I am working on a mysterious bug at work, and absent of any other promising theories, I decided to compare the firmware revision of all the hard drives involved to see if that correlated with the pattern of problems. If you aren’t a sysadmin, that will either not make any sense at all, or will give you some insight into what our lives are like. So I figured it can’t be too hard, right? Getting this info from a SCSI disk turns out to be easy, as long as you have Veritas NetBackup server installed, and are on a Sparc. You run “sgscan”, which uses the SCSI Generic driver to scan the buses. Fine, but I was on Solaris x86, and though I did have the NetBackup client package available to me, sgscan is only available in the server install. ...

I’m driving up to Roseburg today for Mother’s Day weekend and my mom’s retirement party. It’s a long drive, but going home for a visit is always worth the trip. I surprised mom for Mother’s Day a few years ago. That was really fun. This time she knows I’m coming, but it should be just as fun. This may be one of the last times I visit the house on Glenmar. Mom and Dick are downsizing into a smaller house, and a smaller mortgage for their retirement. That wasn’t quite how they had planned things, but the down stock market and economy is hitting everyone just a little. ...

nella.org dropped off the net because of some nameserver difficulties. I took the chance to also change registrars, which added to the downtime. I am back now, so if you sent mail and it bounced and you want me to see it, please send it again.

Some usability researchers reported that with a 35 degree viewing angle, women are slower at navigational tasks than men, but when the viewing angle opens up to 70 degrees or more, the gender difference disappears. The improvement only shows up if the animation is smooth like reality, not jumpy. Somehow I feel just a little bit pleased and superior as a result of reading about this. I know I’m not supposed to, but I still do. ...

Why would you pay $200 for a ketchup bottle? If it made me smile like that guy is smiling, I’d pay. Isn’t $200 a small price to pay for everlasting bliss?

This description of life at Microsoft is pretty accurate. There’s more to it, of course. Every big company has politics and culture “issues”. Also, not every employee of Microsoft is so privileged to work at a level where they can control their own fate as much as the article implies. But for a certain class of Microsoft employees, it really just as he says it is. I didn’t leave because I was being overly controlled or constrained by The Borg. I left Microsoft because I was dissatisfied with the business ethics of the company, and was not willing to commit my effort to changing it. Instead, I chose to put my effort into a smaller company where I could more easily reinforce the behaviors I wanted to see in my employer. ...

Girls, listen up!

So, it appears that too aggressive caching in TiVo.pm is the culprit. Even after I changed which services it was supposed to be advertising to the TiVo, it still sent down the old stuff it had cached in files in /tmp. Removing everything in /tmp owned by apache solved the problem. Not graceful, but it worked. Hello, TiVo? Is there someone there I can report these bugs to?

I made a new version of tivo-beacon, with the length bytes included that TiVo seems to send on TCP connections. That makes it quite a bit happier. Now I just need to figure out why TiVo.pm is sending down messages about services (“Music” in my case) that are commented out of example.cgi.

Tonite I set out to make my Tivo use my remotely-hosted Linux webserver as my MP3 server. The eventual goal is to teach WinAmp to play from the same collection of files, so that I can have one copy of my mp3’s in the “cloud” and still get access to them easily on each device. The first step was to investigate the TiVo Developers info. There I found a tar.gz file with some stuff in it that implemented the funky XML messages TiVo needs to know what’s in the directory tree. I fetched it put it in a directory on my webserver. ...