Dave Holland's home page

Keybounce problem
2:55pm, Wednesday 11 January 2006

Since upgrading my work desktop machine to the X.org X server and Linux kernel 2.6.15 I've experienced an annoying keybounce problem in X. Sometimes keys would be repeated for no obvious reason: umount would come out as umoount, grep would come out as grrep ("grr", indeed) and so on. I couldn't find any mentions of the problem, so lacking the time to thoroughly debug it, I kludged it with the XKB extension: xkbset bo 50

Removable devices
4:29pm, Tuesday 3 January 2006

Task: configure a Linux box so that when my MP3 player is plugged in, it consistently appears as /dev/muvo - rather than /dev/sda1 or /dev/sdc1 or /dev/xyz1 depending on whether the digital camera, USB drive, or whatever also happen to be plugged in at the time. For bonus points, automatically mount it on /muvo. [more...]

Boom
4:43pm, Thursday 1 December 2005

And in other news, the hard disk in my work desktop machine abruptly died earlier today. Just stopped working. Unsurprisingly the machine didn't last long (long enough to tell me "ls: I/O error" a few times) before it wedged totally. Got a new disk in it and with a local Debian mirror it was soon back up again. Irritatingly it takes about as long to collect the set of useful browser extensions and plugins (adblock, bugmenot, switchproxy, mozex, flash player, Java) as it does to install the base OS.

Two little letters
4:37pm, Thursday 1 December 2005

Note to self: telling the Linux multipath tools to ignore fd devices in attempt to prevent multipathing to the floppy drive will also prevent disks whose WWID happens to contain the consecutive hex digits F and D from working. Bah. It only took me a day to spot that one.

Keep on digging, Sony
2:10pm, Wednesday 16 November 2005

Oh, this just gets better and better. The Sony root-kit not only phones home, someone's tracked the location of infected PCs... all over the planet. Go Sony!