Category: Rant

Relatively painless upgrade

I upgrade to Debian Lenny on my colo box today. It was relatively painless. I had to upgrade php to php5 manually, because the php4-mysql refused to upgrade and refused to re-install. I had to mess around a bit with my Apache config. The biggest pain was dealing with the “4gb seg fixup” errors. In the past, every time libc upgraded I had to remove /lib/tls and then it was done. But this time I had to install libc6-xen, and then edit /etc/ld.so.conf.d/libc-xen.conf to change “hwcap 1 nosegneg” to “hwcap 0 nosegneg” and then run ldconfig and reboot.

Everything appears to be working except the munin plugin for apt is acting a little weird, so I’ll call this done.

Scared to death

Update: Turns out I wasn’t in much danger. According to this link, it goes away in a minute or two. Thanks to Lara for the information.

Thirty minutes or so ago, I thought I was going to die. I was drifting off to sleep, when suddenly I couldn’t breathe. It felt like mucus had completely plugged my airway, just as I’d fully exhaled. Because my lungs were almost empty, I didn’t have enough breath in me to cough it out. In retrospect, a full-on rib-breaking Heimlich might have dislodged it, but I wouldn’t have been able to make Vicki understand what I wanted even if I’d thought of it. Instead, I was sort of vaguely gesticulating and she was asking if I needed an ambulance, but I couldn’t answer. I guess we were both a little panicy at that point.

After what seemed like minutes but was probably only a few seconds, I was able to start wheezing in small breaths, but nowhere near a lung full. I felt like I was rapidly falling into oxygen debt as the massive effort it took to get in a small breath of air seemed to take more oxygen than I was taking in. But each breath was opening up the airway a tiny bit more than the last, and after a few I had enough in my lungs to cough, and that really opened the airway to where I wasn’t worried about passing out.

Like I said, it’s about half an hour later, and I’m still clearing my throat almost constantly, and I’m scared to lie down. If you don’t hear from me again, the root passwords and life insurance policy numbers are in a file called “AdministrationStuff” on my home directory on the Linux box.

So cold

It’s freezing here at work. I’m not sure if it’s everywhere or just at my desk – there is a bit of a cold breeze here. My feet have been freezing since I got here and my fingers are clumsy. I actually warmed up a bit when I went to Wegmans for lunch. People are looking at me funny because I’m wearing a toque, but at least my fingers are working again. Still no joy with my feet though. I wonder what they’d think if I put on my moon boots?

On browsers, proxies, and JavaScript

My employer forces me to use Windows XP and Internet Explorer on my desktop at work. This is more than just “our internal apps are only supported on IE”, they’ve somehow locked things down. I tried to install Google Chrome, but it complains about a missing DLL when I fire it up. And Safari, which got dragged in when I installed QuickTime, can’t seem to handle our automatic proxy configuration. One of my cow orkers says he has Firefox installed, so I guess I’ll have to try that next.

This came to a head today because yesterday StackOverflow rolled out some awesome new functionality for tracking your reputation, responses to questions and comments. Yesterday it worked great, both at work with IE and at home with Safari. This morning there was a date rollover that Safari had no problems with, but going to any of the new tracking pages in IE crashes the browser. It’s completely consistent – it happens everytime in exactly the same way.

Ok the plus side, they’ve moved the bug reporting and feature requesting site from stackoverflow.uservoice.com to uservoice.stackoverflow.com, which means it isn’t blocked by the web filters at work anymore. Which means I can see that I’m not the only one having this problem.

So now it’s time to do battle with the corporate filters to see of I can get Firefox installed and working.

Well, that experiment didn’t go very well

The Prius beeps and displays a large “Add Fuel” banner on the display. Vicki always starts looking for a gas station almost immediately after it beeps on her car. But with my older cars, I always knew how far I could go after the low fuel warning – on both of my Corollas, it was about 100 km or more. I never ran a car out of gas.

And so I decided to test it. I read on-line that the Prius tank is 12.5 gallons, but I’ve never put more than 9.6 gallons in it. So the last time the low fuel warning came on, I drove 50 miles before filling up. That got me 9.879 gallons. So this time, I figured I’d go 100 miles. After all, the display was showing that I was averaging 40 mph (it’s been really cold and my trip to work is too short for the car to warm up properly) so 11 gallons would be 440 miles, and the warning went off at around 325 miles, so it should have worked out.

So imagine my surprise when I was driving home tonight, and at 75 miles from the low fuel warning almost exactly, this big red warning icon came up on the dash, and the gas engine cut out. I quickly hit the “nearest gas station” button on the GPS, and put on the emergency flashers. I was able to drive on electric only for nearly a mile. Unfortunately the gas station was a mile and a half away. And these days, gas stations don’t carry gas cans. So I walked all that way for nothing.

Fortunately Vicki came to my rescue. Between the gas can and the fill up afterwards, I put in 9.92 gallons. While I was waiting for her, I googled and discovered that the Prius tank might be 12.5 gallons, it has a bladder inside that restricts the capacity to somewhere between 9 and 11 gallons, depending on the temperature. So I guess I was lucky to get nearly 10 out of it. And I guess I’ll start looking for gas 25-50 miles after the warning, rather than 75.