Upgraded to Wordpress 2.0. Looks like my highly customized Maple theme still works, as do all the important plugins. I still haven’t upgraded to Spam Karma 2.0, because the original Spam Karma works just fine for the pitiful small volume of spam I get these days.
The new editor looks nice.
…pick up a pair of vice grips and head towards the bathroom, just shoot me. I just can’t seem to get it right.
The downstairs powder room sink drains really slowly, and Vicki says it started after the carolling party. I tried plungering it, and didn’t help. (Plungering sinks is a bit of a waste of time anyway, because all it does it blow water out of the overflow hole.) So I tried taking the trap off. Didn’t find anything blocking it, so I tried to put it back on. And I couldn’t get the damn thing to stop leaking no matter how hard I tightened it. Then I discovered that in tightening it, I’d managed to knock a big chunk out the the trap. So I went to the hardware store to buy a replacement trap.
While I was there, I picked up a replacment for the handle and arm of the upstairs en-suite toilet. The current one keeps falling off the arm thingy all the time.
When I got home, I put the trap on, but because I forgot to buy teflon tape it still leaks a bit. And of course it didn’t fix the real problem - the blockage is evidently further down.
Then I tried the replacement for the handle. The existing one has a bend in it, but when I tried to bend the new one, I bent it at one of the holes and broke it. So off I went to the hardware store, and bought the exact same type again. And when I carefully bent it at the non-hole part, it broke again. Of course it wasn’t until then that Vicki mentioned to me that there are bendy type arms and non-bendy type arms. Who knew?
Rather than making ANOTHER trip to Myers hardware, I pushed the existing handle on the existing arm on as hard as I could, and hoped that can hold for a while.
…it’s because I’ve had to commit Seppuku to appease our Japanese customers.
A few days ago, based on a code review (which I unfortunately did on our 5.0 code base instead of the 3.6 code that they are using) and an examination of the customer logs, I confidently said that this mysterious changing value that they are seeing is due to one of them mucking around with changing values in Webmin. I found at least one case where that had happened, and like House my default assumption is that the user is always lying, because that’s usually the case. My confidence was reported up the line by my boss, and from him to the Japanese support people, and from them to the customer.
So yesterday I was taking another look at the logs, and I found that as well as the case where they had messed around with the values themselves, I found another case where the values had changed “spontaneously”. Oh oh. And then I remembered the cache of these values I’d put in in 3.1, and how hard it had been to get everybody who used the cache to understand that if they used the cache they had to listen for a particular message, and when they got that message they had to call a method to flush and reload the cache, and how some of the other developers don’t seem to get the concept of Singletons and how something they call in one thread can affect something that happens after that thread is dead and another one spawned off, and because of that in 4.0 I’d gotten rid of the cache entirely.
After apologizing, I’m going to have some backporting to do.
Why is it that when called on to apologize to the touchy Japanese customers I feel this Basil Fawlty voice in the back of my mind saying “Don’t mention the war” over and over again? I have trouble reconciling the delicate sensibilities of the Japanese and with the brutal butchers who bayonetted Canadian nurses in Hong Kong at Christmas 1941 or who casually beheaded surrendered prisoners being force marched in Bataan. I guess that’s not very culturally sensitive of me.
Andy somebody did a “post the first line from your first post of each month” so I figured I’d copy it.
If I had a bit more patience, I’d make those links to the original posts. But I’m lazy.
I don’t know why, maybe the season, but I nearly cried when this one came on my iPod. I’ve always liked it, today it just grabbed my attention extra hard.
Hold on to young friends we made of old
And cleave to the women that keep us whole,
And keep a warm fire
For all our friends who come in from the cold;
We love them all as brothers
And we don’t have to know their names
We know this must sound different,
But for us it always stays the same.
1) You can’t even count on your own project’s QA team members not to lie and say “I didn’t change anything” when they really mean “I manually edited this vital configuration file and totally botched the syntax of the start time parameter”.
2) If you need to get a screen dump of the login screen on a machine that isn’t network attached, and so therefore you can’t just use VNC to do it, you can do
chvt 7 ; sleep 5 ; XAUTHORITY=/var/gdm/:0.Xauth DISPLAY=:0.0 xwd -root > login.xwd
You youngsters might want to use the import program instead of xwd if it’s available. But then you’ll never know the joys of stringing together a half dozen pnm commands and getting it right the first time. Damn kids. Get off my lawn.
Vicki and I both upgraded to Firefox 1.5 (on Mac OS X) in the last couple of weeks. Vicki went first, and she had a problem with something that went away when she uninstalled all the extensions she uses and reinstalled them. Then after a short time she found it was so unstable that she switched to Safari. Then I noticed that I couldn’t get Flash to work on any site. I tried uninstalling FlashBlock, and that didn’t help. I tried upgrading to Flash 8, and that didn’t help. Eventually I discovered that if I go into my profiles directory (in ~/Library/Application Support/Firefox/Profiles/foo) and deleted all the extensions related files and directories, Flash worked again. I installed FlashBlock and the Google Toolbar, but I can’t seem to find the BugMeNot extension. Oh well, I guess I’ll have to do that the old fashioned way.
