Happy New Year!

2016. It came rather quickly and seem to have gone rather quickly too.

What has happened this year? I learnt I needed to update my IF rules earlier in the year so that at least I post something relevant! I had one of my dogs hit by a car at the very beginning of the year.

But with those things, I get stronger. I get smarter and wiser. I get a little bit more confident.

2017 will be another successful year. :-( He's ok now.

I wish you all a Happy 2017. May all your goals come true... that means work hard!

Happy New Year!

Remotely printing on a printer behind a firewall...

Printing...

Today I needed to print something at home. My wife was there and she needed the document but didn't have a way of printing it herself.

So, how do you go about doing this? Well, there's probably a few ways, like creating a print queue using a shared drive and having a print server at home that checks that queue. Then you can upload the file to dropbox, gdrive or where ever you've shared the directory and get that printed.

But what if you haven't set that up yet? Well, depending on the printer and if you have a server/desktop with ssh running, you could tunnel it.

sudo ssh user@ext.er.nal.ip -L 161:pri.nt.er.ip:161 -L 162:pri.nt.er.ip:162 -L 9100:pri.nt.er.ip:9100 

Obviously substitute your external IP with the IP to get to your ssh box and the printer IP with the one for the printer you're trying to use.

This command by the way is for printing to an HP printer and worked fine for me!

-P

Happy New Year!

And 2014 is over, just like that.
What has happened this year? Too much to really. A grandchild, a wife with a Masters, new friends, old friends...
I wish you all a Happy 2015. May all your wishes come true.
Happy New Year!

So as you can probably tell, I've automated my response to when a New Year even happens. I did it with IFTTT (If This Then That) which is great. However... I didn't update the message for this year so I so elegantly posted the same message I posted last year!

This happened on Facebook and here as you can see.

So, Rule #1 when starting a new year. Update the message you're planning on posting! You don't need to have it completed, but at least the gist. So that if you haven't done anything and 20xx comes along, at least you have the right message!

Happy New Year - May 2016 be a great year for you.

-P

Happy New Year!

And 2014 is over, just like that.

What has happened this year? Too much to really. A grandchild, a wife with a Masters, new friends, old friends...

I wish you all a Happy 2015. May all your wishes come true.

Happy New Year!

Predictions for 2014

The New Year is here and lots of people are posting their New Year resolutions. This year I thought I'd try something different. Here are my New Year Predictions.

1. In the area of social media, we will find that all those companies that are gathering our tweets, Facebook posts, G+ shares, etc will finally start providing services that make use of this data. Thanks to Big Data Analytics and Predictive Analytics these companies will provide better discounts, more relevant and interesting advertising AND they will do it in such a way we won't even realize the complexities behind it all.

2. Space exploration will have some privately funded companies looking for new ideas by using crowdsourcing techniques and mass marketing.

3. Looking at DNA for techniques to prolong life has been going on for a while, but I think the next big breakthrough will happen this year. Now beating diseases like cancer is going to become even more important. Please donate to those doing research in these diseases.

4. Advances in cheap disposable computing device like the Pi and Arduino will make more DIY projects more appealing. Watch the big companies start to sweat at having these cheap device take over in the home. Thanks to this, educators will start to focus on technology again, making it more appealing to kids.

5. Google makes Glass more affordable than people currently expect it will be and finally opens it to everyone. In the $150-200 range. (OK that's just wishful thinking.)

Well, that is all I am going to put down for now. Now let 2014 begin!

Happy New Year!

It's a brand new year. People will start thinking about the things that they have accomplished and the things they wish they had accomplished.

I know that this past year was a great year. I managed to do so many things and a lot of them wouldn't have happened if it weren't for my wonderful wife.

Happy New Year!

Debugging a core? What tools do you use?

Whenever you have an application crash or become unstable and the worse part is that logs don't give you anything useful, what do you do? What tools could you use.

Well, one thing is strace. Running and tracing a process while it's doing its thing is one way. Crashing the process or generating a core with "gencore", gcore (aka gdb core) or something similar is another.

But what do you do when you want to capture the core and its dependencies on another machine to debug? 

On AIX IBM has snapcore. If you don't know this utility, read about it! It's a great tool but there is no equivalent in Linux. 

What can you do?

Well it turns out that gdb can provide a few things that make this easier. For example, gdb can list the libraries that are loaded in memory on the core. This is helpful so that you can gather those to bring in house.

So once you are in gdb you can do a "info sharedlib" and get this list.

Once you do that, you can collect the libraries that you need and use them to debug the core locally by loading them at the same time as you load the core and binary. You need to set some information when you are doing this.

I'll write another post with my way of doing this... and possibly a "snapcore" equivalent for Linux.

-P