Category: technology

I moved five months agao and had not installed the nest yet. When I hooked it up it only showed

a red blinking light

On top of the unit. It turned out that the device needed to get charged via the mini USB adapter in the back. After about 5 minutes, a small dull nest home screen showed up.
After maybe another minute the screen said:

Please attach display
to its base

It turns out that this message tends to be over optimistic: After connecting the device
it fell back into the red-blink slumber.

I gave the device 10 more minutes of USB charge. I used an actual physical charger, not a USB connection from a computer. The ampere that the unit sees can be quiet different.
A drained rechargeable battery certainly appreciates the flow a nice and solid current.
After said 10 minute charge things got better: the thermostat started ‘boot’ while being connected and it was able to operate the heat pump. At this point it still said

low battery

in the Wifi and other connection related screens. Since this did not change for an hour I gave the display another 30 minutes on the USB charger and then was able to set up the network connection as expected.

doing a simple

perl -MCPAN -e shell
install DateTime::TimeZone

the screen starting throwing LOTS of errors at me. And they end along the lines of:

... skipped lots of output ...
t/10deprecated.t   (Wstat: 512 Tests: 0 Failed: 0)
  Non-zero exit status: 2
  Parse errors: No plan found in TAP output
Files=12, Tests=0,  0 wallclock secs ( 0.04 usr  0.03 sys +  0.26 cusr  0.05 csys =  0.38 CPU)
Result: FAIL
Failed 10/12 test programs. 0/0 subtests failed.
make: *** [test_dynamic] Error 255
  /usr/bin/make test -- NOT OK
Running make install
  make test had returned bad status, won't install without force

That does not look so promising – does it?

Actually the fix was easier than the output had let me to believe. Scrolling up I saw there were lots of errors starting like

Can't locate Params/Validate.pm in @INC ...

When I tried to do a

install Params::Validate

I got a similar error – just now Attribute/Handlers.pm

Much to my happiness

install Attribute::Handlers

actually worked. After that Params/Validate could be installed and finally I was back on track with installing the module that I actually wanted.

I do not know why my CPAN install is not having the right understanding of its proper pre requisites. Since this worked for me I probably will not find out …

First there is ‘vimtutor’ which covers the basics.

Drew Neil publishes insightful screen casts about vim.

Bram Moolar himself has a great commented page about books he recommends about vim. [A little bit as if Jesus would point out his favorite Bibles]

These vim keyboard maps might be handy. Not sure since I have not used those yet.

If you like to use the MegaRAID write cache feature make sure that you indeed have a version 2.0 key.

Version 2 keys have the part number LSI00292 while Version 1 keys have the part number LSI00248.

It is possible to get the Version 1 flavor, since both keys share a part number. If you use a Version 1 key
nothing will say this in the MegaRAID “WebBIOS” software or any of the command line tools that LSI offers.
The only indicator will be the part number on the packaging and the fact that write cache will not be enabled.

If you don’t want to see enum suggestions in a mysql procedure analyse() call on a table then you simply run it like:


select * from table_name procedure analyse(1,1) \G


The (1,1) will always show you non enum solutions for each column.

For time machine and other local data needs I really like a drop in design for an external disk. When drives were cheap it was so nice just to drop them into the ‘enclosure’ and go on.

I ended up buying and liking the BlacX ones from Thermaltake. Slight cheap electronic stench when you open them. 1 out 5 that I bought ended up not working. But the price was really right.

Unfortunately the love ends with larger than 2TB drives. It seems to say somewhere in the specs for the device. The model I have is old too.

But it is still a bit of a let down if a 3.0 Tb drive only shows you 801.57 GB in ‘Generic External Media’ in Disk Utility under OS X.

I remember having spent hours at a client in 1987 trying to get their whopping 30 Megabyte hard drive to work with the limitation of the initial FAT16 allocation table.

There have been countless problems caused by an “oh this kind of system will last for sooo long” engineering attitude since then. “Nobody will want to have so much space, speed, insert-thing-here.”

People seem to have a hard time estimating how long something will be around – and in what kind of world things might have to fit in.

Doing those underlying things ‘right’, making them easily extendable for instance, creates tremendous value.

If Amazon actually manages to continue to fully implement their SOA approach then we might be hearing from that for quiet a while. They are currently one of the few companies that positively surprise me when I interact with them.

We will see. And I wonder what kind of size limit the new drive enclosures have that I just ordered.