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Category Archives: Technical Problems

Hardware Problems

My laptop turned one-year old last Monday. What could be called remarkable for this gadget anniversary is the fact that I had legitimate cause to claim warranty in the allotted one-year period. It’s not a show-stopper defect that required servicing. It’s something minor though it’s one of those minor things that tend to be really annoying.

One day, the down arrow-key button just stopped working (or started over working depending on how you view the symptoms).

That day I noticed that Windows 8 automagically loaded even if I missed the 10-second period where GRUB asks you for a confirmation on the OS you want to load. I did not fuss too much about it since I was about to play Skyrim, and was going to boot into Windows 8 anyway. However, later that day, when I wanted to code and so had to boot into Linux, I noticed the automagic and started wondering.

In Linux, I noticed that the browser randomly scrolls down and scrolling up with anything (mouse wheel, scroll bar drag, page-up, up arrow key) had no effect as it just drags back down. Then I started switching workspaces via the Ctrl+Alt+Down key combo which just didn’t work.

This is where I started experimenting, starting with GRUB. With no further delay, I present you, the symptoms:

  • At GRUB, I noticed that the selection cursor automatically goes down to Windows 8 (the bottom-most option). From there, while in the 10-second grace period, you can still go up (by pressing `up`) but not down.
  • Inside Linux, I noticed that Ctrl+Alt+Left does not work as well.
  • Inside Windows, while in Notepad, the down button really does not work. All the other direction keys seem to be fine though.
  • Inside a terminal session in Linux, pressing `down` does not make your terminal command history go forward.

As I said, not really a show stopper. At vim, my text editor of choice, I’ve grown accustomed to using the h, j, k, l keys to navigate around my document; for everything else, I have a mouse with a scroll wheel. At bash, I seldom go through my command history via the up and down buttons anyway; I mostly use Ctrl+R (reverse search). As for workspace switching, I can still get to any workspace as long as up and right are still working and wrap-around behavior is enabled. But this defect just bugs my workflow, not to mention the annoying scroll down browser behavior told earlier.

As when this happened, the machine is still under warranty, I thought it prudent to claim it. Everything’s fine, save that I went to this year’s GDG Philippines DevFest without a laptop. I had to leave it with Acer for three weeks as they ordered a new keyboard. Those three weeks, I managed to sleep on time and devote time to my other hobbies.

I wonder what could’ve caused it though.

Now, I’m having another problem, still minor but perhaps less annoying. For some reason, USB mice are working very erratically with my laptop. At first I thought that the one I’m using just failed. I’ve been using it for less than over a year and it’s not any recognizable brand but one that has sentimental value; I wouldn’t want to let it go too easily.  But I just bought an A4 D530FX, saw that it works well with my computer at work but not with my laptop. I’m not sure if I should feel happy or sad that I seem to have established that my no-namer, sentimentally-important mouse is still fine1 but my laptop may be in for another maintenance check.

(In retrospect, I could’ve saved myself a few hundred pesos by plugging my sentimentally-important mouse to another computer—like the laptop my sister is using, or the old Windows XP desktop which we only keep for printing, or the beast I use at work—and check if its working fine there. Oh well, back-ups can still be considered an investment no?)

It’s not a big problem as the touchpad is still working fine. What suffers is my Skyrim. Damn. :(

With that all said, I’m still pretty pleased with my laptop. Though I, as part of being a “wise consumer”, do check out reviews of products before buying them (especially when I buy uber-new products, like what I did with my XPeria Z), I do not place that much value in them. It seems to me that most reviews today come from people who have just used the product concerned for a test drive, just in time to write a blog post about it (and get their paycheck). Well, I’m buying things not to use them for a test drive but for a pretty long time. I’d actually like to see my purchases as investments.

After a year, I think I’m in a position to make a short review of my laptop no? Quoting from this blog’s “About” page as of this writing:

Unit Model: Acer Aspire V3
Processor: Intel Core i5 (2.5GHz) with Turbo Boost up to 3.1GHz.
RAM: 4GB DDR3
GPU: NVIDIA GeForce GT 630M with 2GB dedicated VRAM
Operating Systems: Linux Ubuntu 12.04 LTS (Precise Pangolin) and Windows 8

So well, the pros: I think it looks really sleek. It’s no MacBook, but I find the design really aesthetically pleasing. It is not as light as I would’ve wanted (when I bought this, it was due to an emergency; it was still quite out of spending schedule) but I’ve no issues with weight since, unlike when I was in undergrad, my laptop mostly sits on my desk at home now. Plus points for having the order of the Ctrl, Fn, and Super2 keys in the same order as my previous one.

