This is from memory (I can’t find the original source material right now), so hopefully it’s still right:
“that’s a little too much high that’s that’s it low”.

I’m a computing professional myself, so I feel some responsibility to repair this failure, and if my blog does nothing else, I’d love it if I could just get more awareness of this one particular issue. I feel the need to inform people in all walks of life of this one fact: computers can store and display letters in cases other than ‘upper’. Among the other cases that can be used in computer-mediated communication is the case ‘lower’. Just incorporating that one additional case into your repertoire would take us all a nice little step toward a better world.

Hmmm, maybe I should make a short slogan out of this concept to sort of help the meme spread. Let’s see…:

“Use lower case (in your computer-mediated communications, whether you are a computing professional yourself incorporating human-visible text into your software, displays, software configurations, error messages, etc., or whether you are someone who is directly or indirectly responsible for forming specifications for projects wherein the aforementioned computing professionals are presenting human-visible text on your behalf)!”

I also like the fact that I’m reading a paper from the world of sociology and it’s actually making some sense. OK, sorry, it’s from the world of “dynamic, critical interdisciplinary research at the interface of cultural geography, sociology, cultural studies, architectural theory, ethnography, communications, urban studies, environmental studies and discourse analysis”, as the journal’s ‘about’ page says.

Today I was investigating a problem with PyAMF, getting an exception that says “Unknown command operation 12″. In the old days, had PyAMF been closed source and the web not been what it is today, I’d have been forced to do the BBPD (Black Box Probe Dance). I’d have looked in the official docs, seen nothing of any help, so I’d spend the day messing with the context of the problem until I got some different results that eventually led me to understand the basic shape of the offending turd somewhere inside there. Then I’d devise a workaround (because there’s never time or money or vendor enough to get proper support from the library vendor), which in this case would probably be in the form of some sort of proxy class that would drop the incoming message before it got into the library (i.e. a turd shredder).

In the new days, I did the RFTS loop (Read, Fiddle, Test, Search). I searched for “Unknown command operation 12″, found only dead ends, found the line in the PyAMF code where the exception was coming from, read enough of the context to try a hack to basically ignore the operation, saw that that removed the exception, found the list of operations in the code, saw that 12 was not in it, searched for the text name of one that was in the list, found Adobe’s Flex 2 docs, discovered the list of names/numbers in Adobe’s docs matched those in PyAMF, hacked the doc URL to get the Flex 3 version, saw that DISCONNECT_OPERATION/12 was added for Flex 3, searched for “pyamf disconnect_operation”, saw that there was a patch to PyAMF for this problem and that it was equivalent to my hack, applied the patch so as to match PyAMF’s official code, and checked in the change to our repo.

It’s a very different process, very interesting to develop.

FYI, if you came to this page because you got “Unknown command operation 12″, try applying the patch.

After resuming from suspend, the fan usually goes to high mode and stays there forever, which of course is annoying, even if less dangerous. This actually happened in Windows, too, where I used the Toshiba power utility thing to work around the problem. Don’t have a workaround here.

The fan is advertised via ACPI, but when I try to use /proc/acpi to control it, I get a variety of errors no matter what I try.

There’s the ‘omnibook’ module for the kernel around that has a hint of support for the A105, but it doesn’t do fan.

Dunno what to do about this one yet…

‘Course, you wouldn’t say ‘hang the shirt off the hanger’ or ‘hang the keys off the hook’, but you would say ‘hang the Payment object off the Speaker object’ or ‘hang the new tree off the first leaf’ when talking about data structures in software. Or at least, I and my peer group would say these. But they mean the same as if you replace ‘off’ with ‘on’. I guess the preposition there is more for looks than function, since ‘hang’ itself is fairly unambiguous.

So I guess the only thing that’s actually interesting about this is that the phrase was appropriated into programming terminology, then slightly morphed from its origin, and probably for no good reason.

• I have a webapp that’s using a library that might be doing some slightly tricky classloader things
• If I access that app through the AJP connector, it fails to find a class that’s definitely there in my WEB-INF/classes and world-readable
• If I access that app (from the same URL and in the same state) through the HTTP connector, it finds the class

It must be something to do with classloaders, but I can’t say that I understand any reason why that would happen. Of course, I haven’t investigated it, either, because I’m more interested in getting the thing to work right now than in figuring out what this weirdness is about.

