waider dot i e

September 19: As noted elsewhere: first day of my fourteenth year in my current employment.

Upgraded Safari - I presume it's to fix that crashing CSS bug that's been doing the rounds - and it informed me it was disabling "extensions that slow down web pages" or some such. One of which was uBlock Origin, the content blocker I use to clip adverts and what not out of my browsing. THANKS, APPLE. So I go to turn it back on, and the "Are You Sure?" popup has "Uninstall" selected by default. NO REALLY, THANKS, APPLE. Mutter mutter mutter.

(The less said about the App Store telling me it couldn't update Safari because Spotlight was using its extensions, which I could find no way to fix other than force-installing the update via the command-line, the better)

Oh tsk. It looks like the Safari version of this has become abandonware. Dammit.
September 16: Converting a bunch of Django code to the latest 1.x release, as you do. I'm aiming to move it all to Python3/Django 2, but doing it step by step since I tried a big-bang upgrade on one project and ALL the wheels came off.
September 15: The Post was really good and seems to have stuck pretty close to the truth. The critcism from NYT reporters that their role was played down seemed a bit petty given that ample screen time is given to the NYT being the ones breaking the story, the Post being ticked off that they've got nothing to match it, etc. I was sufficiently aware of the Pentagon Papers to know the name of the leaker, but I didn't know anything about what they contained or the fact that this was essentially the thing that tipped Nixon into full-on paranoia. The parallels with the current US Administratino are also somewhat startling.
September 14: Watched season 10, episode 6 of the X-Files... which turns out to be the season finale. Lots of WTF when we realised. The whole episode feels like it was cobbled together in a hurry, everyone's overacting, and to add to all that we've discovered that Prime Video isn't currently carrying season 11 so we've no way of finding out what happens next. Bah.
September 09: A little social observation: a recent planning grant for a Domino's Pizza joint on Bridge Street in Ringsend. Almost all of the conditions listed pertain to the construction itself; there's a restrictino on opening hours that outlasts the construction, but that's more-or-less it. Now, should you happen by that outlet on any given day, you'll find a line of delivery bikes (motor and not) "parked" along the double yellow lines. Because there's nowhere else within a reasonable distance to park your delivery bike. (delivery trucks for this Domino's, I'm sure, pull in on the pavement, blocking it and the road; or they'll pull in outside the church on Thorncastle Street, again on the pavement, causing a hazard for left-turning traffic from Bridge Street). I see a lot of this around the city: new uses for old places with no apparent consideration given to what changes they'll make to traffic in the area, or what access is required for deliveries to and from the place, and in the end you wind up with illegal and dangerous parking. I'm no expert on planning regulations, but this seems like an obvious point to consider in a city full of narrow streets.
September 08: Nerd Lazy: sitting on the sofa for ten minutes hacking about with curl until I finally managed to poke the network-connected radio in the right way to power it off. It's all of five metres away from where I'm sitting.
September 07: R.I.P.D. is... not terrible. It's fun watching Jeff Bridges play, basically, Jeff Bridges, although I couldn't understand his dialogue in places. The plot is predictable enough, the effects are generally not the point of any given shot in which they occur, and there's a nice thread of goofy humour running through it. Shame that the two main female characters amounted to little; in particular, I was expecting that Stephanie Szostak's character would do something in the finale other than being a hapless pawn, but no, hapless pawn to the end. Mary-Louise Parker's character at least had a little more going on, but that's not saying a lot.
September 02: Changing a few random passwords led me to encounter Cisco's "login experience" (no, not kidding, there's a banner that says, "Learn more about this new login experience"). First, it won't let me log in, and I'm gonna guess it's because yet again some Web 2.0 developer didn't test to see what happens when you use a "+" in a password, since that particular bug is apparently Still A Thing; but that aside, welcome to Cisco's Email Harvester! If you enter a username - and let's face it, who doesn't have a giant dictionary of usernames lying around? - it'll tell you the email address for that username! In the clear! Excellent! But wait, they're Protecting Your Privacy, because if you click on "I forgot my password" (or "your login experience doesn't recognise the password I saved in my password safe, so I'm pretty sure I'm not mistyping it"), it tells you that an email has been sent to a**b@example.com - see, those asterisks protect your email from the people who didn't read it off the previous page! update: tsk, ok, this turns out to be a bit of me being an idiot, and a bit of Cisco. It displays the username you entered, and I'm sure I entered a username and saw an email displayed, but I'm willing to allow that I may well have entered the email in the username field. HOWEVER!!!111eleventy!@@ It is the case that they're using some fabulous piece of code which didn't recognise my old password and sets requirements for the password which would exclude my old password, which might explain my inability to log in. And when I did reset the password, I got this:
Single sign-on authentication was unsuccessful (reference # AFTBISZU).
Partner: https://identity.cisco.com/api/tenants/super/v1/am
And so I will leave the original snarky paragraph below in place.

Great work, Cisco. I'm not sure I actually have a reason to use a Cisco login at this point so I'll probably just delete the account as soon as I get back my access to it.
September 01: Since I don't update this as often as I used to, the birthday greetings have become more random... Happy Birthday Big (but not Biggest) Brother.
August 31: The Guernsey Literary and Potato-Peel Society is a lovely piece of work; it's somewhat predictable, but that's ok. It's beautifully shot (mind, not actually on Guernsey, and there's a shot of a German observation post from Guernsey that looks a bit poorly composited into whichever hillside in The Mainland they were filming on) and while you can pick apart the story yourself fairly quickly, it's still fun to let it play out. It also piqued my interest in the wartime experience on the Channel Islands, the complexities of which are more alluded to in the film than stated outright. Anyway, a solid movie for Friday night.