Hacker's Diary
A rough account of what I did with Emacs recently.
- December 29
- Ant-man
was a HEAP of fun. I will confess that a plot twist I expected
didn't materialise, and I found Mr. Bad Guy bore more than a
passing resemblance to a certain CEO of a Seattle-based IT
company. But that's all handwaving; about the only thing I didn't
like - and I guess, somehow, I wasn't meant to like - was Luis,
and that was more mild annoyance than actual dislike.
- December 26
- 'Tis the season and all that. I've watched a whole heap of Harry
Potter, and a few other random things, but the only new thing is
Mission Impossible - Fallout
which was ... ok. The whole "Tom does all his own stunts!" thing
is a bit tiresome, because then you have to have a twenty-minute
helicoptor chase to show off Tom's flying skills, when really it'd
have been better to try and tie up the 15-minute deadline in real
time (apparently they overrun the deadline by 7 minutes; it felt
like half an hour). I recently watched someone's YouTube opinion
on the first Pirates of the Caribbean movie and how it
was accidentally great, and one of the points the guy made was
that an action sequence should advance the plot or the characters
in some way, and not simply be in awe of its own spectacle, and by
that measure this movie fails repeatedly. Anyway. It's a bit of
bubblegum, it's overly long, and it works out pretty much exactly
the way you think it does.
- December 23
- The General
was pretty decent, and seems to have at least some connection to
the reality of the situation - Gleeson does a pretty good job of
actually looking like the man he's portaying. There are still some
liberties taken with historical detail, but to be honest I don't
think anyone's got the actual truth of any of it so it probably
doesn't really matter. It's a dark movie - well, you'd expect that
with the subject matter, I suppose - but done well and worth
watching.
- December 22
- Hitchcock
isn't quite what I expected, since I didn't realise it was
actually about the making of Psycho as much as it was
about the eponymous director. It was also about his wife -
long-suffering and very supportive, as portrayed. Helen Mirren I
think probably carried the best of the acting in this. It's an
interesting piece of work and I enjoyed it, but I find now that I
want to know more about the man for whom it's
named.
- December 20
- Earlier this year I watched an interview from, oh, probably some
time in the nineties where the Edge talked about his guitar
playing and it was both fascinating and enlightening - I hadn't
realised, for example, that he makes extensive use of alternative
tunings. Last night I watched an hour-long review of his stage
equipment with his guitar tech (who both amusingly and annoyingly
seemed to have a good deal of trouble getting words out of his
mouth in the right order to express what he was trying to say) and
it was... eye-opening. The alternative guitar tunings thing is on
another level entirely - specific guitars with specific tunings,
with backups for specific songs - but Edge's attention to all
the tech that goes into making his particular sound is
incredible. Like, because they're using wireless rigs, he wants to
make sure he's getting the same sound as if they were plugged in,
but he doesn't want to touch any of the guitar setup, so he's
tweaking the capacitors in the wireless rig and listening to the
sound and tweaking again until he's happy with it. The legendary
pedalboard looks kinda mundane in this context; it's just a bank
of switches hooked to a rack-load of gear and, uh, five (mostly)
vintage amplifiers which for aesthetic reasons are all sitting out of
sight next to the guitar tech's workspace during the gig. The
non-mundane parts of the pedalboard? There're pedals to adjust the
parameters of the delay he's using, so he's not having to tweak
the dials on stage. There's a distortion pedal of a particular
vintage rebuilt into the body of a wah-wah pedal to give the
distinctive guitar sound in Elevation. And there's pedals
to tell the band he's ready to go with the song, which is kinda
funny, to be honest - I mean, sure, it's probably necesssary for
"lemme dial in these fifteen effects and then we can go", but
still.
And I'm reminded that there's a bit in the performance of
Sunday Bloody Sunday in Rattle and Hum where
he's been laying into the guitar - it's a very emotional
performance - and suddenly realises he's on the wrong side of the
stage and needs to hit an effect, and basically starts
playing... almost filler on the guitar while he legs it
across to his pedalboard to hit the magic button.
Anyway. That's two Edge revelations for me this year, and I've
been a fan of U2 for a very long time.
