Smells like a pre-Internet library in here

Here is a list of things that I tend to hoard (where I define hoard as "keep more (or longer than) needed, or conserve or manage more than the effort involved warrants"):

* Alaska license plates (I had to get the obvious one out of the way first)
* books and magazines
* cardboard boxes
* coins
* computers and peripherals
* computer adapters, cords and computer-related tools
* dowls, rods, tubes
* ID cards
* movie stubs
* paper
* pens and pencils
* plane tickets
* twist ties
* water

... and here are the things that I think that my wife hoards:

* books and magazines
* candles
* checks
* coffee cups
* cookbooks
* glass jars
* greeting cards received
* leftovers
* toiletries

Obviously, we have many bookshelves.

APC Masterswitch errors: heap corrupted : non-matching sizes

Sometimes, an APC Masterswitch will start spewing errors like this on its console:

heap corrupted : non-matching sizes :-22904..13041

This sometimes happens when some revisions of the APC Masterswitch OS have too much uptime.

The issue can be temporarily resolved by rebooting the management card. Even though your terminal is filling up with these errors, you can still actually log in and reboot the card - you just have to do it semi-blind.

For some revisions of OS, the key sequence is:

[username]
[password]
3 (the 'System' menu)
5 (the 'Tools' menu)
1 (the 'Reboot' option)
YES (all in caps, to confirm that you want to reboot)

This will clear the error without power-cycling any devices. I suspect that an OS upgrade would address the issue permanently.

Better late than never

I just realized that I didn't mention something important here.

We had a baby!

Using vi key bindings in Perl's debugger on FreeBSD

Even after verifying that Term::ReadKey and Term::ReadLine were part of my perl distribution:

royce@heffalump$ perl -e 'use Term::ReadKey;'
royce@heffalump$ perl -e 'use Term::ReadLine;'
royce@heffalump$

... and making sure that vi key bindings were listed in my .inputrc:

royce@heffalump$ grep editing-mode ~/.inputrc
set editing-mode vi

... I still couldn't use 'em, as demonstrated by what happened when I tried to use movement keys:

  DB<1> testtesttest^[[A

In my research, I discovered that Ubuntu folks were installing a different ReadLine. I eventually found the devel/p5-ReadLine-Perl port, which has this pkg-descr:

Perl 5 ships with a module called Term::ReadLine which is an interface
to command line editing and recall.  The version that ships with Perl
is only a stub, and offers little functionality.

This module supplants the Term::ReadLine stubs with real command line
editing and recall facilities, written entirely in Perl.  Applications
that use Term::ReadLine do not need to be modified to gain the benefits
of this package; it will happen transparently upon installation.

After installing p5-ReadLine-Perl, I'm up and running.

FreeBSD apr1 upgrade error: Configure: 9904: Syntax error: word unexpected (expecting ")")

I was having trouble with apr1 on a FreeBSD web server. apr1 is used by Apache. The configure script for apr1 was dying with this error:

Performing libtool configuration ... 
. / configure: line 9904: syntax error near unexpected token `lt_decl_varnames, ' 

... which boiled down to:

. / configure: line 9904: `lt_if_append_uniq (lt_decl_varnames, SHELL,,, '

Fortunately, this thread was eventually resolved by someone finding out that they had some libtoo115 files left over, even though it had been deinstalled. I manually removed the extraneous files with:

# pkg_delete libtool-1.5.24 
# rm -rf /usr/local/share/libtool15 
# rm -f /usr/local/bin/libtool15 /usr/local/bin/libtoolize15

I am now back up and running!

Thanks to Vladislav Staroselskiy for a very helpful post about the FreeBSD apr1 libtool15 problem.

A little post-1964-earthquake humor

A guest post from my father, for which I asked him to share a story about something that happened after things had mostly gotten back to normal after the 1964 Alaska Earthquake. Dad worked at what was then the 6981st, and is now the 381st Intelligence Squadron on Elmendorf (now Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson). For those who know the work, the terminology here will be familiar.

...

The Great Alaska Earthquake happened in late March of 1964. 9.2 on the Richter scale. As many folks know, it was devastating to many parts of southeast Alaska.

Sometime after that event, I was on D Flight “tearing traffic” as usual during a swing shift. One of the Flight’s 292X1s was a “goosey” sort of guy. He was diligently working away that evening as I approached his work station from behind, preparing to “tear traffic” from his position. As I came up behind him I reached up and tapped the fluorescent light fixture hanging directly above. This started the fixture swinging. Then, “tearing traffic” in front of him, I got his attention and looked up as if to suddenly notice the swinging light fixture. He saw I was looking up so he looked up too. He saw the fixture moving and before he had any second thoughts, leaped out of his chair and at double time made for the Operations door. He went past other folks diligently working, through the doors, down the stairs, past the Air Police person guarding access to the upstairs Operations area, through the first floor foyer and out the front doors of the building to the flag pole located in the center of the secure compound area.

Once he got there he couldn’t understand why others weren’t there too. He was sure he had quickly reacted to an earthquake aftershock.

When no one else was around except him and the flag pole it dawned on him that perhaps the swinging light fixture had not caused what he thought. He strolled back into the building, up to the Air Police person on guard duty, showed the guard his badge and continued on up to the second floor and back to his position in the Operations area. He did not stop or even slow down to answer anyone’s questions about his rapid departure a few minutes earlier.

By that time I figured that he had an idea who was responsible for his quick-reaction to the swinging light fixture.

I managed to avoid his attempts to find me through the rest of the swing shift.

Damn 202s! Not funny! Be a takin' 'er easy. Ur Dad sends

Remembering William Sleator

The Sleator family has created a blog for posting memories about William Sleator.