The Boston Diaries

The ongoing saga of a programmer who doesn't live in Boston, nor does he even like Boston, but yet named his weblog/journal “The Boston Diaries.”

Go figure.

Friday, June 05, 2015

It's such a buggy day

“There's an FPL truck in the neighborhood.”

“Well, that explains why I couldn't log onto my home computer.”


Bunny and I were coming home from an errand to Lowes. Bunny was picking up supplies for a project and I wanted to test the Wi-Fi hotspot on my iPhone. The Wi-Fi hotspot worked wonderfully.

But logging into my home computer, not so much. I figured something was going on, perhaps the Monopolistic Phone Company's DSL going down again but no, it was FPL again.

Sigh.


Normally, I type my entries into a text file which I mail to mod_blog. But to do that, I need to send the entry to my email server. And to do that, I need to be logged into my now powerless computer. But wait, I thought, I have a web inerface to mod_blog, I should use that!

Only, the last change I made broke the web interface (technobabble: the editing template had a field for Facebook but I removed all support for Facebook; mod_blog couldn't find support for the Facebook portion of the template which caused there is some memory corruption somewhere in the code—I need to track that down. Can you tell I use the web interface often?).

Just as my iPhone was running out of power.

Sigh.

Fortunately, FPL restored power just then, and I was able to remove the offending portion of the template, and I'm now trying this yet again through the web interface (on my iPad) running through the iPhone hotspot just to make sure it works in an emergency. I'm going to have to debug mod_blog some more before I can use the web interface; the EPS isn't quite up to snuff.


Dog food

Well, let's see if it works this time.

I was able to track the issue down to a double call to free(). But the really scary bit is that the behavior only exhibited itself on the webserver; on my development box, I never saw the bug.

Sigh.

Debugging on a production server—never a good thing.

But more on that after I finish dogfooding the web interface on an iPad over the iPhone hotspot.

Obligatory Picture

Trying to get into the festive mood this year

Obligatory Contact Info

Obligatory Feeds

Obligatory Links

Obligatory Miscellaneous

Obligatory AI Disclaimer

No AI was used in the making of this site, unless otherwise noted.

You have my permission to link freely to any entry here. Go ahead, I won't bite. I promise.

The dates are the permanent links to that day's entries (or entry, if there is only one entry). The titles are the permanent links to that entry only. The format for the links are simple: Start with the base link for this site: https://boston.conman.org/, then add the date you are interested in, say 2000/08/01, so that would make the final URL:

https://boston.conman.org/2000/08/01

You can also specify the entire month by leaving off the day portion. You can even select an arbitrary portion of time.

You may also note subtle shading of the links and that's intentional: the “closer” the link is (relative to the page) the “brighter” it appears. It's an experiment in using color shading to denote the distance a link is from here. If you don't notice it, don't worry; it's not all that important.

It is assumed that every brand name, slogan, corporate name, symbol, design element, et cetera mentioned in these pages is a protected and/or trademarked entity, the sole property of its owner(s), and acknowledgement of this status is implied.

Copyright © 1999-2024 by Sean Conner. All Rights Reserved.