Waider's Geek Diary

Waider's Geek Diary http://www.waider.ie/hacks/hacking.html A rough account of what I did with Emacs recently. en-ie Copyright 1995 - 2012, Waider Sun, 13 May 2012 19:07:03 IST Sun, 13 May 2012 19:07:00 +0100 waider@waider.ie waider@waider.ie Waider http://www.waider.ie/images/people/waider/newlj.png http://www.waider.ie/hacks/hacking.html May 12 http://www.waider.ie/hacks/diary/2012/may.html#12 Beery evening with some coworkers (and an ex-coworker). Great food at Bear, too. http://www.waider.ie/hacks/diary/2012/may.html#12 Sat, 12 May 2012 23:59:59 IST May 11 http://www.waider.ie/hacks/diary/2012/may.html#11 <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0983193/combined" title="The Adventures of Tintin (2011)">Tintin</a> was so-so. There was nothing really wrong with it, it just lacked that unknown quantity that raises movies above the average. It was certainly fun to watch, and the rendering of the various characters into fully-animated people (while retaining the cartoon look, feel, and occasionally physics) was all well done, but at the end I felt pretty underwhelmed by the whole thing. Still, better than that Twilight nonsense. http://www.waider.ie/hacks/diary/2012/may.html#11 Fri, 11 May 2012 23:59:59 IST May 6 http://www.waider.ie/hacks/diary/2012/may.html#6 Back in Dublin again. I just spent more time than was strictly necessary trying to get a photo from a camera to that social media website: iPhoto purports to facilitate this, but put the picture in my "Wall Photos", which is something that appears to have disappeared from any easily findable link on the destination site, and the other choices (Profile photos, Mobile uploads) don't appear in iPhoto's view of the world; then I get the photo uploaded the old-fashioned way, i.e. upload file, and discover there's no preview option, which leads me to upload it with privacy set to me-only so I can fiddle with it first. I thought the point of these things was to make it so that I didn't feel any pain as my demographic information is effortlessly prised away from me. <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1324999/combined" title="The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn - Part 1 (2011)">Breaking Dawn - Part I</a> was about as miserable as we expected - I think at this point we're just watching it out of some sense of seeing just how bad it can get. It's an awesome display of characters you don't really care about lurching from one crisis to the next all because of the female lead and her complete inability to make any sort of sensible choice about anything, ever. I can't recommend enough that you avoid this at all costs. http://www.waider.ie/hacks/diary/2012/may.html#6 Sun, 06 May 2012 23:59:59 IST May 5 http://www.waider.ie/hacks/diary/2012/may.html#5 Off to Galway for a spot of family-visitng and craft beer consumption. http://www.waider.ie/hacks/diary/2012/may.html#5 Sat, 05 May 2012 23:59:59 IST May 4 http://www.waider.ie/hacks/diary/2012/may.html#4 <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1124035/combined" title="The Ides of March (2011)">The Ides of March</a> was... I dunno. It could have been, and given the cast, should have been an absolutely top-notch piece of cinema. Instead it was fairly mundane. I caught one of the plot twists, but missed another, and expected at least one more. Not really essential viewing, I think, in the end. http://www.waider.ie/hacks/diary/2012/may.html#4 Fri, 04 May 2012 23:59:59 IST April 30 http://www.waider.ie/hacks/diary/2012/april.html#30 Fiddling with RSS toy to make it more iPhone friendly based on some reading I'm doing - mainly through adding some CSS styling. I do need to get back to my project to convert it to Java, however. Cycling incident this morning, thankfully not directly involving me: cyclist overtakes me, continues on ahead of me in the middle of the taxi lane I'm occupying the left side of. I hear honking behind me, then a taxi passes. Cyclist ahead of me pulls in, then as the taxi draws level, he spits at the taxi (stupid, really). Taxi swerves at him and forces him onto the pavement. Pavement, at this point, is separated from road by a wall; fortunately for the cyclist there's a gap he can go through. Cyclist continues on the pavement; I accelerate to note the taxi's license plate. As the wall comes to an end and the cyclist on the pavement approaches that point, taxi swerves in again, mounts the pavement, and cuts into a side street in front of the cyclist. Cyclist dismounts. Taxi stops some way down the side street; driver gets out to hurl abuse at both errant cyclist and me, then gets back in his taxi and drives off. Errant cyclist declines my offer to support a report to the police. I go and report it to the police anyway. Police response: can't do anything much unless either the cyclist involved or the taxi driver make a complaint; at best they can contact the taxi driver and, "talk to him about his attitude". Taxi drivers, I am told, "have a bad attitude". So, if a taxi driver attempts to maim or kill you with his taxi in response to something stupid you did, please do report it - I'm not joking about this. That cyclist this morning, stupid and all as he was in his actions, did not deserve a risk of serious injury; hurling a few hundred kilos of metal at someone on a bike is not a proportionate response to any action on the part of the cyclist short of life-threatening activity. And since he chose not to report it, the taxi driver gets to do this again the next time he feels annoyed at one of us. The other thing I'll say about this is that I can understand to some extent the police point of view: there's a lot happening in the city centre, and following up on a near miss with no injuries reported by a third party isn't necessarily the