Tag Archives: crash

Putting the Post in Post Office

Posted on March 1, 2010 by Kelson

A few weeks ago, I stopped at the post office on the way to work. As I walked to the door, my eye was immediately drawn to the big hole in the wall where, apparently, a car had crashed into the building while trying to park.

Whatever vehicle had done the damage was long gone, and the area around was cordoned off with yellow caution tape. Since I like to take pictures of weird stuff, I snapped a photo with my cell phone. (No, I didn’t cross the tape; it’s just not visible in the frame.)

This morning, I stopped at the same post office again. This time, my eye was drawn to a new addition to the facility:

One of these bright yellow posts stood in front of each parking space along the building. You can still see where the concrete has been spread around the base, and absolutely no paint has worn off. Clearly someone decided not to take any more chances with wayward cars!

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Cut it out, Ned!

Posted on January 1, 2010 by Kelson

I put the Pushing Daisies soundtrack CD in my computer and it rebooted. Fortunately it took less than a minute….

Of course I tried it again to see if it was a fluke. Same thing. Then I decided to try with another CD. Apparently any audio CD crashes it. Shows how often I use CDs these days.

At least the DVD-RW drive works. IIRC it doesn’t have CD-audio hooked up, but the player seems perfectly happy to just read it digitally.

I guess I’ll have to set aside some time on Sunday to figure out what’s causing the problem. It’s a bit late tonight, and tomorrow’s going to be busy!

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Case of Mondays: Usability, 2012, and Chkdsk

Posted on December 21, 2009 by Kelson
  • Usability question: Is it better for a form to auto-detect the credit card type from its number, or have the user select it as an error check? # (Consensus on Twitter & Facebook was to have the user select it.)
  • In case you were worried, the world will NOT end on this date (or any other) in 2012. #
  • Yay, the PC isn’t totally crashed! Grabbed a current backup & now running chkdsk. Work last week, home this week. Pattern? #
  • Chkdsk is FINALLY running. If you get a “cannot open volume for direct access” error trying to run it on Windows XP, try running msconfig and selecting a Diagnostic startup. #

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Spam, Activism, N’okay

Posted on December 15, 2009 by Kelson
  • Project Honeypot: 1 Billion Spammers Served! #
  • Wow. Without “activist judges” to blame, anti-gay-marriage *ahem* activists in DC are complaining about activist…legislators. #
  • It’s almost 2010. Why do OK/Cancel boxes STILL pop up while I’m typing & accept my “input?” I’m not sure what I just confirmed. Or canceled. Or whatever it is that it thought I told it. #
  • Computer update: Disk check finished overnight, seems OK today. Ran a backup just in case, but got some work done on that project! #

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Manic Monday

Posted on December 14, 2009 by Kelson

First, some linkblogging…

And then the “fun” started.

  • Me: I’m going to focus on project X today!
    Computer needed for project X: I’m going to lock up today!
    Me: Argh! #
  • Someone thought it would be a good idea to cover “Wonderful Christmastime?” 8O # (For the record: Shazam says it was Hilary Duff.)
  • OK, after 3½ hours stuck at 74%, I think I can assume chkdsk is stalled. *grumble* #
  • Ate some blackberries I’d forgotten about from a week ago. Good news: I only threw out 1! Bad news: I should’ve thrown out 2. Blech! #
  • Chkdsk round 3 is at 55% on Stage 5 of 5. Going to call it a night & hope my PC runs tomorrow. # (According to Facebook, this posted at 5:55pm!)

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@font-face Crashes Firefox on Fedora

Posted on July 5, 2009 by Kelson

With the release of Firefox 3.5, I decided it was finally time to get serious about setting up a custom headline font on Speed Force. Cross-platform @font-face embedding in CSS is now possible on Firefox, Safari, the beta version of Opera, and (I think) Chrome. So I pulled out some bookmarks, looked for some fonts with licenses that allowed embedding, messed around with a test page and finally settled on two custom fonts: one for the post headlines, and one for the title and the sidebar section headers.

I tested it in a couple of browsers, both on my Linux desktop and on the Mac laptop, and planned to test it on the Windows desktop when Katie was done with it. But then something weird started happening.

Firefox started crashing. Repeatedly. Not quite predictably, but only when that test page was open.

I figured maybe it was a corrupted font, so I removed one, then the other, then both. If the page tried to download an embedded font, Firefox would eventually crash. If not, it was rock solid.

This seemed kind of bizarre for such a high-profile new feature to cause consistent crashing.