Instead of using mod_jk and JkMount, I’m using mod_proxy_http and ProxyPass. Works well enough for my purposes and avoids whatever this problem is. Maybe sometime I’ll be inspired to dig deeper, because ya know this would turn out to be one of those “wow, I can’t believe these things would all interact in such an unexpected way” things.

While I was in there replacing that, I figured I’d swap my TV card into that machine too, since the one that it was running in is failing to boot for reasons I don’t quite understand (it’s a combination of my fault and hardware bugs, I think). That required getting the card running under Linux.

It was only recently that my card (Hauppauge HVR-1600) got a Linux driver, so I was waiting for a while before I jumped over. But, given the confluence of annoying computer failures, I took the dive today.

It took several hours to hunt up code, compile kernel modules, install TV software, configure stuff, etc. Not really any longer than under Windows, so that’s good.

But now that I have it running, oh, man, am I glad I made the switch. MythTV is pretty awesome. The coolest thing for me is MythWeb, the web-based management plugin. Since I don’t do the using-the-remote watching-from-across-the-room thing, I really (really!) don’t like UIs designed for that mode. MythWeb instead gives a nice, compact, fast, easy to use way to browse listings, set up recordings, and get on with my life. Later I’ll just play my MPEGs out of a Samba share with VLC, totally avoiding the wacky UI stuff.

There are few bold “aha” ideas, lot’s of social “-this or -that”, and mostly a bunch of companies hoping to draft on the perceived success of a few gorillas.

(from Incrementalism and “The New New Thing”)

The first episode would be where I used suspend and had a mixed bag of results. Things seem to stop and start alright, but I have this fan problem… In Windows, the fan would often come on full blast and stay on after resuming, and I had a little workaround ritual where I’d select a different “power profile” from this applet that Toshiba pre-installed, then switch back, and it would go back to normal. I have similar symptoms under Ubuntu, but no workaround ritual developed yet. In the process of looking at that, I see that the fan doesn’t always kick in when the machine is running hard, which worries me a little that the thermal management is out of whack.

I’m also getting this notification when I resume that my machine could not suspend. Which is surprising, when coming out of resume, because I was under the impression that ‘to resume’ is something an entity can do only when it had, indeed, suspended. Hopefully that’s just spurious, rather than indicating some hidden problem.

So, yeah, I’m gonna need a scriptwriter to punch this up a little. Car wrecks, babies giggling, lottery winners who lose their husbands to their step-daughters, that kind of thing.

I haven’t actually used it beyond a couple tests so far, because my lid latch problem happened before my switch away from Windows, but those tests went well. I’ll report on my further experiences later.

The whole back story: I had a quick and unexpected contact with Earth while exiting a car on an icy day, and while carrying my precious baby Toshiba in my backpack. She lost a right lid latch that day…

I can live with the fact that the lid is not quite as secure as before (there’s still the left lid latch), but I find it harder to live with the fact that now, when she’s in my backpack in suspend mode, she’ll spontaneously power on, in the hot and suffocating confines (when one is powered on) of the backpack laptop pocket. That could lead to at least battery drainage and at most CPU meltdown, neither of which I want.

There’s no option in the BIOS to turn off the switch action (and OS settings didn’t help either, which didn’t surprise me). Toshiba/Intel, please put this option in your BIOS settings in future models.

So, I had to say goodbye to suspend, which is paaainful to me, because I hate waiting for bootups and app startups and all that garbage several times a day. I wanted my suspend back.

The daring resolution: I decided today to go ahead and disassemble the machine and see if I could somehow disable the switch. I used the handy little Toshiba disassembly guide (and made a donation). Note: DO NOT DISASSEMBLE YOUR MACHINE LIKE THIS. It was somewhat risky and quite unnecessary for me to do this, so I don’t recommend making that mistake if all you want to do is disable your lid switch.

However, in the process of doing this, I did discover the fix to the problem. I noticed at one point that a couple of screws were sticking to the upper-right corner of the screen bezel. Odd. They were stuck there magnetically. I checked whether they’d stick to the other side; they wouldn’t. Hmmm, I thought, this is interesting, because my earlier tests had indicated that the right side of the lid was the important side in triggering the lid switch. Is it magnetic? I put things back together enough to be able to boot and test the theory, and used a magnetic toy to reveal that yes, the lid switch is magnetic.