But it seems like Firefox really screwed up when it comes to upgrading when you have extensions installed.
adventurelounge.com - Early Aircraft Design
It’s a set of drawings of aircraft from patent applications in the 1930s-50s approximately. It’s funny looking through these bizarre and fanciful ideas and every once in a while finding one that you actually recognize as a real airplane.
Backing up just got a lot faster when I realized that copying a 12Gb file from an IDE disk to a USB 2.0 disk should *not* take 3+ hours. After some hints from the members of LUGOR, I discovered that last time I’d unplugged the USB disk for some reason, it had come back up as USB 1.1 “full” speed instead of USB 2.0 “high” speed, i.e. 12Mbps instead of 480Mbps. I replugged it and watched for the words “high speed” in /var/log/messages:
Dec 16 15:16:56 allhats kernel: usb 1-4: new high speed USB device using ehci_hcd and address 6
Dec 16 15:16:56 allhats kernel: scsi7 : SCSI emulation for USB Mass Storage devices
Dec 16 15:17:01 allhats kernel: Vendor: HDS72252 Model: 5VLAT80 Rev: V36O
Dec 16 15:17:01 allhats kernel: Type: Direct-Access ANSI SCSI revision: 00
Dec 16 15:17:01 allhats kernel: SCSI device sda: 488397168 512-byte hdwr sectors (250059 MB)
Dec 16 15:17:01 allhats kernel: sda: assuming drive cache: write through
Dec 16 15:17:01 allhats kernel: SCSI device sda: 488397168 512-byte hdwr sectors (250059 MB)
Dec 16 15:17:01 allhats kernel: sda: assuming drive cache: write through
Dec 16 15:17:01 allhats kernel: sda: sda1
On the Powerbook front, I’ve been playing around a bit with a program called “Quicksilver” that a few friends have been raving about. You’d think this would be right up my alley, since it allows me to control my computer with more keyboard interaction and less mousing. But so far, my reaction has been “meh”. It can do some cool stuff, but it’s a memory hog. I never thought I’d see the day when 1Gb of RAM in a laptop was barely adequate, but thanks to Firefox and Quicksilver, I’m there.
In other Powerbook news, I’m anxiously awaiting my replacement power supply. I tripped over the one that came with it and had to order a new one on Tuesday, and it still hasn’t come. Damn good thing I bought a spare power supply back when it seemed that Apple had never heard of “strain relief” and their power supplies kept dying with arcing from worn out insulation where-ever a wire went into a solid piece, or I would have had a dead Powerbook for 4 days now.
Speaking of inadequate memory - does anybody make 1Gb SO-DIMM PC-133? Vicki’s iBook has 128Mb built in and one SO-DIMM slot, which currently has 512Mb in it. I know, 640Mb should be enough for anybody, but she’s had to give up on Firefox because it’s such a memory hog and she misses some of her plugins. (Shut up, Jason.)
Whenever they have one of those “lets bring in food to celebrate some occasion”, I always feel left out because it’s always high sugar stuff and I can’t eat it because of my insulin problems. Today was different. Mary Ann, the head of the QA group, brought in home made chocolate chip cookies today to celebrate Lisa’s getting married, and she also brought a bag of pistacios just for me.
What a nice jesture.
TMIoTD:
(more…)
If you’re at work, and you need to call Apple Care about your Powerbook, and you discover that you forgot to write down the serial number before you left, and it’s possible to ssh into that Powerbook, you can find out the serial number by doing:
ioreg -l | grep IOPlatformSerialNumber
Very great, and now I have a new Powerbook power supply coming.
Rushing for the phone, I tripped over the power cable for my Powerbook. The metal part that goes into the Powerbook was already cracked from a previous accident, and this time it shattered. I wonder if it’s covered by AppleCare?
I finished migrating my image gallery this afternoon. It wasn’t easy - it kept getting hung up at the same pictures. Upgrading from 1.4.4 to 1.5.1 and deleting the aborted albums out of the G2 album area helped, but some pictures just refused to migrate for some reason, including one whole album. In each case I had to copy the files to /tmp, delete the problematic ones, migrate the album, and import the picture from /tmp. I guess there were about 25 pictures I had to do that way. Not bad out of 2500+, I guess, but it was a pain. But the gallery looks a lot better now.
This afternoon/evening was our annual Christmas Carolling Party. I’m sure Vicki will blog about it in huge detail, but it was a rousing success. One of the things I like best about the party is that we invite people from church, people from work, and people from the neighbourhood, and I keep looking around to make sure that they’re not breaking up into homogeneous groups. Especially this year when we’re in a new neighbourhood. And it worked well. I think everybody got along with each other.
I love this house, and I love this neighbourhood.
I’m in the process of migrating my image galleries from Gallery 1.4.4 to Gallery 2.0.2. Some of the 1.x albums aren’t moving properly, so there will be a slight delay while some of your pictures won’t be available. This includes the “Piper Pictures”, the pictures posted by the members of the Piper chat mailing list. In the mean time, the ones that aren’t available in http://xcski.com/gallery/[whatever] will be at http://xcski.com/g1/[whatever].
Sorry for the inconvenience.
