A rough account of what I did with Emacs recently.
November 30
Hoo boy. I wasn't expecting much from Transformers: Dark of the Moon
but frankly it was still worse than I expected. Main
character is basically a whiner at this point. Gratuitous eyecandy
is lingered over at every possible opportunity and given about as
much agency as a hatstand. Annoying comedy characters are just
annoying. There are homophobic "jokes". The soundtrack is
jarringly noticeable to the point that I thought I'd flipped into
some sort of advert at one point. Product placement is so blatant
that they may as well have run a chyron at the bottom of the
screen repeating CISCO and LENOVO and CHEVROLET over and over. How
did Stephen Spielberg think it was a good idea to have his name
associated with this?
November 23
Captain America: The Winter Soldier
I think I previously watched on a plane, which means it was
probably cut. In any case, I'd kinda forgotten the details, so
watching it again didn't hurt. It's good, but there's a small flaw
in the whole thing: the "bad" guys are bad because they want to be
a police force without oversight, which is, er, what Natasha
basically says the Avengers want to be - or, de facto,
are, at hearings at the end of the
movie. Oooooo-kay.
November 22
A labourious round of poking at settings has sorted out some of
the Outlook pain, but there are still annoyances like: I check a
box somewhere that says, essentially, remove blank lines from
messages when reading. And what does this do? It saves visual
real-estate. Good. But then every time it does it, it puts a
notice in the message to tell me it saved space by removing blank
lines, thus... consuming space. <facepalm>
(also, if anyone knows how to make a "Delete" icon appear in the
preview reading pane along with the reply/reply-all/forward
buttons, I will give you my firstborn cat or something.)
(that's not a great offer, btw; firstborn cat is a bit of a
terror.)
November 21
Stuck with a Microsoft Windows desktop today for handwavy
reasons (my normal setup consists of a Mac and a RDP-connected
Linux box). I realise there's a certain lack of familiarity at
work, but how the hell do people actually use Outlook? There's
300 million things going on in the window where I'm trying to read
my email, and trying to reduce the visual clutter is painful to
say the least. Options? Preferences? View? Ribbons? Menus? Whoever
it was said that every checkbox on an options page is a place
where a designer gave up was a bit extreme, but Outlook is at the
opposite end of the customisation scale from that.
That aside, there's smaller irritations as well, like the fact
that the message I'm reading right now has a corresponding line in
the mailbox pane, but I can't see it properly because the window
cuts the text off horizontally. Deleting a bunch of emails by
conversation / group / whatever you want to call it, I
periodically get a message saying "there's more mail on the
server" or "this mail is part of a split conversation" and I've no
idea what the rest of those emails say because I don't care and
I'm trying not to interrupt the flow of dealing with my email. And
despite all the visual clutter, there's ACRES of whitespace.
Seriously. I read this same mailbox every day using the native
email client on MacOS - which has its own barrel of quirks, to be
sure, like "I will now randomly advance you to whichever message
in the mailbox I think is "next" and good luck figuring out how
that works" - and there's none of this visual clutter or
clunkiness. Even Thunderbird on Linux was better than
this.
November 14
A couple of years back, in the course of pursuing family
history, I took to investigating one of the local landowners who
had a named "Big House" next door to the house I grew up in
(albeit one that was demolished a number of years before I was
born). Having found out a few things and then run into the
inevitable brick wall, I put together
a page about
Arsallagh House, including my hope that someone who knew more
might stumble on the page and contact me. And this did indeed
happen: a descendant of staff who spent part of his youth on the
farm attached to the house reached out and over the course of the
last two years he's sent me recollections and pictures which I've
duly arranged into a document for posterity. And for good measure
I'm meeting him for lunch today. Hurrah for the
interweb!
November 13
Checked my database schema. I'm already using "MediumBlobField",
something I created myself to map to MySQL's "mediumblob" column
type - so it shouldn't be trying to interpret the data,
but somehow it is. I hate it when I've not only thought of the
obvious fix, but I've also tried it, forgotten about it, and it
hasn't actually worked.
