A rough account of what I did with Emacs recently.
March 31
Jo's season finale - series finale, in fact - was not
terrible but it left an awful lot of things
unfinished. Disappointing.
March 27
We've been watching Jo
since we ran out of Elementary. IMDb has it tagged as a miniseries
because they only did one season and didn't get renewed. It's
definitely got promise, but the dialogue can be a little lumpy in
places.
March 21
I stalled a bit on my React conversion project trying to replace
two components that I'd previously used JQuery for: a pop-up
dialog box and a combo box. This is proving annoyingly difficult
to fix - the pop-up I've reasonably dealt with using
react-modal, but the combo box I'm trying to use -
Downshift - does not work anywhere near as nicely as the one in
JQuery, and I'm not wholly clear on how to fix it because it's CSS
wizardry and mostly I don't understand that when it's not
immediately obvious where the problem lies. I suppose I could just
yank in something like my employer's React component library and
use that, but I don't really want a non-work toy to feel like I'm
working whenever I use it, y'know?
March 18
The Grand Budapest Hotel
was an absolute blast. The funniest thing was that every time a
big-name actor showed up, it was unclear whether they were just
there for a cameo or would maybe show up again (for the record, it
looks like George Clooney was the only actual one-shot cameo, and
he's uncredited).
March 17
House of Gucci
was about an hour too long, so it's hard to say if it's actually a
good movie or not outside of that. Basically I don't think I cared
after the first 90 minutes.
March 15
Wow, that was terrible.
The series finale for Elementary could charitably be described as
"rushed": it jumps three years from the preceding episode, then
has another one-year skip in the middle, the only murder to be
solved in the episode is over and done with before you've caught
on, and there's just So. Much. larded into a single episode that
it feels like they forgot the most important thing: a story. For a
series I really enjoyed, this is a major let-down.
I can only hope it was forced on the creators somehow, like their
funding got pulled or something. That this might be the best idea
they could come up with doesn't bear contemplating.
March 13
Dozen episodes? More like three. I do not like these shortened
final seasons. Anyway, two to go.
Attempting to build the CloudWatch client for i386 on a t2.micro
kills the t2.micro for all effective purpsoes. Ouch.
March 12
We're closing in on the end of Elementary,
and it continues to be a fun romp - particularly the little
"closing the case" snippets they've put at the start of some of
the episodes. The introduction of a major nemesis who
isn't Moriarty but who is named Reichenbach sort of
forbodes a deeply silly interpretation of the "classic" end of
Holmes, but I guess we'll see in another dozen episodes or
so.
We've also started in on Season 2 of Star Trek: Picard;
it's fun so far but oh yay more meddling with Time Travel. Also in
episode 2 Alison Pill is easily the best at the whole
"we're in a different timeline to the one we were just in and I
need to cope without letting anyone know I'm disoriented"
thing.
Fiddling with SSM (another AWS service); for... complicated
reasons I wound up having to build the agent for a Debian i386
install, which was less fun than it sounds. It seems to be running
now, though, and the console recognises both of my
servers...
The backup saga: it rolls on, in the background. tl;dr my latest
attempt ran out of memory. Literally. I'm inching closer to
considering exactly how much of this data I actually want to hang
on to.
March 7
After yesterday's hacking on the guess counts, I thought it
still wasn't working (tests? me? do you think I'm some
sort of software developer?) but on further investigation
I realised that there are two ways of scoring a given guess: score
it in isolation, or score it in combination with previous
guesses. So, for example, given guess 1, "gusty" and guess 2,
"demur", in both cases "u" is flagged as "correct letter, wrong
place". That means I know the word has to have "u" in it (457
possible words) but taking the cases in isolation and excluding
all the incorrect letters, I get 142 for "gusty" and 154 for
"demur". Now, if I combine the two, I get to exclude words
containing "d", "e", "m", "r", and "g", "s", "t", and
"y", giving a combined score of 30. Which, I mean let's be honest,
still doesn't get me closer to guessing the word (it was "unzip",
and it took me the full six guesses) but at least I know my
scoring mechanism works.
Also, that's the score against possible answers. The score against
permitted guesses is higher, since Wordle allows you to guess
words that will never be answers (cruel, that).
March 6
Figured out that my hackabout Wordle clone had a bug in the code
that gives you counts of possible guesses and answers based on
your current guess and score. Makes no real difference to my
playing, to be honest. Also it appears I have a blind spot for
double letters, wasting a bunch of guessess on "cur?y" when the
missing letter was in fact "r". (if you're playing the real thing,
I'm not bothering with the one-word-per-day stuff, I just have it
pick a random word from its list of answers.)
March 5
Started on a new team at work this week which has meant, among
other things, a new programming language which I've not yet
started in on learning.