I did some searches online but didn’t come up with anything until I tried running Firefox from the command-line, so that I could read the error message. It complained, "firefox: cairo-ft-font.c:554: _cairo_ft_unscaled_font_lock_face: Assertion `!unscaled->from_face' failed." Searching for that led me to Fedora bug 509501 and bug 502274, and this blog entry.

To make a long story short:

  • On Linux, Firefox uses a library called cairo to handle graphics, including fonts.
  • An old version of cairo had a bug that would cause crashes with fonts under certain circumstances.
  • Cairo fixed the bug in December.
  • Fedora 11 is still using the old version of cairo.

So until Fedora ships a newer (or at least patched) version of cairo, my primary browser on my primary desktop will crash on any web page with an embedded font.

Nice.

I guess I could patch my own system for now and put the fonts up for the benefit of the rest of the Firefox+Safari+Opera-using audience on Windows and Macs (and probably other Linux distributions). But that means causing a crash for anyone else running Fedora 11 when they visit my site. I’m not too thrilled about that idea. I have no problem with adding enhancements that only appear under certain browser+os combinations, but actively crashing a browser? Not something I want to do.

Update (July 21): Aha! Fedora submitted an updated cairo for inclusion in the stable release last night!

Posted in Troubleshooting | Tagged , , , , | 4 Comments

Installing IE8 RC1 — Or Trying

Posted on January 27, 2009 by Kelson
  • Installed IE8 RC1. Installer crashed, and I ended up with IE7…even though I’d been running the IE8 beta before. #
  • IE8 installer crashes system. New HW checks out. Bad RAM may have screwed something up before I replaced it. Time for System Restore. *grr* #
  • Wow, System Restore is taking a lot longer this time. Maybe it’s actually working? (Or maybe safe mode just makes it slower?) #
  • I can’t remember how many times I’ve rebooted this computer today. (And no, safe mode didn’t solve it) #
  • Finally got IE8 RC1 installed by telling it not to install updates immediately. The Malicious Software Scan was crashing the system. WTF? #
  • Now that I’ve FINALLY got IE8 RC1 running, a cursory check of websites I maintain shows no glaring problems. *whew!* #

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Crash Cause

Posted on January 13, 2009 by Kelson

Aha! Crashes on Windows box are due to bad memory! #

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Pop-Up Design, Bird Buzz, and What is…the Thing?

Posted on December 16, 2008 by Kelson
  • Running system restore on my Windows box at work. Just how I wanted to spend Monday morning. #
  • Dear HaloScan users: Please do not use the Javascript-only pop-up for your comments links. I can’t open that in a new tab. #
  • Grr. Dialog boxes should not pop up while typing. I hate accidentally saying OK or Cancel. Who runs only one app at a time these days? #
  • Just got buzzed by a bird on the way to the car. #
  • I don’t know why yesterday’s Real Life is so funny. #

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Improving Browser Reliability

Posted on July 31, 2008 by Kelson

The IEBlog recently posted about their efforts to improve reliability in Internet Explorer 8, particularly the idea of “loosely-coupled IE” (or LCIE). The short explanation is that each tab runs in its own process, so if a web page causes the browser to crash, only that tab crashes — not the whole thing. (It is a bit more complicated, but that’s the principle.) Combine that with session recovery (load with the same set of web pages, if possible with the form data you hadn’t quite finished typing in), and you massively reduce the pain of browser crashes.

I’d like to see something like this picked up by Firefox and Opera as well. They both have crash recovery already, but it still means restoring the entire session. If you have 20 tabs open, it’s great that you don’t have to hunt them down again. But it also means you have to wait for 20 pages to load simultaneously. It would be much nicer to only have to wait for one (or, if I read the IE8 article correctly, three).

Edited to add:

On a related note, I’ve run into an interesting conflict between crash recovery and WordPress’ auto-save feature. If you start a new post, WordPress will automatically save it as a draft. If the browser crashes, it will bring up the new-post page, but restore most of the form data you filled in. So the title, the text of your post, etc will all be there. But WordPress will see it as a new post, and you’ll end up with a duplicate.

This wasn’t a major problem when I encountered it — I had to reset the categories, tags, and post slug after I hit publish (since I hadn’t noticed that they’d been reset to defaults), and I just deleted the older, partial version of the post — but I can imagine if I’d uploaded an image gallery, I would have been rather annoyed, since there’s no way (that I’ve noticed) to move images from one post to another. Reuse them, sure, but not such that the gallery feature would work.

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