CRiSP Weblog

I keep getting the "We've detect a problem with your cookie settings" in my browser. Google is the only site to do this. I hope they are doing this for good intentions.

I reported this on my blog a while ago. I put this down to the fact that I keep two tabs open to two different gmail accounts. Fair enough. You win. So now I run chrome+firefox to avoid this.

I just upgraded to firefox 29 - I dont know if this is at fault or not. But restarting ff with only one login to gmail and I get the *same* error.

Of course, I do a google search for my problem and google helpfully returns everyone with the same problem - telling me that having two panels open is a problem. Nowhere can I find someone reporting the issue with a single tab open.

It could be a cert issue. It could be a cheese on the moon. I am obviously not going to get an answer soon.

I am getting bored of having to manually delete cookies. Or, I can use my android phone - where I dont have the problem.

Is this progress?

I remember the day when my Pentium-233 laptop, with (cant remember now, maybe 128M of memory) was good enough to run Linux. I sit here on a 8GB RAM laptop, with FF at 1.6GB - I only have one tab open! Chrome at 1.4GB with one tab open; /usr/bin/plasma-desktop with 3.7GB of VSS allocated. Wow.

And I worry that CRiSP is using 10MB of memory...

In the beginning, gcc set out to outdo the native Unix C compilers. It did that pretty well. One of the key features of gcc was that:

$ gcc -g ..
and
$ gcc -O ..

were not complimentary options. You could do optimise and debug at the same time, and it worked nicely.

Nowadays with todays advanced optimisation selections, this is broken. If you compile with -O and -g, you get stuff like this:

2386                            int n1 = MIN(sizeof tbuf - addr - addr1, len);
(gdb) p/x w0
$2 = <optimized out>

What use is that? I want to see the value of w0, but now I resort to my trusty friend "printf".

What went wrong?

Linkedin has this annoying habit of sending emails if you do anything on the site. You have to pretty much not partake in joining groups, or discussions - else the volume of email is intolerable. You can manage per-group and other mail settings, but you should not have to do that. Why have a web site if everything you do is emailed also?

Insane.

I use LinkedIn - I dont add any technical contribution because I do not treat the site as an advert for my employer.

I get a once a week email from LinkedIn telling me the blindingly obvious (since I do frequent LinkedIn regularly).

I also have a twitter account. The blue icons of LinkedIn and Twitter confused me today. I got an email from LinkedIn and it suggested adding a group as a contact. BAD NEWS. DONT DO THAT.

I dont want more spam. I realised I had added the contact on LinkedIn rather than Twitter.

The contact is valid (a Pink Floyd radio station!) but that is not what LinkedIn is for. So I tried to remove the contact.

After a bit of googling, I did do so - but it wasnt easy.

I have since turned off all emails from LinkedIn.

FFS.

If you are a CRiSP user, please check this out.

Release crisp 11.0.29 contains a very nasty bug. If you attempt to uninstall this release, it will wipe out your "C:\Program Files" directory. DO NOT UNINSTALL THIS RELEASE.

The bug is not present in the prior or subsequent release - i.e. 11.0.28 and 11.0.30 are *good* releases.

You can happily reinstall a later (or earlier) release on top of the installed release. This will fix the issue.

A feature change to use the %ProgramFiles% environment variable during install, would have lead to crisp installing at "C:\Program Files" and not in "C:\Program Files\CRiSP".

If you suffer from this issue, you can manually delete the following folders which are incorrectly placed.

C:\Program Files\ORDERS.TXT
C:\Program Files\RELNOTES.TXT
C:\Program Files\COPYRITE
C:\Program Files\dict
C:\Program Files\doc
C:\Program Files\etc
C:\Program Files\help
C:\Program Files\licenses
C:\Program Files\macros
C:\Program Files\man
C:\Program Files\pixmaps
C:\Program Files\scripts
C:\Program Files\src

Before deleting any of these areas, please ensure they belong to CRiSP (by comparing with the "C:\Program Files\CRiSP" folder).

So, this is nice. Firefox panicced the kernel.

