Hacker's Diary
A rough account of what I did with Emacs recently.
- January 31
- Inspector George Gently
was tonight's fare - the very first episode - and it was
entertaining. It's like the Morse/Lewis setup, except if Morse had
a sense of humour and Lewis was a mouthy prat.
- January 30
- Charger still claiming offline. Trying to figure out how I
scraped some details out of this the last time I was tinkering with
it: I suspect I may have set up a rogue WiFi device with the same
SSID and password as the charger, and got the app to connect to
that. Which looks like a weekend task.
Rizzle and Izzle is drawing to a close. Jane's off to the FBI,
Tommy has shown up again, Maura's getting involved with the free
clinic, Vince is retiring, Frankie's getting married... honestly,
though, I keep feeling like the scripting in this is mediocre at
best, the missed opportunities to dial it up even
slightly frustrating.
- January 29
- Pretty sure I could stock this journal entirely with things in
my noddy little home automation stack that have spuriously failed
for no evident reason. Today's? The MQTT doodad that scrapes data
out of the car charger apparently stopped working at 6am yesterday
and hasn't been able to resume since.
It is showing symptoms, on analysis, of lacking a HOME
environment variable, or of having same set incorrectly in
cron's environment. Given I didn't touch nuthin', it's
possible that this was some change in cron that I am not
aware of.
Wait, no, that's a red herring. The real problem seems to be that
the vendor API has either changed or is broken. Awesome. (yes,
this is something I reverse-engineered.)
The app claims the charger is offline. The network says, "nope,
it's online", so I can only assume the vendor is having
issues. Awesome. Guess I can try the old "turn it off and on
again" and see if it improves, or given I'm probably out
of warranty I can pop the damn thing open, clone the RPi inside,
and reverse-engineer the thing properly.
- January 28
- Forgot to mention - after the power outage at the weekend, my
creaky macOS jump box seemed to stall while booting. When it
hadn't successfully booted after an hour I did a hard power-off
and let it go again, and this time it was fine. I have no
idea.
- January 27
- Today was so hectic it felt like that 30 Rock gag about "what a
week" except I felt like that by 3pm Monday rather than
Wednesday.
- January 26
- Excitement! The power flickered but stayed on, then someone rang
the doorbell and told us our electrical feed was on
fire. It was pissing down and I was in "not leaving the
house" clothes; by the time I'd put on something more suitable for
the weather, the someone had gone (they were just passing in a
car, and stopped - good samaritan!) I looked up at the power feed
and could only see exhaust from the boiler, so presumed that
must've been what he saw.
Ten minutes later, the next door neighbour rang the bell and asked
if we had power. They'd lost power with a burst of sparks visible
outside the house. hmmmmm. I had another look at the
power feed and if I squinted it might be a bit scorched
looking. She called ESB Networks to see about getting their power
back. When the ESB guys turned up - in remarkably chipper mood for
what must be an extremely busy time for them - our power had
finally decided that it would turn off also. As far as I can tell
the ESB guy replaced the tails feeding into the house, but because
of the aforementioned weather conditions it wasn't really possible
to see after they'd left. In total I think we were offline for
about two hours... wait, I can check my toys, in fact: roughly
13:25 to 15:50, so more like two and a half hours. I'm idly
curious as to what the age of the thing they replaced was - from
the 2007 renovation of this house, or the 1935 build, or somewhere
in between?
Devil's Hour: the answer to last night's question,
disappointingly, appears to be "Season Three".
I wrote a noddy little thing to turn crontab entries into launchd
plists. It's not even fully complete: as soon as it was sufficient
to convert the crontab I was looking at, I stopped. In the
process, I did discover that you can specify
<string> values for Minute, Hour
etc. and it treats <string>0</string> as if
it were, in fact, * rather than 0. That took a
bit of time to figure out.
- January 25
- More Devil's Hour. Where is this
going?
- January 24
- Started on season 2 of The Devil's Hour
which is more of a headwrecker than the first season
because we can't quite remember how the first season actually
worked out, and narrative crossover is kinda part of the whole
thing.
- January 23
- Talking offhand to someone today about protocol handlers in Java
and the pain of writing same. And what am I looking at right now
for, uh, non-work purposes? Mmmhmm.
- January 22
- Durrrr. Forgot to actually launch the disk copy last night, so
did it this morning instead. It was done when I got home from
work, and the drive booted immedateily when I swapped it
in. Laptop is reportedly snappy now.
Next-day delivery is a dangerous thing. That is all.
- January 21
- The usual diversion from current task to unrelated task: fitting
a new SSD in a clunky old Windows laptop to breathe some life
into it. Disk copy time is half a day so I'll let it run
overnight.
