- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
Category: Geekery
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.
I think I deserve a commission
Since I got my new keyboard, one of my co-workers broke her wrist and she bought one. Also, people keep coming by to look at it and ask me about it. I forsee an upsurge in sales for SafeType in this area, and all because people got a chance to see it in action.
New keyboard
I’ve got the new keyboard and it’s nice. It takes a bit of getting used to, and strictly speaking I need more mobility in my left hand than the cast allows me. But when I get the arms of my chair set up right and the pillow under my cast exactly right, it’s just about full speed for normal text typing. Still very strange trying to find number keys, and very hit and miss to find the various modifier keys. The mirrors are more help with the number keys, especially since the modifiers aren’t labelled in an Apple manner, but also because they’re too far away from the mirrors to see them well.
One of the weirder aspects of this system is that is comes with a PS/2 to USB adaptor, and it’s got two connectors, one for a PS/2 mouse. I don’t have a PS/2 mouse, I have a USB mouse, but when I plug this adaptor in, then the Powerbook thinks it has a mouse plugged in, even if my USB mouse isn’t plugged in. This means that the trackpad doesn’t work (because I turned on that option when I’m typing one-handed because otherwise my hand drags on it and moves the cursor when I don’t want it). This causes problems when I have to unplug the mouse to, say, plug in the Compact Flash reader. I’ve either got to unplug this keyboard and go back to one handed typing, or reconfigure to allow the trackpad when a mouse is plugged in. What I really need is a small USB hub. I wonder if an unpowered one would work with this keyboard or if it draws to much?
Aaaarrrgh!
Have I mentioned recently how much I hate typing with one hand, even with Sticky Keys turned on? I just spent way too fucking long on one of those stupid meme quizes. I wrote several paragraphs each on apple, linux, cross country skiing, flying, odd professors and the like, and was just finishing up 4 paragraphs on why usenet is better than blogging when I accidentally hit a key combination that closed the tab I was writing in – I think I was reaching for splat-x and hit splat-w. All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain. Time to die.