Hacker's Diary

A rough account of what I did with Emacs recently.

March 31

My Django admin commands stopped working, and I'd put it down to some weirdness in one of the recent Apple updates, and just bodged around it. Figured it out today: I installed Mercurial using Homebrew, and that dragged in a custom build of python, which took precedence over the system install, and no longer referenced the system Python libraries. Since I can't recall what the hell I was doing with Mercurial in the first place, I removed it and cleaned up the mess.

March 29

Got to the end of Mr. Robot Season 3, which means I'm now all caught up with what's been broadcast so far. It continues to be utterly messed-up and dark and what not. Still enjoying it, though.

March 25

Murder on the Orient Express was fine, I guess, but that mustache was seriously ridiculous.

March 24

Back from a week in Oxford: we saw Ben Goldacre, Monty Don and Derry Moore being interviewed, toured Blenheim Palace, and generally lounged around a lot reading, eating and drinking. Ben Goldacre in person somehow has wilder hair than any photo you've ever seen of him.

I reread Daniel Suarez' Daemon over the course of the week, since I'd recently recommended it to someone and felt like a rerun. It's better than I first thought - I'd given it three out of five stars - but there's still something a bit eye-rolling about a techie writing a sci-fi novel who feels the need to mention specific network protocols and ports in the text; it doesn't matter if it's technically accurate, it always comes across as needless techno-jargon.

March 18

Ooop, been a bit quiet here lately.

Had a "six nations, beer and dinner" weekend with The Lads in Tramore. That was fun, not least because Ireland won their match.

Ireland went on to win the six nations with a game to spare, then beat England to win the Grand Slam and the triple crown. Note, fourth Grand Slam, not third: the women's team took the grand slam in 2013.

We're up to Season 5 in the X-Files: this is apparently the season where the writers stopped caring because David Duchovny and Gillian Anderson and occasionally Mitch Pileggi and frankly who needs a coherent script? There're a few iffy episodes here, and then a bunch of retreads of previous episodes, then an actual retread complete with the bad guy from the previous episode. But hey, David and Gillian and Mitch!

I'm being harsh. We're enjoying it, even if we're mocking the fact that Scully is still coming up with impossible scientific explanations after five years and first-hand experiences, and both Mulder and Scully are taking risks in pursuit of the unknown that normal people wouldn't take, much less trained FBI agents (e.g. let's split up and not keep each other posted on each other's progress so that we're both in constant jeopardy).

Updating TomTom GPS, once again proving to be as "good" as Garmin ever was: "Your GPS is up-to-date!" "But we're downloading a critical update!" "But your GPS is definitely up-to-date!" "Wait, have you logged in?" "The account you've supplied doesn't exist!" "Your account is locked for Security Reasons!" "It’s tricky remembering all those passwords, isn’t it? Thankfully, updating your TomTom password is easy."¹ "Hey, there's an update for GPS, but it will take a long time to download on your 9,600 baud modem!" "We're updating your GPS from the USB key you've plugged in. Please note that the GPS will try to sleep from inactivity before the update completes, at which point you'll need to start over, so please periodically prod the display to convince it it's being used."

¹This is an actual message if you request a password reset because - I am inferring - the desktop app saved the old password and hammered your recently password-changed account with it until you got locked out, and the app doesn't understand "your account is locked out" as an error message so tells you your account doesn't exist instead.

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