Nat West!

The Nat West bank (in the UK ) has been having software problems and with apologies to the Pet Show Boys:

I do hope they don't get a take-down order! Lots of f-words in the above!
(h/t Jackschofield)

Ubuntu - natty narwhal and plasma

Back in this post, I wrote:

kde/plasma did look very nice before the upgrade but at the moment whenever I run it from login the system locks up and I have to reboot - this is before I can interact with the GUI - I've looked through the system logs and as yet have not spotted the problem. When I find a resolution - I'll update this post.

I've eventually got around to researching this, hand editing the startup file ~/.kde/share/config/ksmserverrc and gradually removing startup applications - that previous blog entry led me to suspect some of the terms I was launching - I removed those and it still locked, eventually I removed emacs and I could get in, if I ran emacs with no startup file (-Q) it locked up, having also spotted a

NVRM: Xid (0000:07:00): 13, 0001 00000000 00005097 000015e0 00000000 00000100

message in the logs just before the crash, I googled the NVRM: Xid bit and found this bug, which gives the solution to update the nvidia drivers, rather than the ones mentioned there, I went for not being quite so bleeding edge and installed the ubuntu-x-swat/x-updates ppa, restarted the system and I'm now happily running in the kde/plasma desktop environment!

A shadow on the screen

I thought at first this was the graphics card going - if you look in the top left hand corner of the screen shot you'll see a rectangular shadow on the screen, but it doesn't appear all the time and its appearance tends to coincide with my starting a particular application (amarok - which I use to play music). It - the shadow - doesn't vanish when I close amarok and doesn't appear every time. Though, if it were hardware, I doubt if I could get a screenshot of the problem! I wonder if it is trying to talk to kwin (the kde window manager) which I'm not running? This screenshot with a huge clear space for admiring the background is me running ubuntu using fluxbox as a window manager. This problem has only occurred in the past week or so and I've not much longer been using the closed source nvidia driver, maybe that's the issue?

reboot? - this is linux!

Just had a scary few minutes, this morning I was unable to logon the home mailserver (running mandriva 2010.1) across the local network - the process connected, opened up a terminal window and just hung, never getting to a prompt! Sunday lunch over, I tried opening up a term when sitting at the machine with the problems and there too, no xterm! Fortunately I was already logged in and had root (admin) access. Looking back in the logs I saw a crash in ssh (which I use to get onto the mailserver from other machines) - in ssh-block-Allow. I could understand ssh problems causing a problem with remote access - but why was local access a problem? Even a Control - C failed to interrupt whatever was running - and I could check that nothing was hogging the CPU.
I looked through any recent updates to the machine and saw nothing likely, googling only gave me my tweet for help(!) so I hurriedly connected the backup drive, did a machine backup - I was glad I already had root access and then tried a reboot. This failed to work - wouldn't shutdown with a message:

could not log bootup - already in use

so a magic key shutdown (using the sysRq key) was resorted to.
A few deep breaths later and the system rebooted and I logged in - then I realised the consequence of the ssh crash - one of the system scripts which run when you open up a terminal checks whether the machine is running ssh and, if so, asks you to unlock the key - for passwordless logins - if ssh is confused - as it evidently was - maybe that script was hanging there.
So I guess killing and restarting sshd would have avoided the reboot as to why ssh was broken that's another issue!
At least the server had been up for a month so it wasn't too unstable!

fluxbox and ubuntu screen size issues?

kdeapp-menus
Originally uploaded by rajmarshall

I use fluxbox and on both my ubuntu installations it appears that there is a problem with that window manager - when I try to maximize a window it expands to cover just the lower half of the screen. In addition some applications (those using Qt) popup menus in unexpected places! If you look at the screen shot of amarok - I've just clicked on Settings but the menu appears half way down the window - at the place where maximise thinks is the top of the physical screen. If I 'maximize' the application - or move the window down to that point - then the popup menu appears at the correct point. Is anyone else using fluxbox with ubuntu - are you also seeing this issue?
I also use fluxbox with the mandriva Linux distribution and there maximise etc works correctly, so either they#ve applied a fix to fluxbox or something at a lower level is not signalling screen size correctly.

Whoops!

