Find Bug!

No-one is perfect. Sometimes you'll write code and think it works fine; you've tested all the edge-cases you can think of and nothing seems amiss. It won't be until months later that you're using that code and see it stumble over something it shouldn't. Something that couldn't possibly go wrong just did, right before your eyes.

In my case, the vigil.pl program I wrote in Integrating Integrity stumbled on some directories with Unicode in their names. It's a good thing I noticed it, because I'd started to rely on my little program more and more recently. Let's figure out what happened and fix the bug.

Get S.M.A.R.T.

As followers of this blog may know, I've been having a cacophony of hardware problems lately. Most of them revolve around that one inevitability of packing more and more data into tinier and tinier spaces: Hard disk corruption. I've been busy moving my vital datas onto an older machine of mine and setting it up to host all my source code, so now is a great time to get paranoid about disk integrity.

Oh no not again

So, I was doing a routine upgrade of my (very) old laptop the other day. It no longer has a working battery and doesn't quite have the power I want for modern day-to-day stuff, but it's served me very well as a SSH gateway, Subversion server and a place to keep my IRC session idling. Old laptops can make really nice servers since they're typically quiet, draw little power, and come with their own keyboard and monitor.

But I digress.

I was upgrading the packages, and one of those was a kernel update, so I rebooted for the first time in months and...

Remember how I had hard drive problems recently? Yeah.