Author: Paul Tomblin

Various updates

  1. Got the UPS software working again, after I converted from using the mge-utalk driver to the mge-shut driver. No idea why the other driver, which has supported this UPS just fine for years suddenly started having trouble. Oh well. Such is the world of open source software.
  2. Our company photo contest results were announced today. I didn’t win anything. I guess at least part of the problem was that I ignored all the advice I got from my friends and submitted the pictures I liked best. But because of my wrist problems I didn’t have as much time to work on them as I would have liked. Oh well. Not to sound like sour grapes or anything, but the guy who cleaned up in several of the novice categories takes pictures of bicycle races and sells them at the race, which make him more than a novice in my book. Most of his pictures, though, were really good and would have won in the advanced categories as well, and my favourite one of his didn’t win anything. Actually, all the competition was really good. Of course it doesn’t help that there were three other people submitting pictures from Alaska cruises, and one person who went to Antartica.
  3. My SafeType keyboard was acting a bit weird. Every now and then I’ll be typing away and suddenly all 4 LEDs in the middle (caps lock, num lock , scroll lock and one other labelled “W”) all come on for a second or so, and a whole bunch of typing gets missed. I’ve seen this about two or three times a day at work, but when I brought the keyboard home for the weekend, I was seeing it about once a minute. Mildly annoying. I moved it from my powered USB hub to plugged in directly to the Powerbook, though, and I haven’t seen the problem since. Must be some sort of timing thing.
  4. I worked hard this week to provide a new architecture for dealing with encryption keys for our digital cinema product. Today the guy who has to use these keys comes over and starts talking about unresolved issues and use cases. My thought was why didn’t he think through these issues and use cases before he asked me for this new architecture? The upshot is that I have to totally redesign the architecture again, back to something a little more complicated than the original, but much less complicated than the one I did this week. And since development has to be finished by the end of next week, I guess I’m going to be billing some hours this weekend. Normally I’d be really annoyed at the wasted effort, but I enjoyed the intellectual challenge of that code I wrote this week.

The perils of automatic updates

Last night at 3:20am, I was awakened (awoke? woken up? woke up?) by a lot of beeping. Evidently every xterm open on the Linux server was getting a “wall” message from the UPS monitoring software. That’s four or five Terminal windows on my laptop, a couple on Vicki’s laptop, a few on the G4, and a bunch of VCs on the Linux box itself. Quite a noise. The messages were repeats of

Communications with UPS evolution@localhost lost

UPS evolution@localhost is unavailable

Communications with UPS evolution@localhost established

I couldn’t deal with it at 3:20am, so I just shut down NUT and went back to bed. Investigation this morning shows that Fedora shipped me a new version of NUT last night, and it doesn’t like something about my configuration. I still haven’t figured out what.

Got the cast off!

I went to the doctor about my wrist. They took off my cast, and let me wash my arm. All the skin on my palm was flaking off, but when I went to the sink to try to wash it off, the technician who’d taken off my cast called from the other room to say “you can’t get all the flakes off”. She says everybody goes back to the sink when they discover all the flakes. While waiting for the doctor, I made the mistake of trying to look at the back of my hand to see if it was flaking too. OUCH!

The doctor examined my wrist a bit and said that since it’s doing so well, instead of a cast she’d give me a brace. She said to treat it like a cast and don’t twist my wrist around too much, although of course I can take it off to wash. She said if it’s too painful I could come back and get a cast.

I can almost type normally with this brace on, but only if I raise my elbow at a high angle. And my elbow is very stiff and sore. But it’s nice to be mobile again.