Category: Geekery

Another sleepless night

I was having trouble sleeping. I thought it was because I have a sort of “rubbed raw” feeling in my arm pit. I got the same thing last time – because I can’t lift the arm, my arm pit doesn’t dry out properly and so it rubs painfully. But then I realized there was a lot of light coming from my office. And so I went to have a look, and sure enough my Linux box had crashed, frozen on boot, and so therefore the screen saver wasn’t shutting down the monitors properly.

A few days ago I got a little overzealous in removing old kernels, and since then every time the update process has installed new stuff it’s given me a failure message about running lilo. (Yes, I still use lilo rather than grub because when I first installed this system you couldn’t use grub with a software raid and lvm2 – one of these days I’m going to have to reinstall just to correct that and a few other nagging problems)

I realized that if that was the cause of the problem, I was going to have to boot with a live or rescue CD and remount everything, chroot to it, and fix the lilo problems and run the lilo installer command. So the first thing I tried was downloading the “Ubuntu Rescue Remix”, burning a CD with it, and booting with it. I discovered the hard way that the “Rescue Remix” is a i686 kernel, which means I can’t chroot to my amd64 install and expect to run commands. Oops.

Next I started to download the latest Ubuntu CD. Chrome said I had 27 minutes remaining, so while I waited I dug out the previous Ubuntu CD, and booted with that. I had to “apt-get install lvm2” and “apt-get install mdadm”, but afterwards I was able to “mdadm –assemble” both software RAIDs, and mount the lvm2 partitions under /mnt. I chrooted to /mnt, and ran “lilo”. First problem was that the boot drive was specified using /dev/disk/by-id/…., which it didn’t like in the chroot environment, so I changed that to /dev/sda. Then it complained about the “Linux.old”, so I commented that out. With both of those changes made, lilo installed without any further errors, and when I rebooted everything came up fine.

I’m just manually restarting all my nightly backups which normally happen during the time the computer was down, and then I’m going to try to get an hour or two sleep.

Forth? Why Forth?

Had a dream last night, in which the programming language Forth played a big role. Which is a bit of a puzzlement because I’ve never learned to program in Forth. There was a time when Forth was tagged as the next big thing and every computer magazine had articles about it, but that was around the time when commercial software started advertising “written in C for speed” and an interpreted language like Forth didn’t have a chance. I believe Forth became the core of PostScript.

The first thing I remember from the dream is seeing two small computers with a wire connecting their ‘pin 1’s. Somebody asked the Forth guru why they were connected, and I said “I know that, it’s so their clocks are in sync” and I said something about events on rising edges. I have no idea what that’s about – I’ve never done anything that low level. Evidently my dream self has been taking electrical engineering courses.

Later I was talking to the guru in front of three real train tracks, and every time a train went by a single alphanumeric letter above the track lit up. I wonder if that is some dream reference to the famous Tech Model Railway Club, but I really only know about them from the Jargon File. I wonder if they used Forth?

Later the guru was showing me about ports to respond to external events and control things like lights and heat in a house. I distinctly remember a panel showing four room mates and an indicator of whether they were using Forth to control their thermostats or not.

Anyway, it seems odd to me to be dreaming about a programming language I’ve never used, and low level hardware stuff I’ve never done. Not sure if that’s a subconscious reflection of my recent surgery, or trying to do object oriented programming in Perl.

Perl and IDEs

From about 1987 to about 4 or 5 years ago, I did all my software development using vi (and later gvim), ctags, and all the Unix command line tools. But towards the end of my time at Kodak, I got the Eclipse religion, at least as far as doing Java. Sure, I dislike having to move my hands away from the keys to move the cursor around all the time, but the code completion, integrated debugging and all that other good stuff won me over. The ability to click on an existing method call and see the javadoc for the method and to hit F3 and be taken to the actual code was a game changer for me. So much better than ctags. But for non-Java, whether shell scripts at work or perl at home, I still relied on gvim and the other command line tools.