The specs may not be top-notch but it is sufficient for games (Skyrim, Civ V, KingsRoad, anyone?) and the side projects I’m doing. I find that Windows 8 really plays nice with it, though it is not a touchscreen model. Though I think it must be said that I’m way more pleased with Windows 8 than your average Lifehacker commenter.

And yes, there are cons: one of my very first issues with it is that it doesn’t have any indicator if I’ve my Caps Lock on. It may not be a big issue for most users but it does bug me: imagine getting your web passwords wrong only to find out that you’ve accidentally hit Caps Lock on. There’s also this weird bug it has on Google Chrome where GC suddenly hangs for no apparent reason. It happens for both Windows and Linux but Linux does not seem to be able to recover. I’ve checked the logs, reported, and Googled about this bug but I don’t find much. I guess it’s an architecture-level issue, then? I’ve switched to Chromium in an attempt to isolate the problem further but to no avail.

 

So, hey, a keep-alive. Between me not being able to keep my New Year’s Resolution (at least the part that tells me to write about my experiments here) and some other problems, personal and/or technical, I’ve been going through lately it feels refreshing to be actually writing in casual English instead of code.

See you around! ~Chad

  1. Though you may say that this needs further testing, I noticed that it works quite well in Linux but really annoyingly erratic in Windows. So yes, sentimental value and all it must be still fine. [↩]
  2. The one with a Windows logo printed on it. [↩]

Ubuntu WiFi Problems

Ever since I got my new laptop and upgraded to Ubuntu 12.04, I noticed that my WiFi has been very unsteady to the point that for anything greater than 100MB, my most reliable download method would be via torrent, unless the server I’m downloading from supports resuming downloads, which is never. That’s a shame since not everything > 100MB can be found in P2P networks. I also noticed that Ubuntu 12.04 oftentimes took ages to connect to our WiFi network upon start-up. This isn’t the case with 10.04 and Windows 8. Unfortunately, the last time I felt this frustrated with WiFi connection upon start-up was with Windows Vista.

At first I thought it is an issue with our router which is around 3-4 years old—a suspicion I got pretty confident with upon checking my ping and traceroute logs. My pings averaged at around hundreds of milliseconds, sometimes even up to 800ms, while the normal was only at around 50ms to 60ms. Traceroute, on the other hand, times out intermittently and, noticeably, on the first hop towards our router (192.168.0.1).

I got a replacement for our router around a month ago and, to my disappointment, the problem persisted. My ping and traceroute returned to normal but the WiFi remained choppy while connected and initial connection upon start-up still took ages. I’ve been searching for a solution for this problem but every solution I come across seem to be very hardware specific (check those network cards, geeks) and involved building some low-level modules. For what it’s worth, it seems that this problem boils down to a conflict among the wireless drivers that come with 12.04.

Then somewhere, in my searches, I encountered a post in Ubuntu Forums which looked like a general solution to the problem I am having. This, as the command suggests, installs a backport of wireless drivers into your machine:

sudo apt-get install linux-backports-modules-cw-3.3-precise-generic

Now, my Ubuntu 12.04 instantly connects to our WiFi upon start-up, just like my old 10.04 installation.

The WiFi still cuts though, something which I’ve pinpointed to be a fault of the router (or, maybe, how I’m positioned with respect to the router): I noticed that my XPeria Z, stationed on the same desk, also gets disconnected. For what it’s worth, reestablishing connection is now faster since I backported my drivers.

…And I’m Live (Again)!

There. I beat my deadline. The main site is live again! Yay!

But that is not to say that I got this without glitches. Let’s see…

After feeling good with the WordPress site I developed locally, I pushed it live by uploading all my local files (and changing password-related configs) to my server. However, I noticed that all my links start with “localhost”—they are pointing to the local version I developed. The only page I can view from my remote site was the home page.

The fix is easy enough. I just had to change all option values in the wp_options table of my WP site so that they don’t refer to localhost. To that end I ran the following query in my database:

UPDATE wp_options
SET option_value = REPLACE(option_value, 'localhost/', '');

Note: be careful when running queries like this. The pattern matching went fine for me but some future version might use the term ‘localhost’ for something else. Always back-up before running! Also, you could’ve set this option up in your WP Admin. Just go to Settings -> General and change the URL-related settings. I wasn’t able to do it in this case because even the WP Admin was getting redirected to localhost!

So, after running that, I got my links good. However, clicking on the links returned a status 500 error (Internal Server Error)!

