Hacker's Diary

A rough account of what I did with Emacs recently.

August 31

Wrapped up Voyager S1. No season finale, per se, just another episode. I see notes that S2E1 was originally intended as the finale which makes more sense, dangling another possibility for a shortcut home in front of the audience in case S2 didn't get greenlit.

What's happened with all my projects? Didn't get to the Mac yet. Some domestic DIY was derailed by the inexplicable disappearance of my power drill, which I suspect may only solved by purchasing a new drill at which point the old one will spontaneously appear in the middle of the room. DVD project, I got a bit sidetracked with some polishing of what is something of a throwaway script and I need to get back onto that. I'm sure there's a bunch of other stuff I'm ignoring at present, and very much trying not to pick up new things that I'll ignore.

August 30

Coogan's Bluff... wow. Bit of a stinker, eh, Clint?

August 29

Almost done with Voyager S1. I think it's aged well enough, but it's sort of funny that there's apparently only a handful of plotlines available to your average Star Trek series and they just cycle through them.

August 28

Upgrading a Raspberry Pi using apt dist-upgrade, what could go wrong?

August 27

Almost at the end of S1 of Voyager, and have set up recording for S2. Not a moment too soon as the season starts on Friday!

August 26

Former laptop suffered a spontaneous memory failure over the weekend - it was working, I shut it down, packed it away temporarily, took it out again, tried to power it up, and BEEP BEEP BEEP. I've not encountered beep codes on a Mac before. Oh well, project for the weekend I guess.

A single dose of WD40 and the stuck lock opened.. That was mildly annoying.

August 25

Having gotten my ~17-year-old bike serviced last week, it's whisper-quiet and definitely not squeaking or rattling like it was. Alas, the ~17-year-old Kryptonite U-Lock securing it to the Sheffield stand in the office appears to have aged less gracefully so I wound up taking a DublinBike home, and will have to potentially engage the services of our facilities people and power tools tomorrow to retrieve beloved rothar.

August 24

We are enjoying Voyager. Yes, it's a bit simplistic with the Moral Of The Story sometimes, but it's not really much different from other Treks in that respect.

August 23

Watched an old episode of Marple with a bunch of names - Samantha Bond, Natalie Dormer, Rik Mayall, Sean Biggerstaff and more - followed by an old episode of Midsomer Murders with a bunch of names including a Star Trek villian (Alice Krige) and a Doctor (Peter Davison).

August 22

Foundation is trundling along. I'm not sure I actually care about any of these characters any more.

August 21

Network connectivity to the jump box was broken, for some reason, and remained so until I added and removed a port forward.

August 20

Scrubbing through the filesystem to clean up random files left behind by failed attempts to rip discs.

August 19

Work not dissimilar to last night's error: spent time fixing up a broken test which kept failing no matter what I tried, and it turns out it was two tests which were interacting such that fixing one broke the other and I didn't notice that it wasn't the same test that was breaking.

Also I discovered past me had already thought of the data regeneration problem and dealt with it. Clever past me. Shame you didn't leave me any notes so I had to find out again.

August 18

Implement a thing that regenerates a missing hashkey, then spend a bit of time tinkering with it before realising it's missing some critical input to generate the right hashkey. Duh.

August 17

Discovery: the creaky old Mac Mini running macOS 10.13.6 does not like PKCS#12 files generated by whatever version of openssl homebrew offers it; I need to use the system openssl if i want to generate a PKCS#12 file I can import into the Server Manager.

Swapped my toy database from running on t3.micro instances to t4g.micro instances. Curious to see if there's any noticable difference in cost, since that's the only actual vector that matters to me (and it's trifling so it doesn't even matter that much).

August 16

We watched Hackers. It's an odd movie in a lot of ways: made in 1995, referencing some fairly legendary dialup-modem-era hacks, with a character fairly reminiscent of (my mental image of) Karl Koch aka Hagbard of CCC, it has some references to the then just-starting-to-pop world wide web while still wallowing pretty firmly in the Wargames style of computer hacking. Lots of laughable talk of "Gibsons" and "using all your best viruses" and whatnot. The visuals are spectacular, moreso because the signature ones - the mainframe system the plot revolves around - are actually physical motion-control shots. And all the pretty cast and their outlandish clothing somewhat anticipating The Fifth Element. Oh, and that good old plot of scraping a few cents of every transaction and dumping them into an account because sooner or later that adds up to real money. But it's also an ensemble-cast movie where the protagonists include a woman and people of colour; there's some in-world (diegetic, if you will) commentary on this, with Our Hero unaware that the hacker who burned him is a woman, and Our Hero being challenged with, "I thought you were Black!" (which turns out to have been an ad lib that the director loved and kept, rather than a scripted line, which lends it even more value). It's not wholly on a pedestal; the mock personals advert they create for Agent Gill is punching down quite a bit and everyone in-world laughs at it, and Lorraine Braco's character is laughable, but still. Oh, and that band in the club? Urban Dance Squad? Go look 'em up. Totally worth it if you enjoyed that one track you caught a slice of in the movie.

