Tech notes from all over. To be perfectly honest, we pay very little attention to our server logs. Not, of course, because it would be too depressing to contemplate the meager trickle of visitors, but because we are simply too insouciant to care about such petty things. Really. It's fine. Don't visit. See if we care!.... Hey! Come back!

Anyway, on those extremely rare occasions when I do peek at the logs, I notice that a fair number of Google-referred hits are the result of someone looking for some kind of SuSE or generic Linux information. Just to be of service to those lost, desperate souls, I suppose I should occasionally post something Linux-oriented. So here's this year's tip:

Say, for instance, that you use libgphoto2 and gphoto2 to allow your digital camera to interface with your computer, and also say that this set up usually just works, requiring no further mucking around on your part. Perhaps, after months of just working, the connection starts to fail, intermittently at first, but then regularly, to the point that every attempt to connect the camera to the computer results in the following plaint from gphoto2:

Error (-114: 'OS error in camera communication')

What will you do? I discovered, after a 60-minute period of debugging, logfile-combing, hair-pulling, and teeth-gnashing, that one possible cause of the problem is insufficient battery strength in the camera. The debug logs seemed to indicate that gphoto2 was asking the camera to initialize, and the camera never responded... I thought to myself, what would cause the camera to fail to respond, even though it worked before? while also pondering the camera manual's note that using the USB connector took a lot of juice. On a whim, I popped in some spare batteries.

Nothing.

I raged at the camera and computer some more, and popped in some brand new, just-bought-at-the-store-this-week batteries.... and all was happy again. O frabjous day! (Incidentally, the old batteries still had plenty of power to run the camera. Apparently, the USB connection has pretty major power requirements, relatively speaking.)

On a less happy note, I notice this week that Alcatel-Lucent is shutting down Bell Labs. Yes,
that Bell Labs. Now, that's depressing.

Posted by David Fleck at 28 August 2008 09:14 PM