Hacker's Diary

A rough account of I did with Emacs recently.

June 30

Bob arrived, after which Bob and Waider arrived at the bar.

June 29

Glued my little IMDB search hack onto my HTML mode. Bits upon bits upon bits. At some point I'll just have to type M-x diary and this'll all be filled in automatically.

Also glued a Technorati ping onto the back of my LiveJournal update client. More automation.

Accidentally booted the MiniITX box with a vending installer CD in the drive, which duly erased my stuff and replaced it with Folger's Crystals... fortunately I've been so slack about doing anything with the MiniITX box that I didn't lose anything other than maybe a half-processed SETI@HOME unit, but it did mean I had to rebuild the box from scratch. D'oh.

Made the Micromail mail parser just a little smarter. It still won't do the work for me, of course.

June 28

Finding Nemo was pretty good. Couple of laugh-out-loud moments, and probably something that'd have had me in stitches if I'd seen it with a group of people.

Got to use the magic freezer trick on another failed hard drive. Irritatingly, the Red Hat 7.2 rescue disk doesn't provide dump, ssh or rsync. Not much of a rescue disk, that.

June 27

...and back to Dublin again.

Set up IMAP preauth for my mail client. Kinda neat; it means I don't have to log into mail once I've set up ssh. Yay!

June 26

...and a barbequeue...

June 25

Off down the country for a wee party.

June 24

Grr. I ripped three CDs yesterday and all of them have been encoded as complete silence. I didn't check the .wavs but I'm strongly suspecting the MP3 encoder anyway.

June 23

Right, well, kinda retreading old ground again. I think I've beaten the WLAN drivers into compiling cleanly enough on 2.4 without any of the extra mods I did (such as adding in wireless-tools support). I'll check that this version works (should be good for a few kernel oopses) and then throw it to the linux-wlan guys to see if they want to push it out as release 0.3.5. Then I'll see about adding the wireless-tools support back in.

June 22

Out on the town for a gig: I went to see Tychonaut and ended up seeing three other acts as well. Whee!

June 21

Further hackery: tracking title-bar changes. This allows me to keep an eye on which buffer in Emacs I'm in (for example) without having to depend on focus_change events.

Did some minor hackery on collate (that link's probably dead) to get it to ignore some local stupidity.

June 20

Got peeved with bouncing from Emacs to Mozilla and back again just to link movie titles from IMDB, so I wrote a little lisp that does the job for me. It's pretty coarse, but hey. One less reason to change context.

Wow. Hell of a race at Indy. Only 8 finishers; Taku Sato is the first Japanese driver on the podium since 1990, Minardi get their first point in 41 races, and Ralf Schumacher is in hospital after hitting a concrete wall at 190MPH... going backwards.

Minor addition to my stupid FVWM focus hack to log focus changes with timestamps. This is for an idea I'm tooling with.

Cleaned out a bunch of source directories that are no longer of use to me, such as ethereal and cdrdao.

June 19

In the interests of not breaking things that already work, I've put a couple of 2.2 kernels and 3.0 pcmcia-cs packages on fozzie. First attempt, the 3.0.9 pcmcia-cs package won't compile, but it seems to have generated sufficient headers and what not for Linux-WLAN to build, so that's ok.

Having figured out a range of configurations to test against, I've now got a scripted build to test each of them. Yay me. Also working on a buildfarm setup for unpackaged software.

Woo woo, Rubiño on pole for Indy! Yay!

June 18

Damn, someone's beaten me to the punch: a learning RSS reader. I'd started adding this to my own RSS Toy but as usual got sidetracked by... oh! bright shiny object!

Next stumbling block: ext3 on a 2.2 kernel. Easy enough with a stock kernel, although the ext3 FAQ is way out of date with respect to two URLs and who knows what else. No, I'm trying to get ext3 grafted onto a Red Hat kernel. The kernel patch won't apply cleanly mainly because of colliding macros, and Red Hat's kernel RPM for 2.2.24 has a warning not to enable both large file support and ext3 at the same time - but enabling ext3 just causes the build to blow up anyway. Possibly I need to switch off something else first.

Finding Forrester really turned out to be my sort of movie - full of clichéd schmaltz, but well-enough executed that you can ignore the fact that it's formulaic. The kid in the movie is a complete unknown, but you wouldn't know it from the performance he delivers, which is bang on. F. Murray Abraham's features were bothering me until I figured out who he was (he's also in Amadeus, which I watched not so long ago), and Anna Paquin once again reminded me how damn pretty she is - although there wasn't any more depth to her role than "love interest, ish, for main kid". It is a well-made piece of work, so I'd definitely recommend seeing it.

