Posted in Apple on 2nd September 2008, 1:06 pm by Stuart
I’ve just found a fix to an annoying issue. I have a keystroke set to activate the screensaver and the lock the screen of my work MacBook Pro via an applescript. I was recently finding when I came back from lunch the system is pretty much dying on it’s feet. I started poking around the system logs and googling some of the error message which all seemed to be related to coreservicesd.
From this post http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=20071102105927735 I found the cause of the issue is that a second instance of the screensaver will kick in at the interval set-up in sys prefs despite the screensaver having already been manually activated when I lock the screen.
The solution for this is to activate the screensaver via an automator script as the link above describes. What I’ve done is to set the activation of the screensaver to never happen so that I always activate it manually.
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Posted in Code, Linux/Unix on 20th August 2008, 2:51 pm by Stuart
So this post falls neatly under the “watching paint dry” category, so if you’re susceptible to rage induced by reading terminally dull posts avert your eyes now.
I’ve been having some interesting issues with VMs running on VMware server of late. Basically the problem involved kernel panics and the appearance of lots of messages in the syslog that look like this:
[19133.298838] BUG: soft lockup - CPU#1 stuck for 11s! [swapper:0]
[19133.298929]
[19133.298932] Pid: 0, comm: swapper Not tainted (2.6.24-16-server #1)
[19133.298936] EIP: 0060:[native_safe_halt+0x2/0x10] EFLAGS: 00000246 CPU: 1
[19133.298942] EIP is at native_safe_halt+0×2/0×10
[19133.298945] EAX: 00000000 EBX: 00000001 ECX: c0106f40 EDX: cdde4000
[19133.298949] ESI: c0495004 EDI: c049b300 EBP: 00000000 ESP: cdde5fa4
[19133.298952] DS: 007b ES: 007b FS: 00d8 GS: 0000 SS: 0068
[19133.298956] CR0: 8005003b CR2: b7f51828 CR3: 0049c000 CR4: 000006b0
[19133.298960] DR0: 00000000 DR1: 00000000 DR2: 00000000 DR3: 00000000
[19133.298963] DR6: ffff0ff0 DR7: 00000400
[19133.298966] [default_idle+0x3c/0x60] default_idle+0×3c/0×60
[19133.298972] [cpu_idle+0x73/0xd0] cpu_idle+0×73/0xd0
[19133.298987] =======================
[19133.302433] BUG: soft lockup - CPU#1 stuck for 11s! [swapper:0]
I found this bug which noted that adding the kernel parameter “noapic” would resolve the issue. In case you’re wondering at this point what apic is (well you read this far), the this wiki page details it quite nicely: http://wiki.linuxquestions.org/wiki/APIC
This worked for two out of the three vms but the third was still showing the same error messages.
I thought I’d update to the newest verison of the 2.6.24.19-server kernel
Following a quick:
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get upgrade
Followed by a reboot to pick up the newest edition of the 2.6.24.19-server kernel the messages have gone away.
What’s not clear to me is what is the cause of these issues as they seemed to appear out of no where though I suspect they may have been related to the cpufrequency changes to prevent time drift.
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Posted in Events on 12th August 2008, 12:05 am by Stuart
Following SXSW 2008 it’s been good to see that the organisers have really picked up on the fact that this year’s SXSW was lacking more technical panels and presentations and they’re really looking to address that this year by encouraging more technical proposals.
This year I’ve put forward two panel ideas for SXSWi which are along the lines of the kind of panels I’d like to see at SXSWi 2009. Both are going to be reasonably technical and will certainly aim to provide plenty of practical information along the way.
Practical Website Performance
The first is a panel on practical performance techniques featuring Stoyan Stefanov and Nicole Sullivan of Yahoo!’s Exceptional performance team alongside Ed Eliot and myself. In this panel we’d like to talk about all aspects of the practical things that can be applied to any site to improve the front-end performance.
To vote for this panel please visit “Practical Website Performance”
Decentralize Yourself: Why Distributed Version Control Rocks
The second panel idea is about Distributed Version Control Systems (DVCS) e.g: Bazaar, git, mercurial etc. This session aims to look at what DVCS is, why it’s cool, and how DVCS can make your software much better by not getting in the way of how you want to work. In this panel we also plan to look at DVCS’s role in lowering the barriers to contribution from 3rd parties which is particularly useful for open-source development. This panel will be featuring Gareth Rushgrove and myself with other panellists TBC.
To vote for this panel head over to “Decentralize Yourself: Why Distributed Version Control Rocks“.
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