- December 17
- One of the Advent of Code puzzles has me stumped. I'm sure I've
got the correct answer, but the site says no, and I can't find the
problem. My code's working fine with the examples given, so that's
not helping. The puzzle is effectively a 2D version of Conway's
Life where you get a bunch of patterns to apply to the
current generation that will produce the next generation. I've
manually worked through about half a line from the initial setup
to generation 1, and it all looks sane, so I'm left scratching my
head at this point. There's a second headscratcher but I've not
put quite as much effort into validating my approach - it turns
out the spec for the puzzle leaves a little ambiguity, so I'll
need to play around with that a bit.
- December 16
- The Advent of Code thing finally completed its work - with the
right answer - and the subsequent puzzle I knocked out in about 10
minutes including runtime. Go figure. I'm probably missing a trick
with the long-running one. In any case, I've another slightly
long-running one going now, and I'm kinda chafing against Python's
multi-dimensional array handling.
- December 15
- I'm sure the TV listings said Die Hard 5, but we wound up with
Die Hard 4, so we watched that.
- December 12
- Managed to complete a few backups eventually. So now I need to
figure out what I'm doing next; put the RAID unit back on the
older server, or move everything to the newer server? Maybe
this'll be a Christmas Holiday project!
The circus in the UK... they can't even properly organise a
revolt. It's all too stupid to make up. Oh, and BBC weren't
helping matters by trying to run "live" coverage of the outside
windows of the 1922 Committee's offices while the count was
happening, having the guy on camera saying inane things like,
"maybe their hands are cold and that's why it's taking so
long". Anyway, all over, now we're back to petulantance
vs. obstinancy while the slightly bemused, slightly confused rest
of the EU looks on wondering how the hell these people managed to
conquer a quarter of the planet only a few centuries
ago.
I have been noodling around with Advent of Code 2018, a fun
little site that gives you two programming puzzles each day and
builds up a picture as you solve the puzzles. I got stuck a little
a couple of days ago with one of the puzzles because I'd solved it
using brute force and then the followup puzzle was "now do the
same thing scaled up 100 times". After a couple of days it became
obvious that it wasn't going to complete any time soon, and worse
I'd not put any progress indicators in the code so I'd no idea if
it was at 9% or 90%. So I did a little hacking about this evening
(in the process discovering that Python allows you to do
array[index:] = new_array_values) and my canary run went
from 45 seconds to under 10, so I'm now rerunning it along with
some progress indicators and it's already 20% of the way
through. Shuold be done tomorrow, I guess. There's nothing
stopping me from moving on to the next puzzle in the mean time,
but I figured I'd do them in order.
- December 8
- Just doing a quick fsck...
/dev/rdisk2s2: fsck_hfs started at Sun Dec 2 10:54:05 2018
/dev/rdisk2s2: fsck_hfs completed at Sat Dec 8 07:12:15 2018
Now to see if it'll run a backup.
- December 7
- Company Christmas Party, where there was an actual old-fashioned
carousel. Indoors.
- December 2
- In an attempt to remedy the backup situation, I'm switching the
backup drive to a slightly beefier machine (for handwaving reasons
it needs to be a network share, not directly connected). That
means it's basically spent the last 11 hours verifying the drive,
and there's no progress bar to hint at when it might be
done. Tum-ti-tum.
- December 1
- I have established a pattern of backup failure that goes like
this:
- TimeMachine launches a backup
- Optionally, it spends many hours verifying the existing
backup. This might happen if the previous backup crapped out
badly.
- TimeMachine takes a snapshot of the drive to be backed up,
and estimates how much space it'll need on the backup
drive.
- TimeMachine discovers there's not enough free space, so it
starts pruning things from the backup drive, like the
previous failed backup.
- Time passes...
- TimeMachine starts copying files across, and things of that
nature (I will allow that TimeMachine does clever stuff
here).
- Oh no! A spurious network event has interrupted the
connection to the backup drive! (good luck finding out what,
if anything, actually happened.)
- TimeMachine abandons the backup, leaving a .inProgress
backup occupying all that space it had cleared.
- Go back to the top.
So, the thing about this is that each time around the loop, the
probability of failure increases because there's more data to back
up (unless the machine you're backing up is entirely unused, and
even then it's still generating some level of churn on the disk
from time to time). I appear to have hit a tipping point on this
where I can't rely on the backup drive to be reliably available
for long enough to complete the backup.
I am so glad I have Arq as an offsite backup while I'm trying to
figure this mess out.
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Waider
Woop, 12-18 is here.