But I’m about to start a huge and long term perl project, a large part of which is trying to learn all I can about an existing open source code base. So I wanted to see if an IDE would give me an advantage in terms of moving around the code I’m trying to learn. I installed the EPIC plugin for Eclipse, and also a dedicated perl IDE called “Padre”, and noodled around on both, and so far I’m forced to conclude that neither of them are as useful in perl as Eclipse is in Java. The biggest missing feature seems to be that F3 gets me the wrong function or method declaration most of the time. I don’t know why, possibly the typing system in perl is too weak for the sort of analysis and introspection that Eclipse does in Java.

So I think I’m going to be back to doing gvim and ctags and find and grep and perldoc and all the other fun stuff.

This time I think it was the cache…

As I wrote about in 2007 in articles and , back in 2004 I wrote a cache for part of the product I was working on at Kodak. In the first release to QA, I made sure that area of the code got tested thoroughly, and they found a bug, and fortunately I got it fixed before it went out to the customers. But to my chagrin, my boss and other people on the project got it in their heads that somehow any problem anywhere near that part of the product must be the fault of my cache, even though time and time again it was proven that there were no further bugs in that code for the following 3+ years.

Now flash forward to the product I’m working on now. We have a “go live to the very important customer” happening in just a few days, and we’re supposed to be in code semi-freeze. But the “Performance Project” just put their performance cache into the product, evidently without giving the local QA much chance to test it before it went to the customer’s QA. That seems just a little bit dangerous to me. But no matter, they assure me they’ve written tons of unit tests. So what could possibly go wrong?

Today the customer called up saying that they’re setting up a new client on the admin site, but every time they go to the “branding setup” for that new client, they see some other client’s branding setup. This branding consists of things like the client logo and some “terms and conditions” text and the like. Since they’ve got literally hundreds of QA people hitting this site, I naturally wondered if they weren’t seeing some interaction between multiple people messing with the setup. But after hours of poking around on their site, one of my peers and I (neither of us members of the “Performance Product”, I might add) are convinced it’s the performance cache. Evidently if you use one browser to look at one client’s branding, and then use a different browser to look at the branding of the client who hasn’t been setup yet, you see the branding from the client that you’d looked at in the first browser. Somehow the cache is reacting to the absence of information in the database for a client by pulling up information from some other client out of the cache. That’s not good.

Hopefully that will get fixed, and hopefully somebody will set up a test plan that actually tests what the cache does not just on a cache miss, but also on a database miss as well. And hopefully the important customer won’t think we’re all a bunch of idiots for not testing this properly.

Jealous, much?

So less than a week after I start using my new upgraded Linux box for lots of stuff, my laptop suddenly decides not to wake up out of sleep, and when you reboot it the light comes on and you can hear some minor activity inside, but you never get the start up chime and the usual special keys to boot in diagnostics mode or single user mode didn’t work. I think it’s jealous because I haven’t been using it as much. Or maybe it’s just under more stress because I’m opening and closing the lid and moving it around instead of leaving it tethered on my desk all the time.

Vicki has been talking for a while about getting a new laptop because her old MacBookPro with only 3Gb of RAM keeps freezing up, especially when she’s doing Second Life, and especially since she “upgraded” to Lion. So we went off to the Apple store, her to get a new MacBookPro, and me to get some help from the Genius Bar.

The Genius poked around, tried a few things I’d already tried and a few things I hadn’t, all to no avail. It wouldn’t stir. So he said “well, it looks like it needs a new logic board. We had a few problems with nVidia chipsets back around that time, so I’m going to write it up as one of those even though I can’t boot it far enough to run the graphics system diagnostic.” The upshot is that I’m going to be without my laptop for a week or more, and I’m going to get a new $500 logic board for free. Not too bad, I guess. Although if they’d tried to charge me for it, I probably would have just bought a Macbook Air instead. So maybe that’s a mixed blessing.