Category: Geekery

Probably should have been paying attention

I just noticed that the upstairs TiVo hasn’t recorded anything since Tuesday, not even the manual recordings of the Daily Show. I tried rebooting it, and the “ToDo List” still shows “No shows pending” for every entry in the Season Pass list, even the manual recordings. So now I’ve got a call into tech support, which at 6pm on a Friday, I’m not expecting a quick callback.

Update: an hour after rebooting, the ToDo List has finally been populated.

Stack Overflow not counting XP?

Is it just me, or is Stack Overflow no longer updating the count of how many reputation points you have? Mine hasn’t gone up in the last four hours, even though I’ve gotten two “Nice Answer” badges in that time. Just for an experiment, I tried voting up a couple of answers by Kris Johnson, and his count didn’t go up either.

Update It appears that it’s stopped giving me more XP because I’ve already gotten 200 on the day. And the fact that I’ve been averaging fewer than 50 a day since last Friday, when I’d been up over 100 a day before that, doesn’t mean I can accumulate more. Damn level caps.

Update Today on StackOverflow, as well as hitting my XP cap, I earned 4 “Nice Answer” bronze badges, a silver “Enlightened” and a silver “Good Answer”. Today I was on fire.

I hate RPM packaging.

One of my side duties at work is preparing a disk that (ab)uses our upgrade process to flash the bios on the raid controllers every time IBM releases yet another attempt to make it work right. In the past, what I’ve had to do is make a RPM that installs a couple of “.ufi” files that the %post part of the RPM then uses the arcconf program that’s already on the system to flash the ROMs with. That was fine and dandy, until IBM decided that instead of distributing a ufi file, they’d distribute an ELF binary that included within it the ufi file, the arcconf program, and some other cruft like a script to run it and instructions. Fine, I thought, rather than bothering to unravel all the crap, I’d just package the executable into the RPM and run it in the %post. And it didn’t work. After much sweating and swearing, I finally got it working.

Did you know that the rpmbuild process automatically does a “strip” on any ELF binaries it finds? I didn’t. Did you know that IBM’s packaging of a binary file inside an ELF binary doesn’t work if you strip the file? I didn’t. Did you know that the command to tell rpmbuild to NOT strip the file is almost completely undocumented and obscure to the point of pointlessness? I didn’t. Did you know that the best reference for building RPMs, “Maximum RPM” is no longer available on rpm.org, and the replacement doesn’t have an index or a search function? I didn’t.

Am I annoyed? You bet.

For the benefit of future searchers, here’s how you keep RPM from stripping your binaries. You put the following in your rpm spec file, preferably near the top:

# This stops RPM from stripping the .bin files, which breaks them.
%define __os_install_post \
/usr/lib/rpm/redhat/brp-compress \
/usr/lib/rpm/brp-python-bytecompile \
/usr/lib/rpm/redhat/brp-java-repack-jars \
%{nil}

Intuitive, eh?

Busy day (Busy? I just spent 4 hours burying the cat!)

Let’s see, today I

  • Fixed a bug that I’ve been working on for over a week (which I would have fixed in a day if the China team hadn’t put in a kluge to hide the most visible symptom). Oh, and the root cause was a module that the China team had written violating a basic assumption of my pre-existing gui code.
  • Had a job interview at Paychex which went pretty well, but included a strange little math test at the end which was fun but I’m not sure how relevant it is.
  • Went for a paddle – I meant to make six miles, but I only managed four because my shoulder is bugging me.
  • Got a call from the sleep clinic at Sleep Insights “reminding” me that I had a consult appointment at 11:20 am tomorrow, which is kind of strange because I had a sleep study at a completely different sleep clinic tomorrow evening.

I thought about writing more on each of those things, but I figured my blog is boring enough without the help. So if you really need more details, comment and I’ll inflict more detail on you.