< | >

Hacker's Diary

A rough account of what I did with Emacs recently.

February 25: And now back in Dublin watching Ireland's women's team taking on Wales and (so far) doing as well as, or better than their male counterparts.

In the finest Irish tradition, the Irish let their guard down, but managed not to lose the plot entirely and came back to a fantastic win including bonus point.

February 23: In Tramore to watch Ireland wrestle a win out of Wales, and Scotland do a joyful stompy dance on England. The atmosphere in the pub was something else entirely. I imagine there'll be a few broken chariots on the island next door tomorrow morning.
February 22: Hmm. Seems like my OpenHAB script is not actually taking effect: it's apparently not sending the command(s) to the TRV, so the next time the TRV checks in it's still at the old temperature. Need to figure this one out.

Hmm. Seems I need both a sendCommand and a postUpdate. Documentation for this stuff is sparse, so I'm intuiting that the former updates the device, and the later updates the control system.

February 17: The Great Password Scrub is largely complete. I'm left with a bunch of warnings (I decided that my audit script should flag entries without a URL, for example) and some sanity-checking, but for the most part everything has been updated or deleted as appropriate.

We're well into Season 4 of the X-Files, and both Scully and Skinner have been roped into Mulder's crazed worldview somewhat, but what impressed me recently was the "Memoirs of a Cigarette-Smoking Man" episode; the episode itself was a bit twee, but the attention to detail in the JFK segment was applause-worthy. References to curtain rods, Oswald being startled by his boss and a cop on the stairs, Oswald yelling about police brutality as he was removed from the theatre... all factual, or at least presented as evidence during the subsequent investigations. Nicely done, X-Files.
February 14: With some effort, managed to write a hook for OpenHAB that detects that I've replaced the battery in a TRV (well, ok, it detects that the temperature is below what I'd normally set it to) and resets it. I'm actually kinda surprised that this took no more than ten minutes to get right, but on the other hand I did spend a few hours looking at this some weeks ago so it's not like I was starting from zero.

February 10: Went to a cookery class and made macarons. NOM.
February 9: Printers: the eternal bane of my IT life. This morning I am attempting a simple task, printing a 16-page PDF on my slightly aged Canon Pixma MP480. I have had to resort to printing no more than two pages at a time, as any more causes the printer to crash. And by crash I mean it sits there displaying its "I'm doing something, honest" display, while nothing actually happens, and neither the cancel nor the (soft) power button elicit any response - I have to pull the power cord to get it back.

Further weirdness: accidentally spool to wrong printer. Drag print job from wrong printer to right printer (I love that this actually works on the Mac). Job which was sent to wrong printer as B/W miraculously becomes a full-colour job on the right printer.

Star Trek: First Contact is kinda fun, although there're a few bits where it feels like the pace could've been tightened up a bit. Picard going all Ahab and being called out by a "primitive" is amusing. The Borg themselves, though... they only attack if you're a threat. Or if it's convenient to the storyline. Or they don't attack, if it's convenient to the storyline. Trying to figure out if they will or not seems to be a dice-roll at best. Also, no paradox loop on account of Geordie and Riker being Zefrem's copilots? I guess this movie isn't one for thinking too deeply about.

February 2: Kingsman: the Golden Circle: fun, silly, but not quite as good as the first one. In particular, it felt a bit overdone on CGI in places, and if it wasn't, that's even worse, because that's how it looked.

Waider

Aaaand that was January.