Everything I used to bore people on newsgroups and mailing lists with, now in one inconvenient place.
I came home to find that my USB KVM, which I’ve had for about a month, is dead. It switches, the screen shows the resolution as sort of a double image, but neither computer comes out of the screen saver. If I power off the KVM and power it on again, the Linux box at least shows messages indicating that it’s come alive again. But it doesn’t work.
Bugger it, doesn’t anybody make reliable equipment designed to work 24/7 for months at a time?
In my part of the big project I’m on, I have a class called a Playlist, and a corresponding database table. Based on my analysis of how many Playlists are likely to be used in the lifetime of a system, I decided that an int would be more than adequate storage space for the sequential internal id number. Actually, a short would probably be adequate, but there isn’t any compelling reason to use shorts on modern systems since they don’t save much storage and they’re slower to process (is that true in Java? I know it is in C/C++.) And so I happily used this id all over the code.
Continue reading “When does a unit test become a system test?”
It’s official – the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency (NGA) has decided to remove public access to the Digital Aeronautical Flight Information File (DAFIF). For more information about what DAFIF is, why it’s important, and why it’s being taken away from us, see this page.
I don’t think my waypoint generators will die, but they sure won’t be as useful for people outside of the United States as their data gets staler and staler.
This is a sad day for me.
Preserve me from cow orkers (software developers, mind you) who install rpms with –force (without bothing to read and understand the message they got when they attempted to install without –force) and then wonder why apt-rpm isn’t upgrading things correctly.
Continue reading “Oh Lord”
Came home and the TiVo had finished updating. I entered all the Season’s Passes from the other TiVo – or at least the ones I could: you can’t enter normal Season’s Passes (SPs) for shows that aren’t currently on the schedule, and many of our old SPs are no longer valid. But there were a few surprises – I couldn’t find either “Red Green” or “As Time Goes By” on the schedule, even though we recorded both of them a few days ago.
After I entered the Season’s Passes, I switched the cable input from the old TiVo to the new one, and the coax RF cable from the new TiVo goes into the RF modulator. It’s already recorded a show. Woo hoo!
Phase 3 will be when the new USB wireless network dongle I ordered from TiVo arrives, and I can start sharing TiVo shows between the two TiVos. I can hardly wait.