One more stupid bug in Qt found. When using the Designer, you can’t drag and drop QActions, if you are using the Cocoa version of Qt. The bug is described here, a fix will be available in Qt 4.6.3.
Month: April 2010
OpenCL on OS X
I have just tried to run an official OpenCL sample program by Apple on a MBP 10.6.3 machine. Result: a crash. Why? I do not know yet, but it seems that OpenCL somehow crashlanded the nvidia OpenGL driver. This is what I get:
08.04.10 17:04:50 kernel NVDA(OpenGL): Channel exception! exception type = 0xd = GR: SW Notify Error
08.04.10 17:04:50 kernel 0000006e
08.04.10 17:04:50 kernel 00200000 00008397 00000474 00000040
08.04.10 17:04:50 kernel 0000047e 00001408 00000001 00000008
08.04.10 17:04:50 kernel 00000000 00000000 01dfdc03
08.04.10 17:05:04 kernel NVDA(OpenGL): Channel exception! exception type = 0x8 = Fifo: Watchdog Timeout Error
08.04.10 17:05:04 kernel 0000006e
08.04.10 17:05:04 kernel 00000010 00008397 00000474 00000000
08.04.10 17:05:04 kernel 0000047e 00001528 00000000 00000008
08.04.10 17:05:04 kernel 00000000 00000000 019fdc03
As soon as I know something more and especially how to fix it, I will share it here.
Update: It does not crash, if I don’t touch any keys when the kernel runs. So I guess the OpenCL drivers are a bit buggy still…
Emacs: autocomplete-mode
Just a quick note: the Emacs autocomplete-mode is easy and lovely. It is not as clever as semantic, but it works, is pretty fast and can optionally use semantic, if I understood correctly. Installation is easy, due to the provided install script. It provides nice pop-up menus to choose the alternatives from:
SD card reading problems
Today I was shooting some pictures using some camera and a cheap 2GB SD card. Upon returning home, I copied the pictures from the SD card to the Mac, using an old 6-in-1 card reader. After about 980 MiB of images, OS X throws a read error. Using cp in terminal yields the same result. Trying to repair the card using the hard disk utility even resulted in the system hanging. No hard freeze, but I had to power cycle it, since I was too lazy to fire up another ssh-capable machine.
After some research, I read on Wikipedia that SD cards over 1 GiB are adressed differently. It seems that older devices, such as my reader may have problems using those cards. This means I have to go buy a new reader tomorrow, I guess! Or be restricted to using only 1 Gig of the SD cards I use… Which is not a good idea for camera producing 37 MiB RAW files.
Update: My suspicion was correct. A new 10 € card reader solved the problem. The 2 GiB are back, I can read all the photos from the card.
Automatic security updates for Debian
I was wondering how to configure automatic security updates for Debian. Especially for Debian stable, which I am running. Turns out it’s easy. First, you just install cron-apt. Second, you can configure it by editing /etc/cron-apt/config. I learned from some other blog, that setting one variable helps in getting actually emails for the upgrades, namely setting MAILON=”upgrade” in this file does the trick. And lastly, there is a directory /etc/cron-apt/action.d, which contains all the actions that cron-apt will execute. In there is a file named 3-download, which I changed to look as follows:
autoclean -y
upgrade -y -o APT::Get::Show-Upgraded=true
The second line is changed from “dist-upgrade -d …”, because you don’t want any automatic dist-upgrades. That might leave your server in a horrible state. Also, instead of only downloading (-d), you want it to install the upgrades as well. That’s all and should help you keep up with security patches more easily.
Update: The updates seem to work fine! Tonight I got the first email that notified me of a successful security update.