Hacker's Diary

A rough account of what I did with Emacs recently.

August 25

Survivor wasn't terrible, but there was a certain amount of scoffing at the TV, particularly when a supposedly skilled US intelligence operative didn't swap her heels for a pair of flats while on the run. Really now. But we've watched worse.

August 18

Wrapped season one of The Tick, and it was excellent. Strongly recommend.

Ready Player One went from "meh" to "dear god" as it went on. and on. and on. I enjoyed the book; I understand, retrospectively, there maybe were some problems with it that I didn't recognise at the time because I was busy wallowing in the nostalgia of it. Regardless, the movie is a stinker and, well, NO. I think between this and the faux-biopic we're pretty much no longer interested in anything else Stephen Spielberg has to offer.

August 11

Really enjoyed Tenet, even if I lost the thread of it in a few places. It was clever and well made even without considering that a good deal of the "effects" work was done in camera. I'll probably want to watch this again without the benefit of a couple of drinks and a hard week at the office, mind you.

August 6

Coming to the realisation that in an attempt to avoid using an actual database (rather than the SQLite blob I've used) for a little home hacking that expanded far beyond its original scope, I've build a giant asynchronous thing that's very hard to reason about. I may have to just saw bits off it and start over.

(not helping: mixing data storage logic with what we'll laughingly refer to as business logic, plus a whole bunch of fairly crufty reverse-engineering.)

August 5

Oppenheimer was astonishingly good. It's so good that you stop being surprised at the people who show up in what are essentially cameo roles (Gary Oldman) or maybe slightly more than that (Tom Conti, Rami Malik). I hadn't realised Oppenheimer had gotten pulled into the whole Red Scare nonsense. I read a really terrible e-book ages back about the Manhattan Project and to be honest the only thing that stuck in my head was Leslie Groves' name, and even that was to the point that when he appears on screen I was thinking, "hmm, Groves. Leslie Groves? Is that his name? Why do I know that name?" Anyway. I'd like to see this a few more times to see what I missed. Also probably need to read the book. And read around the story. And and and.

August 4

Not that impressed overall with Good Omens S2: as I put it elsehwere, at times it felt forced, like "We Are Being Funny and You Must Now Laugh!" but more than that, the wrapup was dissatisfying. There's a formula for this sort of thing, and it's a formula because it works. Breaking away from the formula either has to be done very well, or not at all, and I don't think this was done particularly well. Worse, it felt like a giant dangling hook for a third season, which, while not necessarily a bad idea, gives me a sense of foreboding given the state of the second season. Ah well.

So we started watching The Tick and so far it looks like it might be fun - hurrah for that!

August 3

Took another run at the OpenHAB update. For some reason even with the appropriate JDK installed it was still trying to use JDK 11, and I had to nuke that JDK to get it to use 17. I don't know if this is because there's a version setting somewhere in the distribution or in my local config, but it's fixed now. There are still a few warnings I need to understand (there's a bunch of info in the upgrade docs and the upgrade tool about how you may need to explicitly add unit information to some things, but none of it leads to an obvious "...and here's how to do it" page) and now that the UI has parity with file-based config I should move all the file-based config into the UI, but eh. I'll get there.

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