Category: Rant

Today’s interesting discoveries

1) You can’t even count on your own project’s QA team members not to lie and say “I didn’t change anything” when they really mean “I manually edited this vital configuration file and totally botched the syntax of the start time parameter”.

2) If you need to get a screen dump of the login screen on a machine that isn’t network attached, and so therefore you can’t just use VNC to do it, you can do


chvt 7 ; sleep 5 ; XAUTHORITY=/var/gdm/:0.Xauth DISPLAY=:0.0 xwd -root > login.xwd

You youngsters might want to use the import program instead of xwd if it’s available. But then you’ll never know the joys of stringing together a half dozen pnm commands and getting it right the first time. Damn kids. Get off my lawn.

Firefox 1.5 really dropped the ball

Vicki and I both upgraded to Firefox 1.5 (on Mac OS X) in the last couple of weeks. Vicki went first, and she had a problem with something that went away when she uninstalled all the extensions she uses and reinstalled them. Then after a short time she found it was so unstable that she switched to Safari. Then I noticed that I couldn’t get Flash to work on any site. I tried uninstalling FlashBlock, and that didn’t help. I tried upgrading to Flash 8, and that didn’t help. Eventually I discovered that if I go into my profiles directory (in ~/Library/Application Support/Firefox/Profiles/foo) and deleted all the extensions related files and directories, Flash worked again. I installed FlashBlock and the Google Toolbar, but I can’t seem to find the BugMeNot extension. Oh well, I guess I’ll have to do that the old fashioned way.

But it seems like Firefox really screwed up when it comes to upgrading when you have extensions installed.

Ouch

A few weeks ago my physiotherapist gave me some exercises for my wrist, which I damaged in a kayaking injury. I was supposed to do 15-30 reps of these three exercises with a 1-2 pound weight. Well, I couldn’t find a 1-2 pound weight, so I started off doing 10 reps with a 5 pound weight. That was going ok, so I went up to 15 reps, and that worked ok too. But last night I tried to do 20 reps. That was too much. My wrist hurts like hell today. I think I’m going to go back to 10 reps again, and step up more slowly.

Not my day

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?