First post!

For the past decade or so, I’ve maintained about a dozen different blogs.  No, that sounds wrong.  Failed to maintain.  Yes, I failed to maintain about a dozen different blogs.  These were differentiated by their specific topic or sub-topic, and who they were aimed at.

Some were out out the public internet, some were internal only at my work and would require some redactions.  At least one was meant to be public, but I restricted it to my home IP early on and never removed that restriction.

Well, I think it’s to do something about this.  Over the next year or so, I’m going to consolidate everything into this blog.  Some articles require a fair deal of clean up, others need to have identifying information removed.  There’s  lot that’s now technically obsolete.  I mean, who’s debugging obscure dovecot mbox parsing bugs introduced – and subsequently fixed -by a RHEL4 update?  Well, on one of my blogs, the article dealing with this is still the most popular.  So, for posterity I will port these articles too, and do my best to backdate them appropriately.

AMOD trouble

I use an AMOD AGL3080 GPS logger in my photography. For a few days now, I cannot get it to do anything. The storage light stays on, but nothing happens. I thought that I’m out of disc space, maybe the trash is taking up all the free space? But that seemed not to be the case – I had 112MB free.

Today I got to look at this more closely for the first time. In the .Trashes directory, there is a ‘501’ directory, and under that, I get the following:

$ ls -lha
ls: QžÇØ\026gYø.œ?\036: No such file or directory
ls: ýdßÞæer˜.^ín: No such file or directory
$
$ rm *
rm: cannot remove `QžÇØ\026gYø.œ?\036': No such file or directory
rm: cannot remove `ýdßÞæer˜.^ín': No such file or directory

Eventually, I gave up and plugged it into a linux box. Now the ‘501’ didn’t show up as a directory any more, but as a file. rm -rf, unmount it, switch it on, and what do you know, it’s working! I’m not sure if just deleting the 501 from the terminal in OSX would have worked, it probably would have. I just find it strange that it showed up as a directory and not a regular file.

Colour profiles in Firefox 3

Firefox 3 adds support for colour profiles – finally! But (isn’t there always a “but”?) it is not enabled by default. To enable colour profiles, type the following into the address bar:

about:config

Read the warning and take it serious. Click the button to proceed. Now, in the “Filter” bar, type:

gfx.color

This will give three results. The second result should be:

gfx.color_management.enabled

and it should be set to false – double click on it to set it to true. Now restart your browser, and you’re all set.