Blogs on semicomplete

Debian 13 boot loop on qemu

Sun, 03 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Everything was going nicely until Debian 13 was stuck in a boot loop. Qemu repeated the following, endlessly blinking in my terminal:

Booting `Debian GNU/Linux'

Loading Linux 6.12.85+deb13-amd64 ...

Why?

I’m developing a tool to help me build desktop VM images to help me debug weird issues specific to certain Linux distributions. For this project, I’m starting with each linux distro’s cloud image and booting it in a virtual machine using qemu-kvm.

Exploring the Fragmentation of Wayland, an xdotool adventure

Sat, 15 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000

In 2007, I was spending a my norther-hemisphere summer experimenting with UI automation. Born of those efforts, xdotool came into being when I separated it from another project. The goal was modest - write some scripts that execute common keyboard, mouse, and window management tasks.

The first commit had only a few basic commands - basic mouse and keyboard actions, plus a few window management actions like movement, focus, and searching. Xdotool sprouted new features as time rolled on. Today, the project is 18 years old, and still going!

In which LastPass gifts us a Sisyphean task

Sat, 04 Feb 2023 00:00:00 +0000

With recent news of LastPass having a significant security breach and also handling the public response poorly, there’s been calls to ditch LastPass.

From LastPass’ blog post:

The threat actor was also able to copy a backup of customer vault data from the encrypted storage container

This is encouragement to migrate. Bitwarden and 1Password seem like reasonable alternatives, at least for now, until fate comes for them as well.

Because the LastPass breach creates a threat that customer password vaults were copied, it means that any migration isn’t complete without changing passwords.

Instead of `npm install -g`...

Fri, 09 Dec 2022 00:00:00 +0000

We have some Sonos speakers at home, and I’d like my kids to be able to choose music when/where they like. The iOS Sonos app is somewhat labyrinthian, so I think, can I make a simple version of this? I figured a simple-ish web interface with buttons for their favorite albums and playlists. Could be fun?

I’ve been doing light web development since the late 90s, and I love learning new stuff, so I’ll pick something newer to use. With my eager eyes set on a goal to make a silly web app, I began reading through the Ionic+Vue tutorial. Then I got very delayed by a small side quest. Hello! With ADHD, side quests are my entire life. :)

GitHub: Finding changes since last release

Wed, 09 Nov 2022 21:00:00 -0700

Time for release!

It’s an exciting time. Or, it should be. I want to do a release of fpm! However, there’s some preparation I need to do before I can publish.

I need to make sure the changelog file is updated and accurate, and that means I need to know all of the changes made since the previous release. I don’t mean the code changes, though. I mean what behaviors were changed? Who contributed to the change? Is a given change related to one or more open issues?

Moving from Flickr to SmugMug

Tue, 10 May 2022 22:55:00 -0700

[ This post is a work in progress as I work towards solutions ]

I received an email from Flickr on May 9.

Subject: Your Flickr account is in violation of our free account limits.

You have more than 50 non-public photos on your free account.

They gave me 8 days to resolve it – with the threat of deleting photos. It’s been a long time since I’ve used Flickr, but I don’t want to lose the content I had uploaded.

Genie GPS1200IC automation with ESP8266

Mon, 03 May 2021 00:00:00 +0000

My garage has two doors. I’d like to be able to say “Open the garage door” to Siri.

To get there, I’m going to try using Home Assistant and ESPHome. First, though, I need to know how to tell the garage door to operate.

Both door openers are Genie GPS1200IC. Based on some brief research, these appear to have been made between 1996-2000.

Hack a remote?

My first attempt was to buy a remote and hook a microcontroller to it. I bought a Genie GITR-3 remote. This remote has 3 buttons. The plan was to wire an ESP8266 to the buttons of this remote.

Home Office Automation

Sat, 14 Apr 2018 08:58:56 -0700

I built a little digital Rube-Goldberg device for my office. When I turn my desk power switch on, a little microcontroller brings my workstation and stereo online.

My desk has a keyboard and monitor, but no computer. The computer lives in the closet a few feet away. Also in this closet is my stereo which drives audio to for the office. This makes my desk cleaner and quieter, but makes it hard to hit the power buttons.

Growing logstash's value

Sun, 29 Jul 2012 23:00:08 -0700

I spent a while today thinking about nerdy stuff - logstash, etc. I want to grow logstash in terms of performance, use case, deployment instances, happy users, and community.

While musing about on my mental roadmap of logstash, I found most things boil down to costs and returns on investment, even with open source software. Money, time, energy, and patience are all costs. Just because something doesn’t cost any money doesn’t mean it won’t consume any time or energy.

Puppet "pure fact-driven" nodeless configuration

Sat, 27 Nov 2010 01:14:37 -0800

Truth should guide your configuration management tools.

Truth in this case is: what machines you have, properties of those machines, roles for those machines, etc. For example “foo-1.a.example.com is a webserver” is a piece of truth. Where and how you store truth is up to you and out of scope for this post.

My goal is to have truth steer everything about my infrastructure. Roles, jobs, and even long-term one-offs get put into the truth source (like a machine role, etc). That way, if the machine with a one-off dies, I can just add that machine role to another system and puppet will configure it - no pain and no fire to fight.

Debugging java threads with top(1) and jstack.

Mon, 21 Jun 2010 19:24:23 -0700

At work, we’re testing some new real-time bidding on ADX and are working through some performance issues.

Our server is jetty + our code, and we’re seeing performance problems at relatively low QPS.

The first profiling attempt used YJP, but when it was attached to our server, the system load went up quickly and looked like this:

load average: 2671.04, 1653.95, 771.93

Not good; the load average while running with the profiler attached jumps to a number roughly equal to the number of application threads (3000 jetty threads). Possible PEBCAK here, but needless to say we couldn’t use YJP for any meaningful profiling.

SSL handshake latency and HTTPS optimizations.

Fri, 04 Jun 2010 02:33:15 -0700

At work today, I started investigating the latency differences for similar requests between HTTP and HTTPS. Historically, I was running with the assumption that higher latency on HTTPS (SSL) traffic was to be expected since SSL handshakes are more CPU intensive. I didn’t really think about the network consequences of SSL until today.

It’s all in the handshake.

TCP handshake is a 3-packet event. The client sends 2 packets, the server sends 1. Best case, you’re looking at one round-trip for establishing your connection. We can show this empirically by comparing ping and tcp connect times:

Headless wrapper for ephemeral X servers

Tue, 11 May 2010 01:59:47 -0700

For various projects I’m doing right now, I need an easy way to automatically run code in an X server that may not necessarily be the active display. This code may even run on servers in production that don’t have video cards or monitors attached.

For some history on this, check out this post on xvfb and firefox. You can solve the problem in that post by simply launching firefox with the tool below, and your X server will exit when firefox exits.

Xvfb + Firefox

Sat, 08 Apr 2006 03:53:00 -0700

Resig has a bunch of unit tests he does to make sure jQuery works properly on whatever browser. Manually running and checking unit test results is annoying and time consuming. Let’s automate this.

Update (May 2010):

See this post for more details on automating xserver startup without having to worry about display numbers (:1, :2, etc).

Combine something simple like Firefox and Xvfb (X Virtual Frame Buffer), and you’ve got a simple way to run Firefox without a visible display.