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Hacker's Diary

A rough account of what I did with Emacs recently.

February 12
Slightly at a loss as to how the bank who phoned me in San Francisco in the early morning (timezones, eh?) a mere 24 years ago are claiming they don't have a number on record for me and I must therefore engage with their customer service (and, implicitly, an incomprehensible phone tree with horrifically distorted hold music).

I just ran brew install php. I feel dirty twice over.

After about an hour of tinkering I have (a) achieved my goal and (b) become freshly annoyed with PHP.

February 11
I've given up for now on making sense of the Java-based protocol code I was looking at, not least because I'm not really trying hard to follow it and instead looking for a quick hack. The problem is that trying anything out with it is a fairly heavyweight process, so even if a quick hack exists, implementing and testing it is likely to be a royal pain. So, back to good friend ozwcp to reset the broken nodes and hopefully get the network back on track.

February 10
In which I find myself tinkering with PHP for reasons. Oh boy.

Thanks to some assistance obtained on Mastodon I put in a simple filter on my mail server to refuse email from unauthenticated connections claiming to be my domain. Surprisingly it's actually picked up almost 20 hits in its first week in action, each of which would've been spam for me to deal with one way or another. So that's nice.

February 9
Foundation is holding our interest nicely so far.

Dealing with a website hosting company's "easy" site editor. At some point I rolled back changes by restoring a backup and it regenerated all the HTML element IDs ... which I'd been using in javascript to reference said elements. Lovely.


February 8
Daleks' Invasion Earth 2150 A.D. is another brutal experience of how bad 60s sci-fi could get. The effects are ... non-existent, the acting has more ham than a pig farm, and the musical score actually made me laugh at one point where they went into a weird percussion-heavy lounge-music number of a big fight sequence. Groovy! For some mysterious reason this fared poorly at the box-office.

Parkrun, Sanctuary Runners: there was cake. Also coffee, tea, water, biscuits, fun-size snacks, cupcakes, balloons... and lots of fun!

February 7
I tracked down one of the messages in the zwave logs relating to a device with a node ID that isn't on my network, and it turns out to be a bitflip error. A checksummed bitflip error, at that.

February 6
Sancutary Runners: 7 years old today. Happy Birthday! There's probably a group near you: come find us this Saturday at Parkrun or wherever and help us celebrate! There may be cake...

Foundation: I did not see that episode ending coming. I do not know where this is going, but I'm intrigued.

February 5
New TV bubblegum: Foundation. I did not realise this was at least partly filmed in Ireland.

February 4
Final episode of Rizz and Is was ... banal. Other than being heavily laden with schmaltz and a bit of a montage, it was basically the same as any other episode.

February 3
School night, so back to Rizzoli and Isles. We're down the last few episodes and will need to figure out what we're watching next; George Gently is good but the episodes are 90 minutes long so it's like watching a feature film every night, which isn't really our thing.

Got an email from someone thanking me for a reverse-engineering hack I did 20 years ago and in which he found a bug. I am bemused that it's still a going concern, to be honest. Still, I've updated the docs. I've also updated the code, I think, except I don't have anything it'll build on any more, or the hardware to test it...

February 2
Looks like the car charger is back online: a burp a little after midnight, then full data from about 04:45. I'm actually slightly disappointed as I was going to check if it was functional while allegedly offline. I suppose I could just block it from WiFi and see what it does.

Why I dislike Homebrew, in general: just now I asked to to install something, then went and fiddled with some other stuff. When I checked back it was building bash from source. I refuse to believe that the version of bash shipped with the system is not sufficient to requirements.


February 1
More George, wherein I recognised the gate of Dublin Castle due to the presence of a Unicorn on top of it. Apparently the series was at least partially filmed in Ireland, which I find highly amusing, given the thickness of some of the Geordie accents and the completely over-the-top Oirish Character, sur. (named China, no less, a very common Irish name...)

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Waider
No leapday bugs this year