Got an email from NVIDIA today requesting me to tailor which newsletters I wished to receive from them - so I followed the link did the appropriate configuration and got these rather fetching errors:

Waited a few minutes and got this even more cryptic email:

Getting close to WTF territory I think? I don't think I subscribed from anything, but trust software to make a really spectacular hash of it.

Shuffle play!

I was browsing though classical cds at Magpie Music this morning - it's a bit of a mix with prices all over the place 3.99/4.99 for BBC Music Magazine cd's, £4.99 for second hand sampler cds(!) but I spotted a boxed set of Bruno Walter conducts - 10cds for £5.99 - second hand again, I though this would be worth a purchase and listen so I did. I inspected the cds contents more closely on the way home - having before just checked the list on the outside of the box and found this:

Try to ignore the horrid format with the artist name repeated for each track (though that does give a clue if you look carefully) and focus on the content. Yes Mozart's Jupiter Symphony with 7 tracks - it's a classical symphony, it has 4 movements. I wondered whether they'd split the movements but if the total time was right that was unlikely. Putting it in the player revealed an interesting cd. Track 1 is the first movement of the Mozart K466 D Minor piano Concerto (presumably in the recording played and conducted by Walter), track 2 and 3 are the Jupiter symphony, then we have an interlude with the slow movement of the concerto, then another movement of the symphony, the finale of the concerto and the finale of the symphony!!
I suppose if you buy a set produced by Ibiza Entertainment you may expect surprises. The front of the box labels it as Centurion Classics, at the moment googling on those suppliers fails to reveal any other comments on this 'interesting' cd.

I've had (Jan 2014) an email from someone claiming to speak on behalf of Magpie Music asking that I remove the link to their site - apparently they're having issues with some blogspot domains and I guess they have a script running through the domain looking for links to their site. As you can easily find their website by plugging their name into a search engine, I've removed the link.

The delights of place holders

For Ala. man, XXXXXXX marks spot for ticket-magnet

Scottie Roberson bought a vanity plate with seven X's to pay homage to his racer nickname. But that causes a bit of a snafu when parking patrols put the plate into the system. Officials usually put seven X's in place of the number for cars without license plates.

Roberson said the mix-up has led him to get as many as 10 tickets in a day.

Never put valid id's as temporary markers!

Vista Service Pack 2

The 'delights' of...

On Monday some server somewhere decided that I should be upgraded on my work laptop to Vista Service Pack 2. I installed it went through the reboot it requested and everything seemed ok, I then went back to using my Linux (Ubuntu) installation until the afternoon of the next day when I needed to do some work on Vista.
I was out of luck - I got a dialog suggesting this was the first time I'd logged in. Few of the options in the 'Start' menu worked, couldn't get to the control panel, it claimed I needed to reboot to reenable UAC (which I had never disabled). I rebooted and still the strange setup continued. I had another go today when I thought about rolling back to before the upgrade - but as you see from the screenshot the system is uncertain as to whether I have a C drive(!) and how many of them there are - I do (just one) and neither of them appear to have a saved state. I was working from home, so I decided I needed another pair of eyes and headed into the office whereupon all the problems went away! Googled a lot and it looks as if there's some sort of issue with SP2 and removable hardware - at home I don't connect a keyboard or an external monitor. I tried rebooting without these didn't see the problem and decided that it must have sorted itself out.
Unfortunately at home this evening the problem is back. I'll post here when I find the solution - at the moment all I can guess is some problem with roving profiles one of which is extremely broken but why it thinks I've roving I don't know.

Never on a Tuesday

Just spotted this interesting bug reported from comp.risks where Openoffice.org application was unable to print files on Tuesdays(!) The application which recognises the file type was spotting the date in the PostScript file header and identifying it as the wrong file type. Go and read the link and see a hard to locate bug!
Full bug discussion is here.

Hmmmph!

