Author: Jamie Flournoy

Leopard GUI Crashes – Not Parallels but Canon?

I had some serious Leopard stability problems recently. I thought I had found the problem but I was wrong then.

This time I’m pretty sure I’ve gotten rid of all the badness. I’ve had almost 2 days of continuous uptime, which may not sound like something to get excited about, but it sure beats the 4-6 hour average uptime I’ve had for the past few weeks.

I’ve spent so much time on this that I’m not willing to put in the extra 4-8 hours it would take to really truly isolate this issue. But my best guess is that it was the Canon drivers for my recently purchased Canon PIXMA MX310 multifunction printer. Specifically I think it’s the scanner driver, but I’m not certain. If so, that would mean that the culprits were BJUSBLoad.kext and BJUSBMP.kext in /System/Library/Extensions.
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Document Databases – New Kids on an Old Block

There’s a new crop of databases that has appeared lately, under the rubric of “document databases”, and there’s quite a lot of enthusiasm for them given that they tend to be slow and very feature-poor compared to the SQL RDBMSs that are the typical persistence mechanism for web applications. What’s mainly appealing about them is that they are easy to use, and theoretically quite scalable, compared to the traditional “one big SQL database server” approach.
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Upgrading to Ubuntu 7.10 “Gutsy Gibbon” on Xen

I have a VPS hosted at RimuHosting.com. I waited a while (3 months) for bugs to be squashed before upgrading it to Ubuntu Linux 7.10 (“Gutsy Gibbon”). There was one new issue.

BTW, my non-Rimu home server was the first thing I updated. Notes are here.

The only Xen wrinkle is that you need the libc6-xen package. I don’t know if that’s in Feisty or not. In my case I experienced a slew of scary Segmentation Fault errors in the package configuration stage. I found :this post which contains a solution for the problem. But if possible you might want to try installing that package before upgrading. If that doesn’t work, just use the method described in that post.

After doing that and running dpkg --configure -a, it was okay. It did complain about AppArmor and being unable to do something with modules, but that seems to be not germane to Xen so I ignored it and rebooted, and everything seems fine.