Finished re-reading Silo, and yeah. Story differs but the net
result is about the same, and seasons 1/2 cover book one ("Wool",
for those of us who read it after it was a collection of
short stories but before it was a TV series). I still feel like
the whole introduction of Judicial as a third leg is unnecessary,
particularly given where the story goes later.
- January 20
- React stuff almost working. I had a page-level reload
using a meta tag; that failed whenever the server was offline or
otherwise unreachable, something that happens because my EC2
instance is too small and I'm constantly procrastinating on doing
something about that. I've replaced the meta tag with an in-page
timer and hooked it to React state. It works perfectly on my
laptop but for some reason doesn't work on the iPad which is the
primary display for this app, so now I'm gonna have to debug
that.
- January 19
- So what do we watch between now and whenever the next Silo,
Doctor Who, Reacher, or Slow Horses shows up? I guess we've still
got the final season of Rizzoli and Isles.
Bit more poking at the previously-mentioned React stuff; like
seemingly everything in the javascript world, if you're not
working with it on a daily basis, you get out of date
very rapidly. Some of what I'm doing is converting
existing cdoe to the current version of the same thing, which is
somewhat annoying to have to do.
- January 18
- I was sure I'd seen The Negotitator
before, but apparently not. It's a good, tight movie that wastes
pretty much none of its running time, and I couldn't figure out
who the "obvious" ringleader was until the reveal, because they
did a good job setting up at least one other principal for
it.
- January 17
- Silo season finale: wow, they more-or-less stuck the
landing. Nice. I've started rereading the books to see how the
story compares.
- January 16
- I still don't quite understand where my shiny Mac M2 gets all
the bass from. I mean, it's not like it has a big resonant space
to play with, but there's some omph in there
somewhere.
- January 15
- Done and planned for 2025 so far: 1 x-ray, 2 MRIs, a court cause,
and a "trauma clinic". Hopefully this isn't a bellwether for the
year.
- January 14
- Character evolution for Ms. Rizzoli seems to have landed on
"let's make her behave like a two-year-old who demands things her
way regardless of conseuqences." It's rather grating, and I can't
imagine the actress was particularly happy with it, except she was
probably getting a large sack of cash to deal with the
trauma...
- January 13
- Two lessons from my constant fiddling with OpenHAB: Firstly, if
you're gonna have home automation of any sort, make sure you have
a goal in mind. I've a z-wave network of (mostly) TRVs that is
largely a hacker's toy. Secondly, the idea of home
automation is far more attractive than the reality. After all, the
reality is brought to you by the same process that brought you,
"it's not working? try power-cycling it and see if the same thing
happens".
- January 12
- Back on our regular Rizzoli and Isles fodder. One of the most
jarring things about this show is that the Rizzoli of the title
has shot numerous perpetrators - pretty much all fatally, as far
as I can recall - with zero consequences. Her brother, on the
other hand, had a whole episode dedicated to "maybe he
shot someone he shouldn't have?" but of course in the end it
worked out: hurrah, he killed the right person. There was a brief
flirtation with non-lethal weaponry a couple of episodes back but
that seems to have gone straight out the window as tonight's was
back to shoot first, ask questions later on the off chance that
the lead donation recipient survives.
- January 11
- Final season of Vera! Ever! Hope it's a good
one... wait, what, only two episodes? Sheesh... hardly a season,
is it? But ok, the final episode was well done.
- January 10
- Silo: almost complete and I'm still not sure what they're going
to do in the final episode. Not to bang a drum repeatedly but it
looks like introducing the Judicial subplot has complicated things
that need to be resolved.
- January 9
- The Z-Wave adventures continue: at 02:45 this morning, the
controller attempted to process messages from three devices that
aren't in the house. I think it just made up some node
IDs.
- January 8
- Running the Z-Wave binding in trace mode and looking at what
it's doing. I am thinking it could do with posting a good deal of
this information in places other than a trace log; some of this
would be useful as bridge data (akin to the current packet
counters) and some would be useful as Thing data e.g. last time we
heard from this Thing, last time we sent a packet to this Thing,
latency, etc.
- January 7
- Not making much progress on the Z-Wave query. I mean, ok, it's
open source and I'm getting exactly as much support as I paid
for...
- January 6
- So, two things about my OpenHAB setup: I am so sorry I
bought a single Danfoss/Devolo/Popp TRV, because they are nothing
but trouble (they eat batteries. they fall off the network. they
lose their configuration and need to be re-integrated. they
periodically, as best I can tell, report the temperature as being
1000 times what it actually is - I do enjoy my rooms being a
toasty 2,100 °C) and more generally I am peeved with the
opacity and apparent fragility of Z-Wave in general. The latter
may be unfair to Z-Wave since, to be fair, I've only ever used
OpenHAB to talk to it, and I know that there are other tools out
there which may do a better job.
