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Hacker's Diary

A rough account of what I did with Emacs recently.

August 31
It appears that my banking scripts are not working due to something deep in the heart of MacOS: neither Perl, python, nor openssl s_client can connect to the bank's website, and the best hint I have so far is that it's down to the fact that the OpenSSL libraries on MacOS appear to support TLS 1, while the website would prefer a newer version.

curl works, which definitely points a finger at openssl, since MacOS curl uses a different security infrastructure. So now I need to figure out if I can use that same infrastructure from Python or Perl without going all HomeBrew on my system.

August 28
Sorcerer's apprentice script opened a large number of Safari tabs on the Mac Mini, causing processes to start dying. Eventually decided rebooting was the best option.

Oh yeah. DSPsrv SMTP is back on-line, but I've not yet done the magic that makes it whitelisted, so your sending experiences may be impaired.

August 26
Boston & New York. Did, approximately in order: and also

On the way home, watched Captain America: Civil War; I spent a good deal of the movie trying to figure out if the story was a metaphor for something, which I guess means I wasn't fully engaged with it; add to that a small screen, constant external distractions (crying children, engine noise), and encroaching tiredness, and I guess the fact that I enjoyed it means it was a pretty good movie. I will note that I've missed one of the franchise, so there were back-references to events I wasn't aware of, and a couple of characters I didn't recognise. Oh, and yet another endearing Spider-man was cool, but really, how many recent reboots of this character have we had now?

August 15
Sing Street: if you like 80s music and a bit of Irish nostalgia, you'll love this. In particular, if the sound of Phil Lynnot's Yellow Pearl doesn't immediately make you think of a Top of the Pops countdown, this movie might not be for you; otherwise, jump right in. Brilliantly written, fantastic music (especially the original numbers).

August 14
DSPsrv should now be available for Web, DNS, IMAP/IMAPS and POP access. I've not yet turned SMTP access back on as I need to get AWS to whitelist it for outbound email and add a reverse DNS record. Also, I've done very little update to the hosted domains, so it's still probably advertising some incorrect addresses - certainly the IPv6 ones still point at the old box.

August 13
More rewatching: Wolverine, which was an ok movie this time around.

DSPsrv news: with some jiggery-pokery, the DSPsrv box is now running in AWS. I need to do a bit more work before it's fully back in service, but not much.

Watched about half of Gladiator as well. Funny how the accents make it sort of hark back to the epic movies of the 50s.

August 10
Curious. My Perl banking modules - not updated publicly in ages, but I've been nudging away at the private copy - are today returning a 500 when I try to talk to the bank's website. Wonder what changed?

August 9
Watched Chef again. Still awesome.

August 6
Oh look. My "good friends" at TomTom have sent me ... a customer satisfaction survey.

I have no words. Or at least no polite ones, anyway.

August 3
Well, that was just precious: TomTom got back to me to say, whoops, that update we told you would fix everything is Windows only and we don't plan on fixing the broken Mac software until the end of the year. Awesome customer service. I'm only using TomTom because it's embedded in the car; this certainly dispels any notions I might have had about getting or recommending them for non-embedded use.

Wonder if my car manufacturer would give me the option to flip to Garmin? The software's little better, but at least it works on a Mac.

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