Sun, 24 Oct 2004
Safari Bug Reporting
Props to Apple for integrating an easy to find bug reporting mechanism into their Safari web browser. I just encountered a very suprising and annoying behavior (basically, if you have edited a text box for a blog post in Safari, and hit Cmd-Q accidentally, Safari just exits without warning you first), and it really caught me by suprise (as I’ve apparently grown used to MacOS applications trying to prevent the user from making stupid mistakes).
Instead of having to cruise around looking for a bug reporting system on Apple’s website or looking at docs (which basically meant that bugs would never get filed), instead I find, under the application menu, a “Report Bugs to Apple…” item, which is quick, easy, and made me feel better.
Hell, after a tiny bit of exploring, I see that you can put a Report Bugs button on the Address Bar. That’s awesome! All applications should have this!
The funny thing is I don’t even know if they read those bug reports or not, but it doesn’t really matter from a customer support standpoint: it was very easy for me to let them know they have a bug. If they don’t act on it, then eventually I’ll end up switching to another application whose developers do react to bugs, but at least for now, I’m happy that it’s so easy to report problems to them.
smartmontools
smartd, from the smartmontools package, is one of those things that you
don’t really want to think about, but you probably should (at least a little
bit). It monitors the health of your computer’s disks using the S.M.A.R.T.
system built into most modern ATA and SCSI hard disks. It can give you
advanced warning of your disks failing, which can be just enough time to get
all of your data off of them.
The Debian default config tells smartd to scan for all possible ATA and SCSI disks, and to monitor the ones that it finds. Despite the comment in the config file that “most users should… explicitly list the devices that they wish to monitor”, smartd seems to do a good job of not getting confused by CD-ROM drives, RAID controllers, etc., so letting it do a device scan just simplifies its configuration.
By default, smartd will just log what it finds into syslog, but it can do
more. I like to have it email root if it predicts a drive failure, and to run
a set of SMART self tests. The SMART tests are non-intrusive and can be safely
run while the system is up.
The configuration file is sadly a bit cryptic, so you can can a copy from here:
The smartmontools package also includes a commandline utility, smartctl.
The most useful commandline argument is --all, which will query and display
all of the available SMART readouts from a device, like so:
smartctl --all /dev/hda
It will generate a few screens worth of output, so dumping it into a file or
less is probably what you want.