All this because I'm trying, yet again, to see if there's a way to
get OpenHAB to pick these stupid TRVs back up after they've fallen
on their faces. At this point, having trawled the code a bit,
looked at the corresponding Open Z-Wave code, and tried a few
things, I've given up in favour of posting a request to the
OpenHAB forums. Meanwhile, my Z-Wave logs are scrolling by here,
showing devices falling off the network and climbing back onto it
for no reason I can determine other than that they felt like
it. Meanwhile, the actual devices I'm trying to recover
insist they're online even though they've been dead for a couple
of days. Oh, and that one TRV that is of the more reliable and
expensive kind is still insisting that it hasn't woken up since
August, despite happily posting temperature updates on a regular
basis.
- January 5
- Episode 8 of Silo Season 2 and I'm wondering just how far the
last two episodes are going to go. I read the plot outline on
Wikipedia to remind myself of how the book wraps up and on one
hand there's two hours left to fill in the gaps, but on the other
hand given the pace to date I'm not sure there's enough time to
cover this, particularly with the complications introduced with
the whole Judicial side-plot.
- January 4
- Still marshalling at Parkrun. Over 250 people showed up this
morning and I applauded every single one of them!
State of Play
was pretty good throughout but did get a little messy at the
end. Curious to see it's based on a BBC series - I'd noticed
Working Title in the opening credits and wondered what the
cross-channel connection might be. Anyway. Rachel McAdams, Helen
Mirren, Robin Wright Penn, Russell Crowe, Ben Affleck, Jeff
Bridges all turning in pretty decent performances. Oh, and that
weaselly guy from The Man In The High Castle who I'm sure
is a perfectly nice person but that series kinda ruined him for
me.
Spent some time trying to reacquaint myself with some stuff I'd
done with React over a year ago. I'm sure it all needs
updating but it's frankly exhausting to deal with.
So it seems like the spurious git behaviour I've been
seeing (files being inconsistently reported as tracked or
modified) may be down to the precomposeunicode
and ignorecase settings, but to be honest none of the
verbiage written about this online seems to provide a helpful
guide to establish if this is actually the problem I'm
encountering. Guess I'll have to experiment.
- January 3
- Absolute Power
is surprisingly lumpy in places (questionable cuts, bad lining up
between two angles on the same scene, the whole "who actually is
that" towards the end of the movie when someone's face down on
their desk) for a Clint Eastwood flick. It's ok, though. It's
lightweight enough that you can kinda forgive the lumpiness for
the most part.
That git thing I fixed? A file vanished, possibly due to
an rsync. and git claims there is no difference
in the state of the directory containing the file. Django was
somewhat less sanguine when it went looking for the same file,
though. I am not entirely clear on what happened here, but it's
definitely very annoying.
- January 2
- Weird streaming glitch. Our evening's entertainment attempted to
reset us to the season 5 finale of Rizz and Izz, and also insisted
there were only 5 and a half seasons when I was sure there were
seven. We shrugged, watched an episode, then I went poking at the UI
and lo and behold there are two Rizz and Izz shows,
identical except that one has less seasons than the other. The
metadata quality on this streaming platform continues to be
appalling.
Trying to get my head around OpenHAB's page/component
construction. It's sort of making a bit of sense to me, but it's
not helped by the fact that the UI seems to be fairly picky about
when and how it offers autocomplete, and the default behaviour if
you make a mistake is "don't render anything at all" which is
understandable but not exactly user-friendly. Oh, and all the
documentation I've encountered so far just describes UI
components, i.e. there are no pictures of what you're fiddling
with.
Also weird: git on one of my machines was in some
unspecified way out of sync and no amount of git pull
--rebase and what not would fix it. Had to resort to a fetch
and a hard reset in the end (having of course verified
that nothing would get lost in the process).
- January 1
- Happy New Year!
Started the year's viewing with ... well, we're still working our
way through Rizzoli & Isles. It'll never be awesome, but it's
not terrible, and we've a season and a bit left in it.
Nerdery: digging through a bunch of to-do lists to try and scrub
some semi-abandoned projects. I was tinkering with OpenHAB's web
page stuff a bit trying to make auto-updating charts without
resorting to an actual charting engine like Grafana. Not quite
there yet, though. I also spent a bit of time cleaning up some of
the data. For reasons best known to Past Waider, the database uses
local time instead of UTC, but I somehow posted ambiguous
datapoints in there during daylight savings; also, the cheaper
Danfoss/POPP/Devloo TRVs occasionally claim the temperature
doesn't have a decimal point so it's 2048 degrees rather than
20.48, and none of the ensuing processing catches this so it duly
winds up in the database. ALL CLEAN NOW.
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