June 17

Started adding MultiMap support to my half-assed mapping toy. Yay me. So far it's slightly cleverer than any of the preceeding attempts since it attempts to parse the returned map page for scale information rather than assuming it got what it asked for. I was briefly confused by it mapping a route to work when I realised that the incorrectly-named cycling.gpslog does in fact contain a drive to work as well as some of my cycling routes.

June 16

After some abuse I fixed whatever was wrong with RPM on Fozzie. Something got corrupted, and reinstalling all the RPMs on the system appears to have cured it. Since I scripted it, I don't know which package was the culprit, and any attempts to trace the code got me stuck in a no such source file situation, so. Yay brute force.

Now that I've got it sorted I can consider getting back to what I was trying to do, which is to have an independant test box for the Linux 2.2 version of my hacked-up Linux WLAN drivers.

June 15

I'm pretty sure the only reason I rented The Red Siren is because Asia Argento is in it. The movie concept is good, the execution's a bit weak - some of the dialogue is terrible, and accompanied by worse delivery. There's some great music, though, and a fantastic firefight in the middle. And, alas, not half enough of Ms. Argento onscreen, despite the fact that she's got second billing on the credits.

June 14

DVD Rentals customer support rocks, even if the service itself is at the mercies of the postal system and the vagaries of browser incompatibility: they sent me out a two-sided disc which had a label helpfully plastered over the A side, so they're ordering a new copy of the disc in question and in the meantime sending me out two rentals to make up for "lost viewing". Yay!

June 13

Schu qualifies 6th, Schu comes home 1st. One more record for the pile.

Spent some time trying to understand what the hell my TV capture card was doing. It appears I can get audio from it, but it's not immediately obvious how. There's a loadable module for it, but there's no real indication if it worked or not and things like xawtv don't seem to give a clear differentiation between the input and output audio devices.

Curiously, once I'd sorted out in my head what needed to be done, xawtv stopped working. tvtime still works. This software is crap.

June 12

Back to hacking at the WLAN drivers. The 2.2 driver had an oops-causing bug in it (fixed), but now it has some other bug. Bah.

Much as I like yum, it seems to be particularly stupid about fetching cached versions of the header.info file. Which right now is driving me up the wall. If wget can fetch the right one, why can't yum?

Ah. Apparently, because yum doesn't parse the no_proxy setting properly. There's the slightly iffy question of why Squid isn't detecting that the file has changed, too.

...which seems to be something to do with squid having trouble finding the host. Hmm. WTF?

June 11

Yay, software release. Go me.

June 10

Put the PCMCIA adapter into blimp. It promptly failed to work. Gah. I think this is the stupid "swap the cards around until they work" game again.

My cousin and a friend are visiting for a few days. So we watched High Fidelity last night. Such a great movie.

June 9

Minor tweak to my ifup-local script, and now I get a proper hostname when the office wireless network starts up. Yay!

June 8

Bob visited. And so, the restaurant, the pub, the DVD-watching.

June 7

Grr. Backups running WAY too slowly. Not good.

Someone sent me a fixed-up version of bbdb-to-outlook.el a while back, so I finally got around to putting that in CVS. Which led me to the discovery that the CVS mail script for BBDB is borked.

I wasn't quite expecting this: Old School is actually a damned good movie. I didn't think much of Will Ferrell in Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back, so I was pleasantly surprised at his character in this. The movie's well paced, well scripted, and well acted. And I have to say it's nice to see a modern comedy that doesn't rely on gross-out "humour" to make you laugh.

June 6

Much tooling around with kernels, with no real results. Oh well.

June 5

This 2.6 kernel is da bomb. I've just tossed together a MRTG feeder to graph core temperature and fan activity because, well, I CAN.

June 4

Somehow when I booted into rl5 all the USB stuff just worked, so now I'm happily running a 2.6 kernel. I discovered that my battery monitor hacks for ACPI weren't quite complete, so I fixed that. What I'm now curious to see is how this thing behaves if I load it up - the 2.4 kernel was a dog for interactivity if anything else started chewing on the disk.

June 3

After some abuse of scripts and what not, I figured out why I end up with two ssh agents running. Yay. Unfortunately I haven't yet figured out how to cleanly stop it from happening. Boo. I also managed to install one of Arjan's 2.6 kernels on the laptop, but there's some issue with USB that I don't quite understand, so it's not good to go just yet.

June 2

Insomnia + stuff to do == late night coding. Office work, though, so I can't tell you about it. I will say that POE is the absolute business, though.

June 1

Sometimes I leave messages for myself in unfinished scripts:

Updating RSS...You've not fixed this bug yet! [...June.html] at /home/waider/src/perl/diaryrss.pl line 48.

Adding some more bits into the RSS Toy: currently a refresh header and cookies, so I can try some more clever stuff. This doesn't fix the above message, mind you.

previous month | current month | next month