So that means all I have to do is find and remove the magnet, eh? Wish I hadn’t disassembled the whole machine… I reassembled everything and switched to this guide. I went as far as Step 4ish. I opened the screen mask far enough to get to the top-right corner, and found a magnet with some tape over it, which was a good sign. I removed the tape and pried out the magnet (which was also glued from the underside) easily. Put everything back together and tested, and…

Woohoo, I can suspend my laptop again.

My favored way to replace a hard drive (and yeah, I know there are other ways, but this is really the best one) is to boot the machine off a Linux LiveCD and use some sort of cloning program to clone the drive to the new one in a USB enclosure, then swap ‘em. Clonezilla served me well when I replaced the hard drive in my laptop recently, so I wanted to do that with my girlfriend’s, too. But the internal DVD drive is dead, it wouldn’t boot off the external one, it wouldn’t boot off a USB Flash drive with the Clonezilla USB option, and any hope that a BIOS upgrade would fix the problem was dashed by the fact that the BIOS update program had to be run off a floppy (which the machine never had) or a CD, which clearly leaves me with the same problem again.

But, the BIOS does have a network boot option, which only became relevant to me when I felt I was running out of options. Setting up a server for network boot from scratch sounded kinda painful, but I remembered that Knoppix has this fairly cool feature they call ‘terminal server’ that might do the trick. Sure enough, I booted Knoppix on my laptop, ran their terminal server, connected it to this laptop with an Ethernet cable (luckily, though the Ethernet port is a little out of wack on this laptop, it’s still functional), selected network boot, and rather quickly, I was in a full-featured Linux environment without touching the to-be-cloned hard drive.

I used ntfsclone, which I knew to be the core of what Clonezilla uses when moving an NTFS partition, to move the single XP partition to the new drive, then ntfsresize to fill the drive (the new drive is twice the size of the old). The only snag I ran into with that was that Windows had previously diagnosed the drive to have bad sectors (the primary reason for replacing the drive in the first place), and ntfsclone doesn’t want to proceed with more than 5 bad sectors. But luckily that’s just a matter of adding a ‘–rescue’ commandline option. ‘course, it clones the bad sector map, which then causes ntfsresize to barf, but it has a ‘-b’ option. I see now that there’s some verbiage on the ntfsclone page that talks about bad sectors… whatever, it’s fine now, so I don’t feel the need to understand now NTFS deals with BS.

It’s cool that the Linux-NTFS tools have gotten to maturity these days; a few years ago when I was replacing drives, I had to do much more annoying things to clone NTFS. (I’m not sure if the software I mentioned in a previous post was based on Linux-NTFS or if they had some proprietary system (Apricorn’s software _was_ Linux-based, though.)).

Problem is, this looks like one of those wrong turns that will lead us quite far afield before we get back to the highway. There’s a market dynamic that causes otherwise intelligent decision makers to choose poorly: “You have 4 cores (which is a bad idea)? Well, then I’ll have 12 (which is a three-times-bigger idea)!”. (Yeah, I know that particular chip was mentioned as targeting servers, for which a much better argument can be made for multicore, but they’ll inevitably drive those into desktops, etc. because people don’t want to have to use different architectures for different machines).

The one thing that could save us from going too far astray is mobile computing. Multicore has infected that world, too, but it isn’t as likely to take hold there. The need to keep power consumption under control will probably steer processor architects in more innovative directions.

(Don’t copy that line exactly, though, if you’re going to try this solution. Just add those extra arguments to the end. I removed my disk UUID from the line because it’s specific to my computer and wouldn’t work for anyone else.)

In more detail: I’m running the newly-published Ubuntu 8.04 ‘Hardy Heron’ distribution, which is currently using Linux kernel 2.6.24 as a base. This version of the kernel doesn’t work well with some BIOSes that report probably-incorrect information about some motherboard resources (some kernel-list discussion in which Torvalds’ primary argument is ‘x is crap’, a PnP-quirks patch, and there are about a million pages about people having this problem if you look hard enough).