November 11
Token war story for the day that's in it: my great uncle Jack
emigrated to Australia in 1916. He then signed up for the
Australian Imperial Force, who promptly shipped him all the way
back to Europe, where he was a driver with the third artillery
brigade in the north of France. He returned "home" to Australia -
apparently without incident - after the war ended, and during WWII
worked in a munitions factory. I have a copy of Jules Verne's
20,000 Leagues Under the Sea with Jack's ship-out details
scribbled in pencil inside the cover; whether this was Jack's book
that found its way back to the family home, or whether it belonged
to one of his siblings who used it to take note of Jack's
transport, I have no idea.
November 10
Found the UTF8 error that's been bugging me. Turns out it wasn't
the wineglass glyph; it's a bunch of spurious bytes in the file. I
should probably have my code write an unparsed blob of data to the
database rather than trying to interpret it as
UTF8.
November 9
Big Hero 6
was a HUGE pile of fun. It's a reasonably well-worn plot (indeed
IMDb trivia points out multiple parallels with the plot of I,
Robot and I'm sure if you removed replaced the robot
character with a person you could dig up a raft of other similar
movies), but that's not to take away from the rendition of said
plot - it's tight, the emotional beats are well placed, and the
overarching sense of silliness is never far out of reach. Probably
the only mild complaint I'd have is that Fred's character grated
on me a little; I'm not sure why, to be honest. I also found it a
little curious that the Valley-Girl-ish Honey Lemon - voiced by
Latina actress Genesis Rodriguez - is the only one who pronounces
Hiro's name Japanese-style, i.e. with the "r" as a "l"/"r" blend,
and this isn't a subtle note, it's fairly
obvious. Shrug. Someone knows why they did it that way, I
guess. Anyway. Barrels of fun, go watch it. Also, there's a
post-credits sting, so don't miss that (we did and had to go dig
it out of YouTube).
November 8
I've been using macOS' log command to investigate what
my TimeMachine backups are doing. They failed consistently for
about a month and finally managed to recover earlier this week,
but they're still not fully stable (a high churn rate on a section
of the filesystem probably isn't helping). The log view
of what's going on is certainly more informative than the UI, so
for example instead of a power bar you can see how many GB and how
many individual items it's copied or plans on copying.
Except not.
After the initial backup, which looked fairly sane, the last two
or three have basically started out telling me they're going to
copy X GB and Y items; both have then proceeded to copy about 10%
of X, while the item count racks its way up to Y. Then Y starts
increasing, so a progress bar would look like "copied 100% of 10
files", "copied 100% of 20 files", "copied 100% of 30 files"
etc. I'm sure that this makes sense to someone, but I ain't that
someone.
Anyway. The aforementioned filesystem churn is due to a piece of
code which has been caching data rather lazily into individual
files; I've now moved all that into a sqlite database so it should
cut the churn a bit.
November 5
Really enjoying the new series of Doctor Who.
It's silly, it's fun, it's touching, it's dramatic... it's what the
show is supposed to be, I guess.
Observation from the recent trip Down Under: traffic in Sydney -
cars and pedestrians - was extraordinarily well-behaved by Irish
standards. Cars giving way to pedestrians; pedestrians mostly
waiting for traffic signals before crossing roads, even when the
roads were clear; cars stopping at stop lines rather than half a
car-length across; cars stopping as the lights turned red, rather
than the lights being a warning to the stragglers to accelerate. I
can't say it's universal, since I was only there for two weeks and
had a limited scope of wandering, but it was depressingly better
than similar situations on my commute. The only exception to this
general good behaviour were cyclists, and those, in the main, were
"gig economy" delivery cyclists, almost all of whom seemed to
cycle on the pavement, in the wrong direction on one-way streets,
etc. What's weird is that I saw few enough non-delivery bikes, so
I don't know if the Cycling Asshole is restricted to the
deliverers, or if it's how bikes work in general in Sydney. I did
notice that the discard-o-bikes were, as with every other city
I've heard about so far, thrown pretty much anywhere. Like, not
even propped against something - just dropped on the
ground.
I have no theories here. I did notice equipment for detecting cars
breaking red lights, and maybe if one segment of the road-using
populace is forced into compliance, the other segments mellow
out. Or maybe the pedestrian crossings are better managed - more
frequently favouring pedestrians, for example - that people feel
less inclined to cross when the signals say not to. And of course
maybe I was just in a bubble of good behaviour and the rest of
Sydney is a more familiar free-for-all.