waider dot i e

September 23

Hard drive eventually gave out completely. I have backups, I just hate having to restore things... in any event, wound up doing a clean OS Install, something I've been meaning to do for a while, and now I'm attempting to reconstruct things.

Our Kind of Traitor was quite the enjoyable thriller, if you ignore the fact that Ewan McGregor's university professer chose to express his midlife crisis by chasing Russian mobsters through a forest in the French Alps. Seems a bit more strenuous than, say, buying a sportscar. Maybe his salary is too small for that. In any event, a good story, kept me hooked throughout.

Upgraded the laptop to Sierra. I can't actually see the point of talking to my computer (never mind that it'd annoy everyone around me) and... that's about the biggest thing I could see in the update. Oh, and they still haven't upgraded OpenSSL, apparently.

September 18

Day several of several of trying to copy data from failing drive to working drive. After determining that OS X's disk tool wouldn't do the job because of drive errors, I have resorted to using ditto, a tool I've never used in all the years I've had a Mac - so I've no idea if it'll actually do what I want. What it is doing is turning up a helpful list of damaged files/folders that I can use to sort out recovery.

September 15

shutdown
  [-]
  -n    If the -o is specified, prevent the file system cache from being
        flushed by passing -n option to halt(8) or reboot(8).  This
        option should probably not be used.

(my emphasis)

Mhhmm. Used it anyway. Still couldn't shut the damned thing down.

September 13

Booted Mac with sick drive to repair image. Ran disk repair. Nothing. Rebooted back to system disk and it's still complaining. SIGH.

Ordered two drives off Amazon: one replacement, and one spare so the next time this happens I won't be limping along for a few days.

September 12

I wonder why this thing is running so slowly?

disk0s2: I/O error.

OH.

Actually, what's annoying about this is that the drive health is apparently fine, and I've run verifydisk and verifyvolume on it with no errors, and yet.

September 03

Upgraded the MySQL install on the Mac Mini. Picking up the broken pieces now (Python MySQL interface, django stuff that used "storage_engine"...)

August 31

It appears that my banking scripts are not working due to something deep in the heart of MacOS: neither Perl, python, nor openssl s_client can connect to the bank's website, and the best hint I have so far is that it's down to the fact that the OpenSSL libraries on MacOS appear to support TLS 1, while the website would prefer a newer version.

curl works, which definitely points a finger at openssl, since MacOS curl uses a different security infrastructure. So now I need to figure out if I can use that same infrastructure from Python or Perl without going all HomeBrew on my system.

August 28

Sorcerer's apprentice script opened a large number of Safari tabs on the Mac Mini, causing processes to start dying. Eventually decided rebooting was the best option.

Oh yeah. DSPsrv SMTP is back on-line, but I've not yet done the magic that makes it whitelisted, so your sending experiences may be impaired.

August 26

Boston & New York. Did, approximately in order:

One of the tunnels. Midtown.
Downtown/Midtown bus tour
Liberty Island / Statue of Liberty
WTC Memorial Plaza
Zuccotti Park food truck
Chinatown (we actually stayed in Chinatown)
Little Italy
Central Park (including part of the uptown bus tour, and a hot dog from a cart)
Guggenheim
East Village
High Line
Night tour (including Brooklyn Bridge)
Drivebys (i.e. we didn't go inside) of the Liberty Tower, Empire State Building, Chrysler Building, Battery Park "MIB" building, and a couple of others.

and also

Boston Duck Tour (I drove the Duck!)
MIT Museum and a bit of the campus
Part of the Harvard campus
Boylston / Newbury shopping axis
Cambridge Galleria
Much less tourist and more slacking off stuff

On the way home, watched Captain America: Civil War; I spent a good deal of the movie trying to figure out if the story was a metaphor for something, which I guess means I wasn't fully engaged with it; add to that a small screen, constant external distractions (crying children, engine noise), and encroaching tiredness, and I guess the fact that I enjoyed it means it was a pretty good movie. I will note that I've missed one of the franchise, so there were back-references to events I wasn't aware of, and a couple of characters I didn't recognise. Oh, and yet another endearing Spider-man was cool, but really, how many recent reboots of this character have we had now?

August 15

Sing Street: if you like 80s music and a bit of Irish nostalgia, you'll love this. In particular, if the sound of Phil Lynnot's Yellow Pearl doesn't immediately make you think of a Top of the Pops countdown, this movie might not be for you; otherwise, jump right in. Brilliantly written, fantastic music (especially the original numbers).