The ongoing struggle

I’m off to FOSDEM in Brussels tomorrow, in the yearly pilgrimage with the Hampshire LUG lot. If you’re also there and I haven’t made it obvious that I don’t want to talk to you, feel free to say hi!

I had thought that my use of mutt was completely ordinary, but after pasting a screenshot of it:

into IRC for unrelated reasons, a number of people asked how I set it up like that. The answer is I read the manual!

But for those not interested in reading the manual, the image is of the pager view, i.e. what is used to view an individual message. The top few lines show a view of the index, i.e. the list of messages in the current folder. People have referred to this as a split window but it isn’t really as there is no way to make it “active” and give it commands that you would use in the index. It’s just for display purposes, but it does help to see where you are in the thread.

Adding:

set pager_index_lines=10

to your .muttrc will dedicate the top 10 lines of your pager view to this view of the index.

The colour scheme shown is determined by the following lines:

color header cyan black .
color header yellow black ^From
color header yellow black ^Subject
color body yellow black [_a-z\.\$A-Z0-9-]+@[a-zA-Z0-9\./\-]+
color body yellow black (http|ftp)://[_a-zA-Z0-9\?\=\&\@\%\#\:\,\./~\-]+
color quoted green black
color signature cyan black
color attachment yellow black
color tree white black
color indicator black cyan
color status yellow blue
color tilde blue black
color normal white black
color index green black ~N

The lines with regular expressions just pick out things like email addresses and URLs. The last line makes new (unread) mails stand out in the index view. The regular expressions could be improved but really, they work well enough for me. I haven’t edited this part of the config since 2005!

Dear Lazyweb,

You will probably want to skip this if you have no knowledge of server motherboards and RAM and/or no interest in helping me.

I have a new server based on a Tyan S3970 motherboard with four DIMMs. It was assembled by the supplier and subjected to a burn-in test. It seems however that they did not look at the BIOS event log before shipping it because when I got it, it was full of messages regarding single-bit memory errors with date stamps stretching back through the previous week. This is plausible since the ECC RAM will correct single-bit errors.

Anyway, so I thought it would be a single bad DIMM, turned off ECC in the BIOS and broke out memtest86+.

What I found was that after approximately 90 minutes, memtest86+ reported errors across the entire memory range (implicating all DIMMs). Here’s an example:

 WallTime   Cached  RsvdMem   MemMap   Cache  ECC  Test  Pass  Errors ECC Errs
 ---------  ------  -------  --------  -----  ---  ----  ----  ------ --------
   1:59:27   8192M     160K  e820-Std    on   off   Std     0      80        0
 -----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Tst  Pass   Failing Address          Good       Bad     Err-Bits  Count Chan
---  ----  -----------------------  --------  --------  --------  ----- ----
  7     0  000974b216c -  2420.1MB  9c9a2a71  9c9a0a71  00002000      1
  7     0  00126a320cc -  4714.1MB  819293fd  8192b3fd  00002000      1
  7     0  00114c0012c -  4428.0MB  8e8b2ec2  8e8b0ec2  00002000      1
  7     0  001115920ec -  4373.1MB  652557a0  652577a0  00002000      1
  7     0  00165b030cc -  5723.1MB  86cb57f6  86cb77f6  00002000      1
  7     0  0016069710c -  5638.4MB  b59513f4  b59533f4  00002000      1
  7     0  0014969e0ec -  5270.8MB  15be53f9  15be73f9  00002000      1
  7     0  001094370cc -  4244.4MB  2b779fdd  2b77bfdd  00002000      1
  7     0  00139f8d0ec -  5023.8MB  1c54d9dd  1c54f9dd  00002000      1
  7     0  001568ad0cc -  5480.8MB  318657e8  318677e8  00002000      1

At this point I of course began to suspect the motherboard, but in the interest of thorough testing I decided to try just one pair of DIMMs. These tested for over 3 hours without a problem. I thought perhaps that this pair was good whereas the other pair might be bad, so I swapped them over. The other pair then tested for over 8 hours without error. So it’s definitely not the DIMMs.

I checked that the DIMMs are all identical (they are) and studied the motherboard manual closely:

http://www.tyan.com/manuals/m_s3970_110.pdf

The memory section on page 28 states:

For optimal dual-channel DDR operation, always install memory in pairs beginning with P1_DIMM7 and P1_DIMM8. Refer to the following table for supported DDRII populations.

