How to get answers on a developer or help IRC channel.

I’ve spent the better part of two years working on a very technical project. I don’t personally know many people who are able to really help me with the technical side of things. As my environment has little solid documentation, I had nowhere to turn but the developer community’s IRC channel and mailing list.

When I started out, I was relatively new to the whole “IRC as a method of running a project” thing and found it rather frustrating (sometimes I still do). When I asked for help with a problem I was having, I would usually start out by trying to be civil, introducing myself and framing the problem at a high-level so that people interested or knowledgeable about the area would pipe up. I never got a response and I couldn’t understand why.

Recently, I’m finding myself on the opposite side of that interaction, ignoring the person asking for help because I don’t feel like asking for more information about their issue. For all of the people out there experiencing frustration while trying to get help, I wanted to provide some advice on the subject of getting what you want:

  • Culturally, developer communities are usually filled with very technically-mind individuals, each with different skill-sets. They aren’t usually interested in using the channel as a form of interaction or a chatroom. They want to solve their problems, keep up to date on the latest developments (by reading other people’s posts) and sometimes pipe in when they know something.
  • Don’t bother asking if anyone ‘knows about a thing’. Most of these people are at work while on the channel and are working on projects of their own. They aren’t watching the channel eagerly to help young bright minds who want to ask high-level questions which demand long, explanatory answers. People are busy! Don’t waste their time.
  • People in these communities are usually most interested in the technical issues. Ask technical questions and provide enough information that they can try and answer it concisely and without asking for more context or information.
In summary, when you need a question answered just keep it simple, keep it technical, keep it professional. If you are using software X, instead of asking “does anyone know anything about X?” try “While using X, I used feature Y and Z happened.”, copy error messages, version numbers and everything you can think of that might be useful.


Good luck.

 

Converting those pesky .m4a files to .mp3 on Linux

Here is a nice one-liner to convert a .m4a audio file to a .mp3 file:

$ faad -o - input_file.m4a | lame - output_file.mp3

Note: Make sure you have lame and faad installed. In debian they are just ‘faad’ and ‘lame’ packages.

Vim: Use selected text as input to a shell command


This is most likely common knowledge but I keep forgetting how to do it. If you want to run shell command on a small section of text in file you have open in vim, here is how.
Read more

Workviz

Workviz is a prototype tool I built for viewing live server metadata in a compact way. The original intention was not to create an admin tool but rather a way for human’s to use their natural pattern recognition to identify properties in a server cluster. Written in python, using NumPy and VPython, Workviz displays a 3d representation of user-selected metrics about any number of physical machines. It also supports simulations by creating alternate “Workload Generators” and inserting them on the fly.

Here is the Project Page.

Writing to a file from the Kernel

Writing to a file in C is a fairly trivial affair. The Linux kernel does not have access to the usual user-land tools for interacting with files. Because this is generally a highly frowned upon practice (consider that a disclaimer) It took a while to pry the functions in question out of the people who knew them. A “preferred” technique would be to pass the parameters in via IOCTLs and implement a read() function in your module. Then reading the dump from the module and writing into the file from userspace. That just seemed like a lot of work for a one-time test so…
Read more

ImportError: No module named xen… on fresh compiled Xen 4.0.1 with Debian/Ubuntu

This took me a few hours to find in the mailing list and I thought I would share it with a title that people would find if googling for a solution. Read more

SBx00 Azalia HDA sound with Debian Squeeze

I got a new motherboard yesterday with an integrated ASUS chipset and SBx00 Azalia (Intel HDA) audio card. The sound worked out of the box and then after installing the FGLRX video driver, it suddenly stopped. Anyway, long story short I noticed a message in /var/log/kern.log talking about the snd-hda-intel driver “failing to set MSI” whatever that is.

Read more

Debian Squeeze + Xen 4 + Kernel 2.6.32.27 = Misery

I recently moved my Debian Squeeze development platform from the 2.6.31.10 kernel and Xen 3.4.3 to 2.6.32.27 and Xen 4.0.1. I really must say this has been both a learning experience and…to put it lightly, a vortex of never-ending agony from which there is no hope of escape. Read more

Debugging Kernel hard locks with netconsole

There is already plenty of literature in this subject, I just thought I would throw in my vote.

Currently I am building a pair of kernel tools. As i have learned, debugging more complex kernel modules could be considered an art of it’s own. A rather large and fuzzy section of my code is causing a hard lock of my entire test system. Unfortunately because this is a hard lock (entire kernel is in an corrupted and unrecoverable state) none of my debugging output makes it to the daemons responsible for displaying them before the entire system grinds to a screeching halt.
Read more

Attachmate’s Canadian Offices

I was listening to one of my favorite podcasts today when the topic of the Attachmate acquisition of Novell came up. I had heard about this a while ago but decided to go take a look at Attachmate website because I hadn’t heard of the company before. I often like take a look at where large companies have offices (if any) within Canada simply because I am always in the market. There were a surprisingly large number of offices in Canada, nearly one in each province. I then noticed the addresses and thought it was amusing enough to share them.
Read more

Return top