brad's life

Last week I noticed that my keyboard input would "jam" every so often. In the middle of a word, no new letters would appear. This was followed by some horrendous high-pitched sound from the computer. (then again, I can hear this computer's memory access....)

Worse, after the 3-4 second pause, whatever key or keys IIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIOUIIDL was hitting last would spew to the screen. See all the gibberish in that last sentence? It did that.

Can you imagine how annoying that is programming or doing sysadmin work?

So naturally I assumed it was my fancy kinesis chair-mounted keyboard at fault. Which meant a lot of time, labor, and money before it'd be fixed.

It got so bad that I switched to another keyboard.

No change.

So now I'm assuming it's the PS/2 port.

The next day I bring in a PS/2 to USB converter.

First thing I notice: the damn adapter seems to have its own key repeater built-in, in addition to the one already in X, so when I hold down a key, holy shit does it fly. Fucking useless. But it's unpredictable.

Second thing I notice: the lockup and gibberish problems still persist.

So it's not the keyboard, and it's not the PS/2 or USB ports.

Kernel? Haven't touched my kernel since March 1st, and nothing's in dmesg.

So I'm at a loss.

Ideas?

In the past week or so I've become flooded with patches for Danga::Socket, Perlbal, MogileFS, etc. Not sure what the recent interest is. Normal slow growth/acceptance I guess.

Qpsmtpd now requires Danga::Socket I hear, and GUBA (NSFW) uses Perlbal (with internal reproxy) for permissions/auditing. I guess they're also starting to use MogileFS.

The GUBA people sent me a patch to Perlbal to add byte range support, so now LiveJournal and PicPix and MogileFS get that for free.... nice!

Also gave mart cvs commit access a few weeks prior so he can commit LJ-related things and I don't have to deal with his regular patch flood as much. :-)

I made Danga::Socket portable the other day, and now Perlbal is portable as well, using IO::AIO instead of Linux::AIO.

So I'm pretty happy. Sucked having such a wonderful codebase that only ran on x86 Linux and only we used. Looks like that's changing pretty quick.