Category: Rant

By all means, Paul, fuck with the hard drives…

I’ve spent the last two nights trying to get Vicki’s laptop working again. Back in August I bought her a new hard drive for it – a 250Gb one to replace her 80Gb one. The 250Gb one is the same model number as the one that came stock in my MacBook Pro, so I figured it was safe to put it in her slightly older MacBook Pro.

That’s great in theory, but back in December she was complaining about very slow response, and she ended up formatting and re-installing. And again this week, it started happening again. Console.log showed that once again, the disk was full of errors. We tried repairing things with Disk Utility and booting into single user mode and running fsck. Both repaired things, but the disk quickly started acting up. I installed TechTools from a AppleCare disk and did a surface scan, and it found lots of errors.

Ok, now it’s time to get serious. We burned a copy of the DFT (Drive Function(?) Test) ISO from Hitachi, but when you boot it in the MBP it asks for “Floppy B” and refuses to continue. Oh oh. So today I got *really* serious – I opened up the MBP (a tedious process) and took the drive out and put it in my Linux box so I could run DFT there. So my home Linux box is off-line for the rest of the evening as well. (Normally I would use my old Windows box for stuff like this, but the Windows box is IDE and the Linux box is SATA.)

While I was waiting for DFT to find the inevitable errors, I decided to start filling out an RMA request on the Hitachi web site. And I had a real feeling of deja-vu. And then I remembered – I’ve only returned two other drives in my life, and both of them were IBM/HItachi DeathStars. It’s nice that they make it so easy, but I think I’d rather they made the drives so they didn’t fail.

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.