Apr 20 17:40:33 dixxy kernel: [ 7814.643765] BUG: Bad page state in process firefox  pfn:3c0e8
Apr 20 17:40:33 dixxy kernel: [ 7814.643780] page:ffffea0000f03a00 count:0 mapcount:-1 mapping:          (null) index:0x0
Apr 20 17:40:33 dixxy kernel: [ 7814.643784] page flags: 0x1ffff0000000000()
Apr 20 17:40:33 dixxy kernel: [ 7814.643789] Modules linked in: pci_stub vboxpci(OF) vboxnetadp(OF) vboxnetflt(OF) vboxdrv(OF) ctr ccm ipt_REJECT xt_CHECKSUM iptable_mangle xt_tcpudp b43 bcma ssb bridge stp llc xen_gntdev xen_evtchn xenfs xen_privcmd cuse ip6table_filter ip6_tables iptable_filter ip_tables ebtable_nat ebtables x_tables ib_iser rdma_cm iw_cm ib_cm ib_sa ib_mad ib_core ib_addr iscsi_tcp libiscsi_tcp libiscsi scsi_transport_iscsi dm_crypt openvswitch gre vxlan ip_tunnel libcrc32c joydev bnep dell_laptop dcdbas arc4 intel_rapl x86_pkg_temp_thermal intel_powerclamp crct10dif_pclmul crc32_pclmul ghash_clmulni_intel iwldvm cryptd mac80211 rfcomm psmouse btusb serio_raw bluetooth dm_multipath scsi_dh snd_hda_codec_hdmi snd_hda_codec_realtek snd_hda_intel snd_hda_codec snd_hwdep snd_pcm sparse_keymap snd_page_alloc snd_seq_midi snd_seq_midi_event snd_rawmidi snd_seq snd_seq_device snd_timer nvidia(POF) iwlwifi jmb38x_ms memstick snd cfg80211 mei_me lpc_ich soundcore mei wmi mac_hid parport_pc nfsd ppdev auth_rpcgss nfs_acl coretemp nfs lockd sunrpc lp fscache binfmt_misc parport usb_storage mmc_block i915 i2c_algo_bit drm_kms_helper r8169 mii drm ahci sdhci_pci libahci sdhci video [last unloaded: dell_wmi]
Apr 20 17:40:33 dixxy kernel: [ 7814.643940] CPU: 6 PID: 6307 Comm: firefox Tainted: PF          O 3.13.0-24-generic #46-Ubuntu
Apr 20 17:40:33 dixxy kernel: [ 7814.643944] Hardware name: Dell Inc.          Dell System XPS L702X/0XN71K, BIOS A10 05/05/2011
Apr 20 17:40:33 dixxy kernel: [ 7814.643949]  00ffff0000000000 ffff8801d2be5c50 ffffffff81715a64 ffffea0000f03a00
Apr 20 17:40:33 dixxy kernel: [ 7814.643958]  ffff8801d2be5c68 ffffffff817105fe 0000000000000000 ffff8801d2be5ca8
Apr 20 17:40:33 dixxy kernel: [ 7814.643964]  ffffffff81155cb8 ffffea0000f03a00 ffffea0000f03a00 01ffff0000000000
Apr 20 17:40:33 dixxy kernel: [ 7814.643972] Call Trace:
Apr 20 17:40:33 dixxy kernel: [ 7814.643990]  [<ffffffff81715a64>] dump_stack+0x45/0x56
Apr 20 17:40:33 dixxy kernel: [ 7814.644001]  [<ffffffff817105fe>] bad_page.part.64+0xcf/0xe8
Apr 20 17:40:33 dixxy kernel: [ 7814.644011]  [<ffffffff81155cb8>] free_pages_prepare+0x148/0x160
Apr 20 17:40:33 dixxy kernel: [ 7814.644018]  [<ffffffff81156621>] free_hot_cold_page+0x31/0x150
Apr 20 17:40:33 dixxy kernel: [ 7814.644027]  [<ffffffff8115b503>] __put_single_page+0x23/0x30
Apr 20 17:40:33 dixxy kernel: [ 7814.644034]  [<ffffffff8115b6c5>] put_page+0x25/0x40
Apr 20 17:40:33 dixxy kernel: [ 7814.644044]  [<ffffffff811762bd>] do_wp_page+0x2ad/0x7c0
Apr 20 17:40:33 dixxy kernel: [ 7814.644055]  [<ffffffff81005219>] ? __raw_callee_save_xen_pmd_val+0x11/0x1e
Apr 20 17:40:33 dixxy kernel: [ 7814.644062]  [<ffffffff81178854>] handle_mm_fault+0x664/0xf10
Apr 20 17:40:33 dixxy kernel: [ 7814.644069]  [<ffffffff817219a4>] __do_page_fault+0x184/0x560
Apr 20 17:40:33 dixxy kernel: [ 7814.644081]  [<ffffffff81110eb6>] ? __acct_update_integrals+0x76/0xe0
Apr 20 17:40:33 dixxy kernel: [ 7814.644089]  [<ffffffff811112fc>] ? acct_account_cputime+0x1c/0x20
Apr 20 17:40:33 dixxy kernel: [ 7814.644097]  [<ffffffff8109d76b>] ? account_us...

Just upgraded to Ubuntu 14.04 - going through the usual..."Oh dear" moments.

So far, I have had three issues. I note them here so that google can help others (depending if I have solved them).

• wlan0 issues - long ago had I given up on the Linux networking stack. Each and every release was broken. And this release is no different. What worked, stopped working. I have a startup script which does the things I need for each kernel I work on. I had the following line in my startup:

  wpa_supplicant -iwlan0 -c /etc/wpa_supplicant.conf &

  After some searching, and stumbling, this seems to work.

  wpa_supplicant -Dwext -iwlan0 -c /etc/wpa_supplicant.conf &

• I had to 'apt-get install kdm' to get my KDE desktop working. Took a few attempts to kill 'lightdm' and do a 'sudo kdm' to get back to work.
• Hm. Now my UK keyboard is a US one. Go to the KDE System settings dialog and reconfigure the Keyboard settings (under Input devices).
• Killed baloo_file - yet another indexer trying to eat the cycles on my machine. I want to rip out akonadi - simply appalling piece of software with no manpage describing what it does, or why KDE may crumble without it.
• VirtualBox is broken .. again.