The table then shows that you should install the DIMMs in pairs, starting with slots 7 and 8. So, 7→8, 5→8, 3→8 and 1→8 are the only supported configurations.

The server had been delivered with slots 1→4 populated. I have just changed that to 5→8 and it’s now over 4 hours into a test without an error, which is the most I’ve achieved with all 4 DIMMs installed. If we assume that no more errors are encountered, would you be satisfied with this conclusion?

I am still a little bit worried that the motherboard is faulty in some way, because giving a consistent single-bit memory error seems like a really weird outcome for running in an unsupported configuration. I would have thought that it would either not detect the RAM, or it would be OK. Is this behaviour something you would expect?

I’ve opened a support request with Tyan to ask if this is normal behaviour, but I’ve no idea when or if they will respond.

• Gameboy bricks
• “Unforseen events”

Text message from a relative:

hi andrew need to ask you a question when we open the laptop the screen goes all funny with lots of coloured line all over it any clues what up with it. And how are you

I thought I’d treat myself to some toys.

With FOSDEM and other events fast approaching I decided I should buy myself a new compact camera as the Konica DiMAGE I have now is just too big to carry around all the time.

I’m no camera expert and certainly not a very good photographer so I don’t need anything particularly special. pidgin recommended the Panasonic FX series and looking around the review sites the current favourite seems to be the DMC-FX33, so that’s what I got.

It arrived today (well, yesterday) and I’m really impressed by how tiny and cute it is!

I haven’t yet had chance to really play with it but in my limited testing it seems to work well enough, and it’s certainly small and light enough to carry around most of the time.

I was also going to stick up a photo of the new server I’ve bought for BitFolk and am currently testing, but it appears to have been shipped with faulty RAM, or maybe even a faulty motherboard.

The BIOS event log shows single-bit errors corrected over the last week which must have been the burn-in period, and I can induce more of them by running memtest86. It seems the supplier did not check the BIOS event log (ECC RAM corrects single-bit errors so they were probably otherwise undetectable) before shipping.

It doesn’t seem like just a case of a bad stick or two though, as the errors appear across the whole memory space, which is why I think it could be the motherboard. I’ll get it sorted out eventually but it’s going to delay things massively and being out of capacity is costing me money.

So anyway, that’s really annoyed me and left me without anything good to say, so I’ll save it for another day!

$ find /home/andy/Maildir -type f -wholename '*/new/*'| wc -l
123156
$ find /home/andy/Maildir -type f -wholename '*/cur/*'| wc -l
24244

If it’s not obvious, that means I have 123k unread emails and 24k read ones. I archive off read emails older than 60 days, but still, that’s pretty pointless and stupid. It’s time to have a purge and unsubscribe from all those lists which I always think I’ll get around to reading at some point.

Update: Just over a week later and with some ruthless pruning, things look much better:

$ find /home/andy/Maildir -type f -wholename '*/new/*' | wc -l
2234
$ find /home/andy/Maildir -type f -wholename '*/cur/*' | wc -l
16774

Andrew comments regarding Dog-lead goths ‘hounded off bus’:

Now whilst I am not for/against the Goth lifestyle - it’s not something that I’d personally get into. However, just because it’s seen as a bit ’strange’ or ‘weird’ to the majority of us does not mean we should prevent it.

Andrew, if you take the bus company at their word they were not stopping it because they deemed it “strange” or “weird”, but because they deemed it unsafe, i.e. they did not claim to be taking a position on the Goth lifestyle. Being libertarian (or indeed anarchist) does not mean “everyone can do anything they want.”

I have a little difficulty in seeing how these two being chained together really affects anyone else’s safety though..!

After discussing the following Freecycle ad on IRC:

Hi all. me and my chilren are moving to an unfurnished home and we need pretty much everything like sofas 2 two seaters colour unimportant. microwave, tv unit, small tv for my daughters bedroom and everything would be well appreicated so please contact me if you have any of these on your list to clear out. many thanks and kind regards
emma

I want to know, has anyone dated anyone they met from Freecycle? Feel free to tell me in confidence if you don’t want to be identified!

Update: Just to clarify, I am not suggesting that this ad in any way presents itself as looking for dates. The conversation that followed me mentioning it on IRC did, however, contain a suggestion that someone who was interested in meeting single mothers might find Freecycle a good place to do it. And I am interested to know if anyone has ever had a relationship with someone they first met from Freecycle.

There’s some threads where you feel that everything that could ever be usefully said has already been said. That point was reached several pages past the top of the image below:

Internet drama: Just say no.