Hacker's Diary
A rough account of what I did with Emacs recently.
- March 22
- I've been trying and failing to get a working cross-compiler
toolchain running. Now, admittedly I'm not tackling this as a
primary-focus project, but so far:
- Wheezy old Raspberry Pi 2-ish: doesn't have the horsepower
to build binutils. The build flakes out here and the
wrapper I'm using (Crosstools-NG) doesn't have an obvious means
of stopping it from cleaning up previous failed builds when
starting a new one, so I can't get an incremental build
going.
- macOS: crosstools-NG's docs basically say, "good luck with
that". Among the problems encountered are "I have
ncurses.h but can't link libncurses", "I have
a linkable ncurses but can't find the header files
midway through the build", and "you likely need a case-sensitive
filesystem for this". None of this is insurmountable but it's
tedious.
- previously-used tools: ran them on the 32-bit Debian install
that I recently upgraded, with some entertainment, to 64-bit;
turns out they don't run any more and I don't know quite where I
sourced them from.
I see more yak-shaving in my future.
- March 17
- Getting mod_wsgi with a relatively modern Python
(3.8...) running on the crunky old Mac Mini (MacOS 10.13.6) turned
out to be surprisingly straightforward: use the package from the
Python website to install the interpreter, then upgrade pip (not
strictly necessary), then install mod_wsgi, then use
mod_wsgi-express to print out the necessary config, then
update
/Library/Server/Web/Config/apache2/httpd_server_app.conf
with that config. I did wrap the WSGIPythonHome config
line in a check to verify that mod_wsgi was loaded, and
used the Server app to turn the module off and on a few times to
verify that it doesn't break.
This is, of course, preliminary yak-shaving for some
other hacking about.
I have reinstated a long-ago hack which approximates a CI/CD
pipeline: a file monitor on a git repository of WSGI apps which,
when it detects changes, tests them and then installs them and
reloads the server. It's cheap and cheerful and terribly
inefficient, but it does the job.
- March 16
- Did I mention 11.22.63?
I don't think I did. It was very good. I was slightly
disturbed by recognising Dealy Plaza when it first showed up,
and being able to pick out specific witnesses from the
reconstruction of the motorcade; I definitely went into a JFK
wormhole at some point but I didn't realise how much of it
stuck. I've not read the book - herself has - but apparently the
ending deviates fairly significantly from it. So I guess that's
going on the reading list.
- March 10
- Oh, one funny bit about Un Asunto Privado: the theme
music is this sort of ethereal Julie Cruise number, and when I
looked it up I discovered it was a Joan Jett cover, and the
original is... well, very different.
- March 9
- I've more or less given up on Twitter at this point: I open the
app every couple of days at best, and scroll through accumulated
things, but frankly it's not really holding my interest. Funny
thing being I've not transferred that interest to some other
venue: Mastodon is a much slower (for me) source of snippets, so I
don't hit that up much either. And updates to this site have
become something of a trickle. At the rate I'm going I'll be a
digital hermit before the year is out.
- March 7
- Been a bit lax about updating here. Some recent viewing:
The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel: really enjoyed this for the most
part - it's light, a bit silly, and even the heavies are nice
guys. Midge's attitude is annoying at times: it's kinda like
watching Mikey in Swingers leaving the series of
messages on the girl's answering machine - impending doom
brought about by the character themselves and it's just kinda
cringey. Anyway, that aside, I'm looking forward to more of this
showing up.
Picard, Season Three: man, people are really ripping into
this. I dunno. I'm enjoying it, but I was never much of a
Trekkie, so maybe I'm missing the obvious fanservice, or I'm
just not sufficiently dedicated to the veracity of the
characters to care that they're upending things a
bit.
Un Asunto Privado: this was pretty random. "Leon", er, I
mean Jean Reno, playing a butler to a family whose deceased
patriarch was the local head police guy, a position his son has
inherited and his daughter covets. She investigates, Reno helps,
and etc. 8 episodes, a bit of fun, and while I figured out who
did it before we got there it was more through lack of other
candidates for the role than unlocking the plot.
Night Sky: started this. Gave up after two episodes which
covered about five minutes of storyline in two hours. No thanks.
11-22-63: just started watching this. One episode down:
looks pretty good.
previous month | current month