's
Tell You The Plot Before We Start voiceover at the
beginning.
- January 17
- Went on a rampage through the tmp directory cleaning out stuff
I've had for ages and haven't done anything with, such as freenet
source code and assorted Windows bits.
- January 16
- Customer Service Summary for this week:
| Eircom |
Three previous copies of account paperwork "must be
lost in post", fourth sent out. |
| Aer Lingus |
Website booking fails for the third time in six months,
with the exact same error as previous occasions. |
- January 15
- More gettext fun. My application is now approximately
translatable.
- January 14
- Phoned Eircom. Stop me if you've heard this one
before... apparently, all three of the copies of the
agreement that have been sent to me "must have been lost in
the post". The infuriating part of this is that I can't
really go to ComReg until I have
exhausted customer abuse option at Eircom, at least according to
the ComReg guidelines anyway. I
may send 'em an email on spec to see if they'd be willing to look
at it as ongoing and needless customer abuse.
And today I learned about language translations using
gettext. Whee!
Added a hook to cddb-mode.el to load
the newest file in the CDDB
directory, rather than trying to figure out which file I'd just
created with Grip... laziness can be a
wonderful driver sometimes.
- January 13
- The DSPsrv box has been
upgraded to a 2.6 kernel cos
we're all cutting-edge and stuff. Mind you, it seems to have upset
some of my scheduled scripts for reasons that are still unclear to
me.
Having to shut down Mozilla
yet again due to memory leakage, I fired up Konqueror instead to
see if I'd be able to use it as my main browser as opposed to an
occasional last resort for problematic sites. Alas, the first
thing I missed was the Personal Toolbar Folder, and the second was
the LINK menubar which picks up on navigational metalinks. I'd not
realised I use them quite so much until I tried a browser that
doesn't have them... guess I'll put up with the Lizard for a bit
longer.
Added some tweaks to my network setup so that it gets a proper
hostname. It's pretty convoluted inside the Red Hat startup scripts. Also
scripted some automatic changes to xchat depending on what domain
I'm in.
- January 12
- Well, my first Eircom bill arrived. So now I know my account
number. And I have extra grounds for complaint: they signed me up
for additional services that I didn't request.
- January 11
- Spent much of the day cleaning things up, including trying to
figure out what was failing rpm --verify on the dialup
box and why.
- January 10
- Red Planet isn't the terrible movie I was lead to believe it
was. I won't be buying it or anything, but it was good
enough.
- January 9
- Customer Service Summary thus far in 2004:
| Eircom | Sent final bill
No sign of
account paperwork |
| NTL | Sent credit for
mistaken bill.
No indication that account was cancelled,
though. |
I'll leave off phoning Eircom's
Customer Abuse department until Monday, on the off chance that the
paperwork has been caught in the post-Christmas rush or some such
nonsense.
- January 8
- New kernel installed, per
previous comments.
- January 7
- Burned a few things off to CD that I'd been meaning to do for a
while, including the freebie versions of Solaris x86 that Sun have
been giving out. It's highly unlikely I'll ever use it, but just
in case...
- January 6
- Sorted out most of the mess from the last two days, thankfully.
Upgraded kernel on both
laptops. Rebuilt ltmodem bits. Fired up modem, fetched latest
updates from local mirror... another new kernel! BAH!
Bulletproof Monk. Hmm. Well, it's good in a lot of places. But the editing
is awful. Discontinuities and near-unwatchable angle-changes in
excess do NOT help your martial arts routine any. Mind you, the
girl (Jaime King) was DAMNED cute. And the use of the stick-figure martial
arts guys over the DVD menus was funny, even if they didn't give
any credit to the original artist...
- January 5
- Yesterday's heinousness encountered today's platform
difference. GRR.
- January 4
- Committed heinous deeds with CSS and HTML and Javascript.
- January 3
- Back to Dublin again.
- January 2
- Drove to parents, installed webcam.
- January 1
- Went to see Return Of The King in Ster Century Screen 1, aka "The Big
Fella". And it was good.
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Waider
Hey, where did 2003 go?