A rough account of what I did with Emacs recently.
September 29
Two terminals, both alike in connectivity,
In fair MacOS, where we lay our scene,
at which point I ran ssh raspberrypi.local in both;
one could not - and still cannot connect, while the other has no
such problem.
After much theorising about independent name caches and what not I
eventually noticed that I'd left out the second "r" in
"raspberry", and somehow instead of getting a resolution error it
just sat there waiting for such a hostname to appear on the local
network (I guess).
September 28
Watched S1E4 of Rebus
which remains a solid, gritty rendition of the books. We've only
seen half of S1E2 because Virgin Media had their spat with UK Gold
while we were DVR'ing the season, and since we'd figured that the
Alibi channel was gone for good we rather too hastily deleted the
subsequent seasons (with Ken Stott rather than John Hannah as the
titular character). So now we wait for the later seasons to come
around again.
On the positive side, Doctor Who starts up again soon.
September 23
Continuing to upgrade a bunch of Django apps, and learning how
to use Python's six module to write code that's
compatible with both Python 2 and Python 3.
September 19
As noted elsewhere: first day of my fourteenth year in my
current employment.
Upgraded Safari - I presume it's to fix that crashing CSS bug
that's been doing the rounds - and it informed me it was disabling
"extensions that slow down web pages" or some such. One of which
was uBlock Origin, the content blocker I use to clip adverts and
what not out of my browsing. THANKS, APPLE. So I go to turn it
back on, and the "Are You Sure?" popup has "Uninstall" selected by
default. NO REALLY, THANKS, APPLE. Mutter mutter
mutter.
(The less said about the App Store telling me it couldn't update
Safari because Spotlight was using its extensions, which I could
find no way to fix other than force-installing the update via the
command-line, the better)
Oh tsk. It looks like the Safari version of this has become
abandonware. Dammit.
September 16
Converting a bunch of Django code to the latest 1.x release, as
you do. I'm aiming to move it all to Python3/Django 2, but doing
it step by step since I tried a big-bang upgrade on one project
and ALL the wheels came off.
September 15
The Post was
really good and seems to have stuck pretty close to the
truth. The critcism from NYT reporters that their role was played
down seemed a bit petty given that ample screen time is given to
the NYT being the ones breaking the story, the Post being ticked
off that they've got nothing to match it, etc. I was sufficiently
aware of the Pentagon Papers to know the name of the leaker, but
I didn't know anything about what they contained or the fact that
this was essentially the thing that tipped Nixon into full-on
paranoia. The parallels with the current US Administratino are
also somewhat startling.
September 14
Watched season 10, episode 6 of the X-Files...
which turns out to be the season finale. Lots of WTF when we
realised. The whole episode feels like it was cobbled together in
a hurry, everyone's overacting, and to add to all that we've
discovered that Prime Video isn't currently carrying season 11 so
we've no way of finding out what happens next. Bah.
September 9
A little social observation: a
recent planning grant for a Domino's Pizza joint on Bridge
Street in Ringsend. Almost all of the conditions listed pertain to
the construction itself; there's a restrictino on opening hours
that outlasts the construction, but that's more-or-less it. Now,
should you happen by that outlet on any given day, you'll find a
line of delivery bikes (motor and not) "parked" along the double
yellow lines. Because there's nowhere else within a reasonable
distance to park your delivery bike. (delivery trucks for this
Domino's, I'm sure, pull in on the pavement, blocking it and the
road; or they'll pull in outside the church on Thorncastle Street,
again on the pavement, causing a hazard for left-turning traffic
from Bridge Street). I see a lot of this around the city: new uses
for old places with no apparent consideration given to what
changes they'll make to traffic in the area, or what access is
required for deliveries to and from the place, and in the end you
wind up with illegal and dangerous parking. I'm no expert on
planning regulations, but this seems like an obvious point to
consider in a city full of narrow streets.
September 8
Nerd Lazy: sitting on the sofa for ten minutes hacking about
with curl until I finally managed to poke the
network-connected radio in the right way to power it off. It's
all of five metres away from where I'm sitting.
September 7
R.I.P.D.
is... not terrible. It's fun watching Jeff Bridges play,
basically, Jeff Bridges, although I couldn't understand his
dialogue in places. The plot is predictable enough, the effects
are generally not the point of any given shot in which they
occur, and there's a nice thread of goofy humour running through
it. Shame that the two main female characters amounted to little;
in particular, I was expecting that Stephanie Szostak's character
would do something in the finale other than being a
hapless pawn, but no, hapless pawn to the end. Mary-Louise
Parker's character at least had a little more going on, but
that's not saying a lot.
September 2
Changing a few random passwords led me to encounter Cisco's
"login experience" (no, not kidding, there's a banner that says,
"Learn more about this new login experience"). First, it won't let
me log in, and I'm gonna guess it's because yet again some Web 2.0
developer didn't test to see what happens when you use a "+" in a
password, since that particular bug is apparently Still A
Thing; but that aside, welcome to Cisco's Email Harvester! If you
enter a username - and let's face it, who doesn't have a giant
dictionary of usernames lying around? - it'll tell you the email
address for that username! In the clear! Excellent! But wait,
they're Protecting Your Privacy, because if you click on "I forgot
my password" (or "your login experience doesn't recognise the
password I saved in my password safe, so I'm pretty sure I'm not
mistyping it"), it tells you that an email has been sent
to a**b@example.com - see, those asterisks protect your email from
the people who didn't read it off the previous page!update: tsk, ok, this turns out to be a bit of me being an
idiot, and a bit of Cisco. It displays the username you entered,
and I'm sure I entered a username and saw an email displayed, but
I'm willing to allow that I may well have entered the email in the
username field. HOWEVER!!!111eleventy!@@ It is the case
that they're using some fabulous piece of code which didn't
recognise my old password and sets requirements for the
password which would exclude my old password, which might explain
my inability to log in. And when I did reset the password, I
got this:
Single sign-on authentication was unsuccessful (reference # AFTBISZU).
Partner: https://identity.cisco.com/api/tenants/super/v1/am
And so I will leave the original snarky paragraph below in
place.
Great work, Cisco. I'm not sure I actually have a reason to use
a Cisco login at this point so I'll probably just delete the
account as soon as I get back my access to it.
September 1
Since I don't update this as often as I used to, the birthday
greetings have become more random... Happy Birthday Big (but not
Biggest) Brother.