Hyper Gumbo » tech stuff

Emergency phone replacement time

Don — Tue, 07 Feb 2012 17:51:08 +0000

Not an emergency phone that needs replacement, but rather an acknowledgement that I’ve waited to replace my old phone for so long that the battery life seems to have fallen off a cliff. The last two weeks or so, it’s been degraded enough that an 8 hour workday, without any usage, was enough to put the charge level into the red. But this morning, I’m at best 6 hours into a charge, and it’s already below 25%.

And now it just started to reboot itself for no obvious reason.

Facetime, grar

Don — Fri, 03 Feb 2012 17:00:59 +0000

My boss at work is moving to another state, and will be working remotely from monday on. So, we are setting up facetime betwixt my ipad and her mac, in preparation for the big day. And ever since, my ipad is now making little notification sounds, even though it’s completely muted, and everything I can find about facetime in settings is set to off.

Most annoying is that I can’t see any reason for it to be making the sounds; I’m not getting call requests every five seconds, but it’s making the noise that often.

At least killing the app seems to have stopped them.

UPDATE: Killing the app didn’t make any difference. I finally tracked down that somehow, making a facetime call, turned on email notifications for gmail. WTF?

One Step Forward, Two Steps Side-to-Side

Don — Wed, 01 Feb 2012 15:52:54 +0000

After going to all the trouble of figuring out Selenium and JUnit, it turns out I was mis-remembering, and it should have been TestNG for my testing framework. d’ohwell, it shouldn’t be too hard to move from one to the other.

Oh Happy Day

Don — Fri, 20 Jan 2012 22:10:58 +0000

Finally figured out all my Selenium issues. Well, not all of them, in that I still don’t get the Grid system, but I at least know enough about it to know I don’t need it, so that problem is solved in its own way too.

As of now, I’ve got three remote drones, one for IE, one for Firefox, and one for Chrome. I can execute JUnit tests against all three targets, for the webservice running elsewhere.

Finally, I can start thinking about what I actually want to test, without worrying about if I can make it happen.

Hulu Plus is dog food

Don — Fri, 20 Jan 2012 03:06:58 +0000

They defend the inclusion of advertising in the paid-tier of service by touting its cheapness.

I could buy dog food for a lot cheaper than steak, doesn’t mean I’m going to eat it. At this point, it isn’t even worth free.

Clippy lives on at Google

Don — Thu, 19 Jan 2012 22:24:38 +0000

It would seem the geekworld’s favorite helper-to-hate, Clippy, has gotten a job at Google’s GMail division. You can see his influence in the new look, with it’s unhelpful way of showing and hiding buttons, assuming you can’t keep track of who your friends are by name, nor really want to see your big screen monitor actually full of useful information.

Hopefully someone will notice, and fire his ass, before it’s too late =p

Oh, of course

Don — Tue, 17 Jan 2012 19:02:28 +0000

Today’s Selenium-now-I-get-it-ism: The Selenium IDE can export test cases in Java, it just hides them under 3 different flavors of JUnit, and one flavor of TestNG. This is confusing, because they call out C#, Ruby, and Python by name, and I’m pretty sure you can use TestNG with all of those languages. I know I’ve used it with C#.

Missing something

Don — Thu, 12 Jan 2012 17:57:02 +0000

I must be missing something obvious. AIX has a keyword, mkhomeatlogin, it seems pretty straightforward, and there’s nothing in the docs about having to do anything special to enable it, and yet when I try to turn it on, it fails:

chsec -f /etc/security/login.cfg -s usw -a mkhomeatlogin=true
3004-692 Error changing “mkhomeatlogin” to “true” : Attribute is invalid.

And the PAM alternative isn’t available either,

user:alert syslog: open_module: stat(/usr/lib/security/pam_mkuserhome) failed: No such file or directory

What’s more confusing, there doesn’t seem to be any widespread confusion over these keywords, or indeed Any difficulty that has resulted in the above error message within the context of merely activating the feature, which leads me to suspect I’m missing something obvious. I hate that feeling. But I’d rather feel foolish, and informed, that continue with the frustration.

More Nostalgia Funk

Don — Mon, 09 Jan 2012 16:20:59 +0000

Another part of the weekend’s nostalgia overload, a marathon session of Jason of Star Command. I had remembered the bad guy’s monocle, but there was so much I had forgotten that came back once I started watching. As a kid, I probably didn’t notice that they not only reused sound FX from Star Trek, they even reuse some of the musical cues. I’m certain as a Star Wars obsessed kid, the ‘evil’ wookie-alikes would have been notable. And now I know why the minister from Mom and Dad Save The World seemed so familiar; I was remembering him from Jason.

But the biggest ‘discovery’ was the do-anything-even-fly-through-space-yet-fit-in-a-fanny-pack robot, W1k1, aka Wiki. Wikipedia’s biography claims it comes from the Hawaiian word for quick, but obviously Jimmy Wales was a big Jason fan =p It’s a robot that is capable of interstellar travel, has a built in laser for freeing Jason from the inevitable chains in the dungeon scenes, and R2D2 like one-understandable-sided-jokes.

Morning Joe sucks

Don — Thu, 29 Dec 2011 15:06:15 +0000

Tivo used to be a great device for giving you control of your TV.
Now it’s just another advertising platform that tries to get in your face as much as possible.
Every time you pause live, you are forced to see a pop-up ad for some crappy ‘thing’ called Morning Joe.
Maybe there are people who paid good money so that they could see more ads, instead of fewer. I’m not one of them. Whatever Morning Joe is, it must be a terrible product,show, person, or pile of festering crap left rotting in the sun. If you are in charge of advertising for Morning Joe, you really suck at your job. You’ve made sure I hate your product before I’ve even seen it, and created a lifelong (minor) arch-enemy. I’m not going out of my way to bring your justified doom upon you, but every chance I get, where it’s legal and effortless on my part, I’m going to shit on you. Good use of those advertising dollars.