Missives

I was trying to compile a third party Rust crate today on a Debian box and I was getting a weird error I’d never seen: = note: cc: fatal error: cannot read spec file ‘./specs’: Is a directory compilation terminated. I’ve done a bunch of embedded C stuff in the past so I knew what … Continue reading Bizarre Error while compiling a Rust program

I can’t remember who wrote this first, but my friend and I have been using some version of this shell snippet for years: ssh_find() { for agent in “$SSH_AUTH_SOCK” /tmp/ssh-*/agent.* /tmp/com.apple.launchd.*/Listeners* /tmp/keyring-*/ssh; do SSH_AUTH_SOCK=”$agent” ssh-add -l 2>/dev/null case “$?” in # 0 some keys, 1 no keys, 2 no agent 0) export SSH_AUTH_SOCK=”$agent”; echo “Found … Continue reading ssh_find

I played around with Apple’s Automator app when it was first released, but I could never really find a good use for it (I wrote some actions but I would never reliably use them for whatever reason). But I did eventual write one that I use constantly. It’s a “Quick Action”, which means it shows … Continue reading Automator Is Pretty Sweet

My MacOS Element Matrix client (Electron based) started getting errors when I searched. My Windows Matrix client worked just fine, so I was pretty sure it wasn’t a server issue. When I typed anything into the message search I’d get this error right underneath: “Message search initialisation failed, check your settings for more information” And … Continue reading Fixing Element Search

Do you know the printf trick in shell? Shell printf repeats its format pattern if you give it more arguments than the pattern has. You can use this for all kinds of tricks: $ printf “/some/path/%s ” file1 file2 file3 file4 /some/path/file1 /some/path/file2 /some/path/file3 /some/path/file4 $ printf “%s=%s\n” a 1 b 2 c 3 d … Continue reading Shell printf tricks

I was banging my head against a wall trying to get help for go build with go build help (and for some reason go doesn’t support go build –help, but I kept getting this error: package help is not in GOROOT (/opt/homebrew/Cellar/go/1.18.3/libexec/src/help) Does brew not come with docs by default? How else am I supposed … Continue reading I’m so dumb

My nightly Emacs builds stopped about a month and a half ago. A couple days after I noticed it was failing I tried to debug the issue and found that building openssl was hanging—I found that Jenkins was timing out after an hour or so. I should mention that it’s dying on a Mac OS … Continue reading Failed Emacs builds, hanging kernels, abort(), oh my

On Wednesday as I was going to bed I noticed it was quite hot in my house. I checked my central air blower unit and there was frost on the coils and the blower wasn’t moving. It kept trying to start but not being able to start. The 7 segment led was showing “b5” which … Continue reading Fixing the blower motor in my central air system

I was digging around and I found the original SSV announcement posted to Dominion (the (in)famous Sisters Of Mercy Mailing list). What is SSV? Just read the letter—it explains everything. More info can be found here, here, or here, or here. Here is the email, reproduced with headers for posterity: Received: from maekong.ohm.york.ac.uk by rewind.indigita.com … Continue reading Screw Shareholder Value

I wanted to get DKIM working on an Debian box I have that runs Exim. The first thing to do is to create the keys: $ openssl genrsa -out diamonds.key 4096 $ openssl rsa -in diamonds.key -pubout > diamonds.pub I was following these instructions and noticed that Exim supports ed25519 DKIM signatures. Neat! I decided … Continue reading DKIM and Exim4 on Debian

Today my Jenkins builds were not working because all of the build slaves were offline. Digging around in the logs showed that the couldn’t connect because of name resolution failures. I use mDNS on my network (the slaves are Mac OS X VMs running on a Mac Mini), and so they were named something like … Continue reading AT&T causes mDNS on Linux To Fail

My imgur had been acting up for a while now. In my Firefox it wouldn’t render the actual image but rendered most of the rest of the page just fine: If I went to i.imgur.com (adding the .png or .jpg to the url) then the image loaded just fine. So it wasn’t getting blocked by … Continue reading Firefox imgur failure

Some people were reporting that an IMAP server wasn’t working on their Mac. It was working from linux machines, and from Thunderbird on all OSes. From Macs I was getting this testing from the command line: $ openssl s_client -connect <my-imap-server>:993 CONNECTED(00000003) 39458:error:1407742E:SSL routines:SSL23_GET_SERVER_HELLO:tlsv1 alert protocol version:/BuildRoot/Library/Caches/com.apple.xbs/Sources/OpenSSL098/OpenSSL098-64.50.6/src/ssl/s23_clnt.c:593: This led me to a recent libssl package … Continue reading Debian OpenSSL 1.1.0f-4 and macOS 10.11 (El Capitan)

Today we upgraded a server that ran a bunch of VMs to Fedora 25 and all the VMs failed to come back online after rebooting. Checking the logs I found this: 2017-04-14T08:39:35.304547Z qemu-system-x86_64: Length mismatch: 0000:00:03.0/virtio-net-pci.rom: 0x10000 in != 0x20000: Invalid argument 2017-04-14T08:39:35.304579Z qemu-system-x86_64: error while loading state for instance 0x0 of device ‘ram’ 2017-04-14T08:39:35.304759Z … Continue reading Fedora libvirt/qemu error on upgrade

After you override the core in the Xi Cauldron (which unlike the others I’ve played through so far, happens pretty early), Aloy says “now I can override more machines”. But annoyingly, you don’t actually get the override until you finish the quest, which happens when you exit the cauldron. Along the way back you’ll encounter … Continue reading Horizon Zero Dawn Xi Cauldron Is Confusing

I used to use this Homebrew “Tap” to install Rust nightly versions, but it stopped working at some point. I messed around with it a lot and determined it had something to do with newer Rusts not liking the install_name_tool calls that homebrew forces on libraries during installation. So I looked into rustup (the nice … Continue reading Rust nightly + Homebrew

I wrote a simple little Perl Module recently, and it reminded me how frustrating it is to get it all working. I’m not even talking about the .xs preprocessor (xsubpp)—that’s weird, but it’s fairly straightforward. Most contingencies are accounted for and you can make it do whatever you want, and in my case, the results … Continue reading Perl Module XS configuration is hard