< | >

Hacker's Diary

A rough account of what I did with Emacs recently.

March 26
We got a new robot vaccum/mop, a Deebot T9. It's pretty slick, and the cats are currently fascinated by it, probably because it's quiet enough that it doesn't scare them.


March 25
Lamborghini felt like they'd left out a few important bits of the story, and for all they talked up the Miura, the closing shots of it looked like they'd been given strict instructions not to do anything remotely driver-like with it - puttering along at what looked like at most 50kph on what was evidently a closed section of road. I think giving a bit more connective tissue to the story, explaining what the whole bit with the Countach vs. whatever species of Ferrari Gabriel Byrne was driving was about (or just dropping it), and maybe taking some of the detail lavished on the early, more tractor-y part of the story and injecting it into the rest might have helped. I mean, we had this whole introduction to Bob the Kiwi that makes it seem like he's going to be a make-or-break player in the story, and he barely features for the rest of the movie; friend Matteo has a whole third of the film and then just ... vanishes after breaking up with Ferrucio. I dunno. I didn't know anything about the movie going in, and afterwards I felt like it was a missed opportunity.

March 24
I seem to recall reading the book of Thunderbolt and Lightfoot years ago, but I'd lost most of the detail other than the very last bit of the story. It's a goofy sort of movie. At times, Eastwood looks like he's genuinely cracking up laughing, or trying not to, with Bridges' antics. At other times, it's like the entire writing crew got utterly stoned and decided what the movie really needed was ... a hillbilly in a hot-rod with a trunk full of rabbits. I dunno. The weird bits aside, it's a fairly straightforward tale and a bit of lighthearted fun.

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: 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| next month


Waider
Mrch