August 15

Foundation continues to wallow its way along; hopefully this will get resolved. Meanwhile, Voyager gives us a timey-wimey episode where they dispense with a causality paradox simply by saying, "causality is weird when the plot demands it". Simples!

August 14

Clever. I managed to delete part 2 of episode 1 from the DVR before we'd watched it because it was indistinguishably labelled from Part 1 and I thought we'd somehow managed to record episode 1 twice. A quick short-term sub to Paramount+ allowed us to watch it, wherein we discovered that the DVR'd version was actually missing a scene (possibly more than one) for some inexplicable reason.

August 13

New show: Star Trek Voyager. I've seen a scattering of episodes of this and know some of the characters, but never really watched the show, so consider this filling in a nerd gap. Good opener, albeit it's a two-parter and we've only watched part one so far.

August 12

Ok, that was indeed a finale. I did not see Rawls' outcome coming. I guessed at Olivas'. The closing scene, I guess... no, I didn't see that coming either, but it's a heck of a hook for season 2, whenever that shows up.

So what are we gonna watch now?

Continued DVD tinkering: I've almost done accounting for previous heinous hacks and cleaning up the mess.

August 11

Ballard: serial killer identified. What are they keeping for the finale?

August 10

Galloping towards the Ballard finish line. Got the corruption case but will it stick?

August 9

Today I was Run Director at Poolbeg Parkrun, supported for the most part by a crew of Sanctuary Runners. Much fun and it all went more or less as planned.

I've had Roadrunner on the watchlist for a while, so we finally watched it. It's good, but like the guy says at the start, spoiler, there's no happy ending. I'm also not entirely buying the "Yoko Ono broke up the band" tone of the close, to be honest, but who knows.

August 8

We appear to have caught up with Foundation, so only one episode tonight and then an episode of Ballard. Also working way too late on a very annoying problem.

August 7

Into the second half of Ballard S1 and it's just so good. What's really impressing me is how well the cast gels despite this being only the first season.

Tinkering with the CSS this site uses to try and cope with some things in my RSS feed. If I was smart I'd clean the feeds, but I'm not smart.

August 6

macOS upgrade required a reboot, and the reboot fixed all those extra mount points, obviously, but after I'd done that it turned out the NAS also needed a reboot, and that disconnected the drive, which the macOS desktop apparently didn't notice even if the rest of the system did, and so I remounted the share I needed, and ... I have two icons for the share on my desktop. This feels like basic "should not happen" stuff.

August 5

Sequioa seems to be really good at leaving dead mount points on the desktop. Currently I have three for the same fileshare, only one of which is actually functional. There are also apparently 56 TimeMachine mounts.

August 4

Of course having indirectly praised my lack of data loss while manipulating the DVD ripping stuff I promptly trashed some database records through inadvertent shadowing of a variable. Kids, when dealing with key/value stores, key and value are really obvious variables to use and will also very obviously lead you to a world of hurt. Be explicit about what the key and the value actually are.

Well that was clever. Using SQLite's "upsert" approach - insert data including a primary key, and if it errors change it to an update - sort of depends on you having a primary key in the database in the first place. Durrr.

August 3

Devoured the first Murderbot book, and yes, the bit that felt out of place in the TV series - a good chunk of the last episode - was indeed grafted on and not in the original.

The People vs. Larry Flynt was a pretty decent movie, although the flag-waving "greatest democracy in the world" shtick got a little overbearing at times particularly given actual reality versus the claims characters in the movie were making. Also it hasn't aged particulary well, has it now.

Hacking away at the DVD ripping stuff which at the moment involves cleaning up various poor decisions and unrecorded logic. I've mostly avoided situations which will require me to go dig out specific discs again, but they're all still accessible if I need to do that, at least.

August 2

Got some 8TB drives to put into the NAS in place of the 4TB ones. Drives this large terrify me, no matter what the hardware claims about redundancy and error correction and what not. Also I need to see if I've got equipment lying around that'll properly wipe the old drives.

Wind River is excellent, but a bit grim, and jarring to see the Weinsteins involved given the subject matter.

August 1

Friday night is movie night, or maybe two episodes of Foundation night. This currently feels a little like it's lost its way, sort of like how some of the Marvel movies aren't movies in their own right so much as setup for some further story arc, and the net result is something that isn't quite as entertaining as you'd like your hour of bubblegum to be.

I have, of course, started rereading the Murderbot books, and Mrs. has queued up the audiobooks for herself.

Reverse-engineering several months of how I scattered DVD-related files all over my hard drive continues, edging towards actually having things properly organised.

previous month | current month| next month