Colonel Panic comes to visit...

...but at least he didn't bring his adjutant, Major Issue.
For those of us working with VMWare on MacBooks, a lesson learned:
My laptop is my primary machine at work as well as at home, so I rarely shut it down. It goes for weeks at a time, sleeping and waking several times a day. I didn't think twice about sleeping it with VMWare open and the virtual machine suspended, until last night. When I opened the lid at home, a smooth translucent gray shade dropped down over my desktop, and this soothing message appeared:



A first for me in OS X!
Step one, as always, was to Google Up (on another machine). That's how I discovered that this was Apple's civilized way of presenting a kernel panic, which I'd only seen in its raw Linux command line form. Most of the links I found referred to RAM problems, but my configuration's been stable for a long time, so I was ready to look for a different culprit. I rebooted and browsed my way through Apple's ample crash reporting dialogs. Choosing "More Details" took me eventually to the right log file in Console, and there were VMWare's footprints, all over the house.


So, short story long, I'm shutting the virtual machine down and closing VMWare before sleeping now, and the Colonel seems to have moved on.

Blog Fail

Well, I'm well on my way to establishing that I can't keep up a blog even when I'm being graded on it. Bravo self, at least you're a consistent performer.

Until I get back to the grindstone, here's a moment's amusement: the Linux Cheat Shirt.



Courtesy of ThinkGeek and XKCD , of course.

Absolute Beginners...

...a good song, a better book, and a reference that probably dates me.
I've been exploring the Absolute Beginner Talk thread on the Ubuntu forums. There's a gentle attitude toward the newbie* that I find welcoming.


I've been on similar forums in the past, found a tremendous amount of useful information, and yes, had pointless words with a troll or two. I think online communities, particularly in the open source world, have grown up a bit and learned how to encourage better behavior. There's far less of the secret society feel to the Ubuntu boards than I remember from my first Linux explorations a decade ago.


One thread that interested me was the "Beginner's Guide to Filing Bug Reports". A true newbie might have a lot of trouble distinguishing between a gap in their knowledge and a real software bug. You could make case that a user should reach a certain level of experience before they begin to contribute to bug tracking. On the other hand, openness to that kind of input is one of the strengths of open source software, and sometimes it takes new users and new uses to find the obscure bugs.


Learning to recognize genuinely aberrant behavior in your software is one of the most basic steps in becoming an educated user. The community at Ubuntu is using this thread to educate new users about the nature of bugs as well as the mechanism for reporting them. I also found myself thinking more deeply about the user's ongoing responsibility during the 'life cycle' of a bug report; it isn't just a complaint that you make to management - it's an opportunity to usefully interact with developers as they work to solve problems. For some of us, that may be as close as we get to programming a piece of software.


On a side note, I enjoyed the mental image (with appropriate theme song) of triagers in olive drab and hawaiian shirts, pulling the bugs off the choppers as they come into Ubuntu's M*A*S*H unit.



Are we 'debbies' now? Really?

In Which An Adventure Is Begun.

This blog was born for IRLS 672: Applied Technology, a course through the School of Information Resources and Library Science at the University of Arizona.

Content is under development, but is expected to have a lot to do with the life cycle, social behavior, care, and feeding of LAMP servers. The nature and habits of other related (or unrelated) beasts will be addressed as appropriate (or inappropriate).

And of course, the author can be counted on to stray off-topic in any context. Caveat Lector.