  Heres the failure in the log:

  /tmp/vbox.0/r0drv/linux/memobj-r0drv-linux.c:1539:26: error: 'struct mm_struct' has no member named 'numa_next_reset'
      pTask->mm->numa_next_reset = jiffies + 0x7fffffffffffffffUL;
  

  I may wait for someone else to officially fix this. Or I may just comment out the line (or do a kernel diff to see what happened to mm->numa_next_reset).

  A brief google, shows, http://news.softpedia.com/news/VirtualBox-4-3-4-Released-with-Support-for-Linux-Kernel-3-13-404808.shtml references a 4.3 upgrade for the 3.13 kernel. This is dated Nov 30th, yet Ubuntu ships 4.2. Bizarre.

• Lets try compiling dtrace. "-liberty" has gone missing. A quick google lookup, and we use "-lbfd" instead. DTrace compiles fine now on Ubuntu 14.04.
• Perl Net::SMTP::TLS has gone missing again. My scripts for grabbing email rely on this. So a quick "CPAN Net::SMTP::TLS" and we are good to go.

So, I think I am done for now.

Lets get my embarrassment out of the way first. The last release of CRiSP for Windows (11.0.29) contained a silly bug. The installer defaulted to "C:\Program Files" instead of "C:\Program Files\CRiSP". After people mentioned that the install was going to the wrong choice of "Program Files" vs "Program Files (x86)", I switched to using %ProgramFiles% so that the C runtime and Win API would do the right thing - depending whether you installed win32 or win64 version of CRiSP.

I had been delaying resolving an issue with the uninstaller, which had been failing to remove the final registry entry - due to the fact that the setup.exe tool was distinguishing between a win32 vs a win64 install. (CRiSP still comes as a Win32 or Win64 application, despite all Windows systems supporting 64-bit as default; theres no real need for the 32-bit version, except it may be 0.5% faster or smaller in memory use; CRiSP will mostly fit into the L2 CPU cache).

As a reminder for history, CRiSP started life on an 80286 Unix system and was ported to Windows 3.1! Much of the internal structure hasnt changed in all these years, except to improve the bugs and the GUI.

Since we are talking about Windows, someone posted an issue on CRiSP and on investigation, its a bug in CMD.EXE. Very amazing. CMD.EXE is so old - dating back to Windows NT 3.51, and before. Its a bizarre application because it lets you have an MS-DOS style console window and supports a console API for DOS like apps. "CR.EXE" uses that to give the same BRIEF look'n'feel dating back to the early 1990s.

But a bug report - in 2014 ?!

CRiSP has a feature to display "[EOF]" as the last line in the file. You can turn it on (e.g. "set eof" at the Command: prompt). It displays in reverse video.

If CRiSP window borders are turned off (Alt-F1), then you will likely notice strange lines on the screen as you scroll around.

This is being caused because when in reverse video, CMD.EXE is adding one extra pixel to the left and right of the marked region. You can see this effect by compiling and running the following test program. The "[EOF]" is shown at line 10 and 12 of the console. If you arrange to enter text at the C:\ prompt as you get near to the "[EOF]" you will see the extra pixel disappear. Its easier to use a tool like ZOOMIN.EXE or "xmag" on Unix, to examine closerly at the delta.

Of course, CMD.EXE's bug is my bug, so I get to fix it, despite almost no-one in the known universe caring about this, except people who use CR.EXE (including myself).

Makes your heart bleed, doesnt it?!

#include <windows.h>

int main(int argc, char **argv)
{	int	i, j;
	HANDLE h = GetStdHandle(STD_OUTPUT_HANDLE);
	int	num_written;
	COORD coord;
	WORD	attribs[80];

	for (j = 0; j < 2; j++) {
		coord.X = 30;
		coord.Y = 10 + 2 * j;

		WriteConsoleOutputCharacter(h,
			"[EOF]", 5, coord, &num_written);

		attribs[0] = FOREGROUND_RED | FOREGROUND_GREEN | FOREGROUND_BLUE | BACKGROUND_GREEN;
		attribs[0] = BACKGROUND_GREEN | BACKGROUND_INTENSITY;
		if (j == 1)
			attribs[0] = BACKGROUND_GREEN ;
		for (i = 1; i < 5; i++)
			attribs[i] = attribs[0];
		WriteConsoleOutputAttribute(h, attribs, 5, coord, &num_written);
		}
}
c:\> cl test.c
c:\> cls
c:\> test

The DynDNS address I am using is likely to disappear soon. I have created a couple of replacement ones (most likely crisp.publicvm.com). If you are using the service at crisp.dyndns-server.com:3000, then please update your bookmark(s). I'll announce here anything "final". (I dont know if I will need to renew my DNS or if I will forget).

FYI, I added '/q' over the weekend - now I am being even more frugal! Instead of 2-4 x 100KB of data, I can possibly get away with 2-4 x 20K of data. At this rate, my PAYG SIM is going to last me a *year*!

(Just taken me days to resolve a google/cookie conflict so I can actually post this!)