A coworker brought this up, and it’s worth noting: what’s wrong with this? # parted -s /dev/sda mkpart primary ext2 1M 8M # mke2fs /dev/sda1 Unfortunately, this will occasionally fail with this error from mk2fs: The file /dev/sda1 does not exist and no size was specified. This is due to a race condition in the… Read More

I spent an embarrassing amount of time today diagnosing what appeared to be a Heisenbug in Python. I was debugging a method, and each time I added a debug statement to peek at a value, the value itself would be returned and then… just disappear. It was as if observation changed the results. First the… Read More

I recently upgraded from Fedora 20 to Fedora 23, and I was shocked to find how much Gnome usability took a giant leap backwards. My useful shell extensions were no longer functioning, and I couldn’t figure out how to access the icons in the notification area, since it is now hidden by default. Menus have… Read More

WebEx can be a real pain when it comes to cross-platform use. The Windows installer usually takes care of business, and the Mac installer will usually work with only minor headaches. On the other hand, the Linux installer only installs the WebEx components, without the dependencies, so you end up with a WebEx that can… Read More