Some weeks ago when I was trying to get the bot that runs my weather station stable, I ran yet again into a problem that for various reasons I hadn't put forth the brainpower to come up with a solution for. Stability implies that a system of some kind doesn't crash, which Weather Station Bot was doing occasionally. Part of this wound up being due to the microSD card Clavicula 1 was running on wasn't well suited to being outside all the time, but part of this was due to bugs in my code that I hadn't quite shaken out …
This took me a while to figure out, so here's a fix for an annoying problem:
Let's say that you have a media box running Kodi on your local area network. You have uPNP turned on so you can stream videos from your media box across your LAN. You want to use VLC to watch stuff across your LAN.
Problem: When you select your Kodi box in VLC and double-click on the server to open the directory of media to watch, VLC crashes with no error message (even in debug mode).
Explanation: VLC is configured to exit when the current …
By some accounts, the Amazon crash that began somewhen around 1600 EST5EDT today is the first downtime they've evidenced in years. On one hand I can't help but chuckle a little bit when I see this because, for once this isn't my fault. I can just sit back and fiddle while somebody else's network burns. On the other hand I've been on the other side of the screen when stuff like this happens and the thought of getting trapped in the data center trying to resuscitate the service of one of my old employers jolts me awake dripping with sweat …
Ever since version 2.6.29 of the Linux kernel was released I’d been having problems with Windbringer crashing on shutdown. After triggering the system shutdown applet in Gnome X would terminate, sometimes I’d see a debug message from NetworkManager as it tried to shut down the network interfaces (and sometimes the ALSA sound drivers, oddly enough), sometimes I wouldn’t see anything. The end result, however, was that Windbringer would have to be manually powered off, thus forcing a (lengthy) file system check the next time I booted up.
Yesterday wasn't so much a wave of mutilation as it was a stormfront of WTF sweeping across the land. While I can't really put my finger on any one trigger event that caused yesterday to go west in a serious way, I can outline more or less what happened. First off, the hard drive in my workstation at the office decided to pack it in while I was working on something, which turned the rest of the day into a mad dash to find a new drive and rescue everything that I could. Finding a replacement drive took somewhere around …
Between getting back home from a field assignment late on Friday night, recovering from two weeks on the road eating way too much takeout, and stuff happening at home, I haven't had much time to do anything in the way of writing. I can honestly say that it hasn't been a boring couple of weeks, but there's a lot to be said for sitting at home engaging in a high impact workout (read, my glutius maximii striking the couch at -9.8 m/s^2 once a night for five nights) to unwind.