The eventual diagnosis centered around this in the kernel output (using the dmesg command to view it):

PCI: Unable to reserve mem region #1:4000@febf8000 for device 0000:00:1b.0
ACPI: PCI interrupt for device 0000:00:1b.0 disabled
HDA Intel: probe of 0000:00:1b.0 failed with error -16

This region couldn’t be reserved because it was already reserved, as a message like this shows (I’m copying this from someone else’s description of the problem, but the idea’s the same):
system 00:08: iomem range 0xfebfa000-0xfebfac00 has been reserved

I also used the contents of /proc/iomem to shore up the diagnosis. Here’s the indicative bits:

febf8000-febfbfff : 0000:00:1b.0
febfa000-febfac00 : pnp 00:07
febfe000-febfec00 : pnp 00:07


The part that snd_intel_hda wants overlaps with what pnp has already claimed. It ought to look like

febf8000-febfbfff : 0000:00:1b.0
febf8000-febfbfff : ICH HD audio


This overlap problem was happening on my ASUS P5B-Plus board, with two different BIOS versions (1002 and either 0903 or 1001). This board uses an Intel 82801H (ICH8 Family) HD Audio controller sound solution.

Rather than patching and building the kernel myself or trying to find some .debs out there with a newer version (the patch is included in 2.6.25), either of which is more work than I’d like to do for this problem, I just turned off all PnP. The last time I cared about PnP (a hacky system devised to make PC configuration easier back in the days of the ISA bus, and if you don’t know what an ISA bus is, you can probably just nod and forget it) was more than 5 years ago, so this is no loss for me.

With my latest mobile computing acquisitions, I’m becoming really fond of little semi-specialized general-purpose computers all over. If I want to go light, I can have my phone with me and still have very basic web browsing and email capabilities. If I want a few more features, I can add the internet tablet to the mix. If I have to do real work, I can add the laptop, or sometimes the laptop and the internet tablet. Pretty much mix-n-match, because they’re all good standalone and they synergize nicely when used together. They also all have some means of accessing the Internet and getting to my servers and a million others, which further extends the synergy.

For example, my refrigerator has a vestigial ice-maker. I noticed this one night when I heard that clunk-clunk noise you hear from ice-makers. But I don’t have an ice-maker (or so I thought).

I looked in my freezer and noted that there is a sealed-off chunk of space in there that I had never really payed attention to. Likewise, there’s a sealed space in the refrigerator portion. It was sort of difficult to determine if that was the source of the noises I was hearing, but I was intrigued anyway.

I looked up the manual for the appliance online, but there was no mention of the function of these spaces. Ya know how they have the exploded drawing of the appliance with the little arrows and labels describing the various features; well, these spaces were there, little blank rectangular prisms, but no arrows and no labels.

A night of searching around the web finally uncovered the westinghouse-hackers listserv, where people talk about all their cool mods to their refrigerators and discuss the minutia of the various stock designs. Someone disassembled the mystery box in this model and discovered the weirdest thing. Seems there’s an entire closed-loop ice-maker system in there. It makes ice in the freezer, which is then dropped to the fridge, where it collects in a little container. It melts, then the water is pumped back up to make more ice.

The aforementioned investigator talked to some of her contacts at the local appliance repair shop. Apparently, this sort of thing is well-known among repair pros, but not outside those circles. If the ice-maker continues to function properly, the average person would never even really notice it was there; it’s only my sensitivity to those weird nighttime noises that alerted me to its presence.

There’s some debate among those pros about what the value of such a system might be. When called on to repair problems related to this system, most of them will just remove the entire thing, reasoning that it can’t possibly be useful to the user. However, a few, mostly among the ‘holistic repair’ set, will try to keep it running if at all possible. Some will even recommend replacing the water in the system with a special homeopathic preparation that’s said to slow down the melt-freeze cycle (’metabolism’) slightly in order to increase the refrigerator’s longevity.

The hackers have found various ways to take advantage of this system; for example, one mod detailed on the listserv replaces the white plastic casing of the system with plexiglass and adds neon illumination. Another clever hacker extended that system with a ruggedized WiFi-enabled webcam so you can watch the ice freeze and melt without holding your refrigerator doors open, yielding a significant energy savings.

For now, I think I’m just going to stick with stock.