Ubuntu: BUG: soft lockup - CPU#0 stuck for 11s!

So this post falls neatly under the "watching paint dry" category, so if you're susceptible to rage induced by reading terminally dull posts avert your eyes now. I've been having some interesting issues with VMs running on VMware server of late. Basically the problem involved kernel panics and…

FAIL of the Week: Caffè Nero

So this week I'm nominating Caffè Nero for a cup of coffee so utterly failsome I don't think someone with a kettle and frieze-dried coffee could do worse. What's even more annoying is that this kiosk has a La Marzocco machine. La Marzocco are widely held to be one of…

Working around uTidyLib's unicode handling

A couple of weeks back I was giving uTidyLib a hard time for exploding when passed a unicode string. (see FAIL of the week: uTidyLib unicode error). Looking further into using uTidyLib for tidying HTML I found there is a way to make uTidyLib handle unicode correctly. The workaround is…

FAIL of the week: uTidyLib unicode error

This week I’ve been having fun using uTidyLib, a python wrapper for HTML tidy. All was working swimmingly until I hooked it up to a custom form validation function in Django. The Python process on my mac kept crashing and I was wondering what the cause was since it…

Ubuntu Hardy: Setting up VMWare-tools from the CLI

First you need the vmware tools tar from the cd image. This is found at /media/cdrom once you've run "install vmware tools" from the server console. When I did this the CD didn't seem to be available even though it looked like it had mounted correctly. To…