New autoconf-gl-macros release

Wow, it’s been more than a year since a release of this package. Not bad.

Today’s release just fixes a problem on some Windows configurations (64-bit MinGW, at least), where <windows.h> must be included in order for autoconf to detect <GL/gl.h> as usable.

In order to streamline GtkGLExt’s configure.ac (and to provide decent support for the coming Quartz backend), I started using the macros there. So that’s a bit more exposure and exercise they’re getting.

Syndicated 2010-01-25 21:11:36 from endoframe :: log

Memories I’d like to forget

I suspected rail had a dodgy stick of memory ever since I set it up last summer. If I tried to run the memory at the speeds it was spec’d for, it wouldn’t count up all 12 GB during POST. By November, things had deteriorated further and I began experiencing Strange Problems (random system freezes or failure to load the kernel). Mushkin swapped out the failed stick.

My machine had been running maybe a week with the replacement stick when I once again began to experience Strange Problems. My first assumption was that they’d sent me a bad stick; but no: upon investigation, it was another stick from the original set that had failed. At this point, Mushkin acknowledged that the part I had was known to be failure-prone (well, they had hinted at this when replacing the first stick) and they offered to swap out the whole lot of six sticks. And they would even cross-ship and cover shipping both ways. Cool.

Unfortunately, the new set of six seems to have included another bad stick. After continuing to experience random system freezes, I think I isolated the problem stick: one of the lot always dumps me into BIOS setup when I boot with only it. Mushkin is replacing this stick.

Mushkin’s customer support has been pleasant to work with; and they’ve certainly stood behind their product. But I can’t say I’m satisfied with the quality control. Or is this just par for the course for high performance DDR3 memory?

Syndicated 2010-01-23 18:04:14 from endoframe :: log

Failing gracefully

A little over a week ago I rebooted hinge after a round of Fedora updates and the RAID card—a 3ware 9550SX—saw neither of the discs in my RAID1 array and failed to load its BIOS. I promptly powered down the system and proceeded to search eBay for a replacement card. A few days later, I swapped in the not-quite-new card I got from an eBay seller; and the machine recognized the drives and booted into Fedora like nothing had happened.

Well, there was one tell-tale sign: on the initial boot-up, the second drive was marked “Not used” in the BIOS boot screen. A trip into the RAID card’s BIOS configuration showed a note by the entry for the array, “Rebuild on F8”. Well, F8 is how to exit the BIOS setup. So I proceeded to do that; and sure enough, the rebuild apparently happened in the background without me noticing anything—because now the array pops up on boot just like it did before the old card failed.

So, props to 3ware for failing gracefully. I set up this RAID array for my home directories precisely because I accept the inevitability of hardware failures. The irony of having the RAID card itself fail is not lost on me; I’m nonetheless impressed with just how smoothly recovery proceeded.

Syndicated 2009-08-11 02:48:44 (Updated 2009-08-11 02:50:09) from endoframe :: log

What filesystem?

That was fun.

Sigh.

Syndicated 2009-07-22 03:28:44 from endoframe :: log

Free as a dove

I have finally liberated myself from the mail storage format/layout of a particular mail client: I have set up a dovecot IMAP server. I’m using fetchmail to pull down mail from my SpamCop account and dovecot’s CMU Sieve plug-in for filtering. It seems to work quite well. I can point any IMAP client (including the one on my new iPhone 3G S) at endoframe.net and read e-mail in one centralized location.

The most painful part of this has been (and continues to be…I’m not done yet) moving e-mail from Evolution’s store to IMAP folders. I am an e-mail pack rat, which means I have several very large mail folders. Unsurprisingly, these can take some time to move. More annoyingly, Evolution tends to crash at the end of moving particularly large folders. Fortunately this hasn’t resulted in any actual data loss (yet?). It seems to crash after it’s copied everything over to the new location, during deletion of the messages at the old location.

Syndicated 2009-06-30 04:10:24 from endoframe :: log