Hacker's Diary
A rough account of what I did with Emacs recently.
- May 27
- In which we went to see Mr. Neil Gaiman being interviewed, sort
of, by a member of the International Literary Festival
Dublin. Lovely guy, enteraining evening.
- May 23
- A little more hacking around with the site layout - now there
are next/prev links at the top right of the pages (not in RSS,
obviously).
- May 20
- Reread the entire run of Transmetropolitan over hte
last week... just because. It's still a vibrant and relevant piece
of work despite the fact that it's 21 years old in places; perhaps
it's more relevant, because it was weirdly prescient about things
that were trivially written off as an excess of fiction - like a
White House Press Officer telling the press that it's a privilege
to be permitted in the press room; or a president who wants the
title but doesn't actually want to do any, y'know,
presiding.
Just leaving this here:

Had to redo some scripts which made assumptions about the format
of next/previous links in the diary. Since I've gone to the
trouble of coding up something that can parse the files, I should
probably blow up all these auxilliary scripts and fold them into
the current mess.
- May 19
- Website beaten into template code, now removing the exceptions
so that everything gets cleaned up: no Google Analytics, no Google
Ads, no Technorati profile, and everything using the same
template.
- May 12
- Still working on the random cleanup of this site.
The bulk of content, such as it is, is this diary, and it's not
generated with any of your fancy-pants "blogging"
software: it's written in Emacs,
using a fairly minimal templating and assisting system (which
knows how to look up things in IMDb, and has a semi-functional
means of linking a given piece of text consistently to whatever
I'd linked it to in the past). However, the templating is done at
time of writing, which means that a change I made to the template
in, say, 2013 will not be back-propagated to previous
entries. Which means cleaning out the Google advertising (and, it
seems, Google analytics in a few spots) is a bit of a pain. So
I've hacked together something that will reverse-engineer the
pages into template plus content, and in the process I'm
discovering all sorts of silly errors; not just minor stuff like
misplaced tags, but major stuff like a "Prev" meta tag
that, er, refers to the current month rather than the previous
one. Various other encoding errors are also being sorted out as I
find them.
(Why not use blogging software? Because I don't think I ever came
across one I liked when I went looking, and because my
requirements are few, and because I like that this site is
effectively static once it's shipped to the server - you can't
break into its database of articles and plant malware, because
there isn't a database and the pages get resynced with my offline
copy every time I do an upload.)
- May 11
- Batman vs. Superman was not the terrible movie I was lead to
expect. In fact, I kinda liked it, although I can't really engage
with Ben Affleck as The Bat, and snide, whiny Alfred was rather
unpalatable. Anyway. Not terrible, not essential
cinema.
- May 9
- Doing some random cleanup on the files that make up this site,
not least to remove the Google Ads I randomly stuck in some time
ago.
- May 4
- Friday night is movie night... no, we didn't watch any of the
Star Wars franchise, we watched The Departed - which I'd seen
before, but Mrs. Waider had not. Definitely better the second time
around because you're prepared for it being
Three. Hours. Long. (ok, 2.5) But it does still feel like they
could've edited it a bit. It's good, it's gritty, it's tense,
it's... surprising towards the end (and Scorsese's reported
distatste with how it all pans out is intriguing, to say the
least). Worth seeing at least once.
previous month | current month | next month