Upgrading Mandriva to 2009.1

(Beware, this is fairly hardcore geekery, but do read the link to the Mandriva release!)
Since my last upgrade a newer version of Mandriva has been released - last week - and this time I decided to be less conservative and do an early upgrade - I normally wait at least a month for the bugs to be ironed out!
Again I tried it on another machine before upgrading the email server - so I found out that it would be good to remove kdelibs-common

urpme kdelibs-common

which gets rid of any remaining traces of kde3, before starting the upgrade - where I largely followed this procedure adding a --noclean to the urpmi command to prevent deletion of the downloaded files so that I could use them to upgrade machine two. Note, those are the instructions for a 2008 to 2009 upgrade, but the procedure is the same.
Once complete I had two issues, googling solved them, but let me quote them here, with links to the helpful pages:

• Initially the X server would not start and I had to reboot into safe mode as I couldn't switch to a dumb virtual terminal. I disabled the nvidia driver and ignored that for the moment
• Once I got to the login screen I found that neither the mouse nor the keyboard worked! Fortunately I had another machine to websearch and found this, so these two commands and a reboot (not really necessary but just to check:

  chkconfig --del messagebus
  chkconfig --add messagebus

  gets the messagebus running at the correct point in the boot process.
• I then tried getting the nvidia graphics card working - with the default driver various fancy graphics apps fail to run. I'd been getting the following:

  
  (II) NVIDIA(0): Initialized GART.
  
  Backtrace:
  0: /etc/X11/X(xorg_backtrace+0x37) [0x8135f97]
  1: /etc/X11/X(xf86SigHandler+0x56) [0x80cca26]
  2: [0xffffe400]
  3: /usr/lib/xorg/modules/drivers//nvidia_drv.so [0xb7074c48]
  
  Fatal server error:
  Caught signal 11. Server aborting

  
  Again I found a bug report here. Adding 'nopat' to the options in /boot/grub/menu.lst also solved the problem for me

Not funny but...

admirable control from the newsreader.
Hat tip to Non Working Monkey

Cross site javascript

.. and it appears to be scary stuff! - do stay awake at the back.
Looks as if only having a single tab open in a browser when you're accessing on line banking is recommended - and close the browser afterwards before moving to another site!

Facebook bug?

As a result of a discussion elsewhere, I googled someone and discovered a facebook page of someone with that name - wasn't them unless its a very old picture! Logged out of facebook - from my home page (on that site). When I next login the first page it shows me is this:

as you see, I appear to be one of their friends! I'm sure there's the makings of a security hole here... not to mention the way logging in produces an unexpected page! Also clicking on one of those friends (apart from me) produces another friend list - for someone else - which also includes me! shades of Zelig?

ncredible ffers

I think Aria's email system is doing some trimming of subject lines, in the past few days I've had emails advertising

• ntel Quad Core Q6600
• 7" widescreen monitor
• GB PC
• 00GB Seagate Barracuda SATA2 drive - now only 27.95+

I keep hoping they'll trim the first character off their prices but, so far, they haven't.
Later: it looks to be an fsmail/Orange problem having just noticed another subject line from a different source also just missing the initial letter. I now get the Telegraph xpat emails - I've no idea why! - bizarrely the bug only appears to affect emails from a couple of sources.

Getting from A to B

using multimap..

West Chiltington is in Sussex (as is Gatwick Airport)

and another Ubuntu upgrade oddity!

Following on from this collection, I've just noticed this

$ iwlist eth1 scanning
eth1 No scan results
$ ifconfig eth1
eth1 Link encap:Ethernet HWaddr 00:1a:73:28:ec:d6
inet addr:192.168.1.9 Bcast:192.168.1.255 Mask:255.255.255.0

so I'm connected wirelessly through eth1 (I am honestly!) but it can't see any wireless access points. Pardon!?
PS - all explained now - you need sudo iwlist eth1 scanning
they've tightened up permissions on scanning for wireless connections. Not too surprising when you think about it.

Give me back my bugs!

I'm reminded by this story about microsoft access files being repackaged as virus attack vectors, of an incident that happened to me a few years ago-
I was working on a software application which saved files with an .adp suffix - something that is also used for Access project files. We were using outlook for email and I had a folder on the server with all the bug reports in - usually with example attachment files (obviously as our adp files).
One day, new version of Outlook tightened up security and - surprise - I wasn't able to download any of the files because the post upgrade outlook considered them risky!
Fortunately I was able to access the exchange server using a web interface and download the files (so much for security) but there were riskier ways of getting back access(!)
Be careful where you place your bug reports!

A Feb 29th Bug?

The Cartoon Blog is currently giving me the following mouseover!

That makes it 1970 which sounds really suspicious!