best use of resources. I may follow up with the carriage office instead once I can verify that I got the taxi's license number correctly, because I stupidly, stupidly did not think to detach my phone from my belt and snap a picture of the offending vehicle. So that's lesson two: if you're carrying a camera, use it. Don't rely on memory. http://www.waider.ie/hacks/diary/2012/april.html#30 Mon, 30 Apr 2012 23:59:59 IST April 29 http://www.waider.ie/hacks/diary/2012/april.html#29 <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1650062/combined" title="Super 8 (2011)">Super 8</a> was all manner of fun. Predictable, sure, but all manner of fun. The train wreck set-piece was pretty awesome, too, although it kinda went on to the point where I'd have been checking my watch if I wore one. http://www.waider.ie/hacks/diary/2012/april.html#29 Sun, 29 Apr 2012 23:59:59 IST April 28 http://www.waider.ie/hacks/diary/2012/april.html#28 Went to see The Subways at The Academy on account of tickets I won back in January. Support #1, Neon Wolf: totally rocked. Support #2, whose name I didn't get and don't really want: miserable both in demeanour and quality. Main act: dull. Sounded like they were phoning it in, or perhaps miming to a recording. Left after two songs. http://www.waider.ie/hacks/diary/2012/april.html#28 Sat, 28 Apr 2012 23:59:59 IST April 27 http://www.waider.ie/hacks/diary/2012/april.html#27 I vaguely recall <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1216475/combined" title="Cars 2 (2011)">Cars 2</a> getting some bad reviews, but I don't really know why - herself will attest to the fact that I was giggling happily for most of the movie. It's silly and predictable and a whole lot of fun. http://www.waider.ie/hacks/diary/2012/april.html#27 Fri, 27 Apr 2012 23:59:59 IST April 23 http://www.waider.ie/hacks/diary/2012/april.html#23 After a little more than four years (and a cycle count of 187, whatever that actually means in the context of almost always-on-mains-power), my MacBook's battery is enquiring politely if I'd consider replacing it. Unlike the Compaq that preceeded it, it doesn't appear to have come to a screeching halt in terms of holding a charge (and I'm pretty sure I went through at least two Compaq batteries in a similar timeframe). http://www.waider.ie/hacks/diary/2012/april.html#23 Mon, 23 Apr 2012 23:59:59 IST April 20 http://www.waider.ie/hacks/diary/2012/april.html#20 <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1270798/combined" title="X-Men: First Class (2011)">X-Men: First Class</a> is not as bad as I had expected or was led to believe. It does take a bit of time to get going, as everyone needs to be introduced; the whole token black guy thing is painful, as is the "mutant = gay" allegory given by Beast's introduction as a mutant; but those aside, it's a fun enough brain-candy extravaganza. http://www.waider.ie/hacks/diary/2012/april.html#20 Fri, 20 Apr 2012 23:59:59 IST April 13 http://www.waider.ie/hacks/diary/2012/april.html#13 Converted <a href="http://www.waider.ie/hacks/diary/2012/../../workshop/perl/airprint-republish.pl">airprint-republish.pl</a> to Python. Needs some exception handling, but mainly it actually seems to work, and works as I'd intended to modify the Perl one: a thread listening for mDNS printer broadcasts which generates AirPrint versions and republishes them in separate threads using dns-sd (because dns-sd -R never exits, or rather when it does it takes its advertised record with it). http://www.waider.ie/hacks/diary/2012/april.html#13 Fri, 13 Apr 2012 23:59:59 IST April 12 http://www.waider.ie/hacks/diary/2012/april.html#12 Irony: cleaning out stuff from my <a href="http://www.instapaper.com">Instapaper</a> backlog, I found <a href="http://www.doughellmann.com/PyMOTW/os/index.html">an article on the Python <tt>os</tt> module</a>, which, the article header tells us, provides "Portable access to operating system specific features.". A little further down the page, you'll find this note: <blockquote>Note Some of the example code below will only work on Unix-like operating systems.</blockquote> And off goes Finance::Bank::IE 0.26 to the PAUSE server. I think the next task with this code will be a massive refactoring of some sort. http://www.waider.ie/hacks/diary/2012/april.html#12 Thu, 12 Apr 2012 23:59:59 IST April 11 http://www.waider.ie/hacks/diary/2012/april.html#11 If today is your birthday, you share a birthday with ... ME. After much digging around with unhelpful web pages, unhelpful tools, and unhelpful error messages, I finally managed to connect from laptop to Mac Mini using Kerberos. I had vague plans of writing up the process, since this is something that apparently causes much wailing and gnashing in the Mac community, but at this point I'm not wholly sure what I did that worked. Key points to note, however: if it's telling you that you can't use a principal as a server, use kadmin to remove the disallow-svr attribute from the record in question. There's also some weirdness around creation of such records in the first place: it seems that kadmin refuses to create them (complaining, unhelpfully, "Principal does not exist") but they're required for ssh to work. After some more digging around, it looks like the presence of a record of the form "shorthostname$" will cause this. I think these get created when you bind a client to a server. I used the Workgroup Manager to delete the offending record, then used kadmin to add a new one using the FQDN, and it worked. Finally managed to restore the funds transfer code to F::B::I::BoI, but there are caveats (well, there were caveats with the old code as well). Once I've hacked up the tests to match the new code, I'll have a release. http://www.waider.ie/hacks/diary/2012/april.html#11 Wed, 11 Apr 2012 23:59:59 IST