Googling around, it seems that this has something to do with my .htaccess . The .htaccess is a config file for web servers famous for allowing URL rewriting. It’s the magic behind http://skytreader.net/journal/post-title instead of http://skytreader.net/journal/post-title.php. You can also do cool (or sick, depending on your tastes) things with it like having pages with a .exe extensions (or pointing unsuspecting users to a normal .html page but is actually a sketchy .exe download). Here’s one tutorial I’m quite fond of.

Anyway, my .htaccess looked like, this:

<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /skytreader.net/
RewriteRule ^index\.php$ - [L]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /skytreader.net/index.php [L]
</IfModule>

Now, I had no idea what to do with my .htaccess to prevent the status 500 from happening. Thank goodness that kodeplay itself is WordPress-powered. So, I just patterned it from kodeplay’s .htaccess:

<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteRule ^index\.php$ - [L]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /index.php [L]
</IfModule>

Aaaaannnd voila! Main site up and running! (Though, I won’t be surprised if there are still bugs with my launch.)

It seems that WordPress has a tutorial for migrating WP set-ups. Guess I should’ve read that first no?

Now, a TODO: Write a new entry on my main blog. The most recent one is now more than a year old!

Removing Draft Pages From WordPress’ Navigation

Still working on my revisions for my personal site. It was on full throttle last December but had to take a backseat due to work and something I’m preparing for. Oh well…I’m trying to meet a personal deadline of end-of-this month to mid-February (Feb 16! Mark the concrete date!).

It’s not exactly a tough project but, being the OC guy I am, I’m making sure all ends are ironed well and that’s what’s taking my time. To meet my deadline, I had to cut certain pages (not posts) for which I only have a vague idea as to the content they’ll hold. It feels so long since I did some creative writing.

Now, I ran into a problem removing them from my nav bar (since I don’t want users to see not-even-baked pages, right?). I thought that marking them as “draft” would do the trick. However, they remained on my nav bar.

I’ve been looking into the database and how WP queries for the navbar’s contents, to no avail. There are forum posts regarding this, both I’ve found to be two years old, not to mention not-at-all helpful. That’s when I realized that, last December, I was able to customize my nav bar from the CMS itself, as opposed to hacking the code.

appearance_menus

After some clicking-around the CMS I found what I’m looking for in “Menu” under the “Appearance” tab. You should see some click-and-drag interface for managing what appears on your navbar.

It seems that publishing a page automatically adds it to your navbar but marking it as “draft” does not trigger anything. To make things worse, users not logged-in as an author will hit a 404 if they click a “draft” link. If you are a registered author on the WP site concerned, you’ll still see the actual content. Tsk. First timers might miss the fact that their users will hit a 404.

That’s all for now. Keep coding ~Chad.

Another UEFI problem!

So, I noted here the hell I went through just to get Windows 8 to dual-boot with Ubuntu 12.04. However, just today, I had another problem with it.

To recap, I settled with my system unable to load Windows 8 from GRUB. I resorted to using rEFInd to be able to choose between Ubuntu and Win8. This isn’t a very clean solution as my Ubuntu option at rEFInd still loads GRUB (as opposed to having Ubuntu straightaway) but hey, it works.

Well, just this morning, as I booted into Ubuntu, I was greeted by a message from rEFInd which, in essence, tells me that Secure Boot is not allowing me to load grubx64.efi . Puzzled as it was only last night that I used Ubuntu, I did not see any cause to panic as the workaround is something I’ve mastered during my previous tussle with Secure Boot: I just need to (re)authorize grubx64.efi from my BIOS.

I rebooted to do this. However, when I booted into Ubuntu, I was greeted with a message that really made me panic. It read,

error: Secure Boot forbids loading module from (hd0, gpt7)\boot\grub\normal.mod

grub rescue>

Like, what the hell is normal.mod, much more (hd0, gpt7)?! I’ve encountered hd’s and gpt’s in my readings during my dual boot session last time but they were never really clearly explained and I haven’t bothered to look into them deeply.

After moving around (very carefully!) around my BIOS, I noticed two things:

  1. Some new entries has been added into my boot order list and it has definitely changed. I remember leaving the Windows Bootloader at the bottom of the list but it is now at the top of the list; and,
  2. There is an option to disable Secure Boot.

Yes. I don’t know why I haven’t noticed that I can disable Secure Boot before but disable it, I did. I can now boot into Ubuntu again. What’s more is that it fixed the rather-convoluted set-up I had with rEFInd: I can now boot into Windows 8 from GRUB though it still shows some errors which I can bypass with just a button press.

So, is Secure Boot actually good for anything aside from annoying people and wasting time?