Just a problem I recently ran into. I have been using taskwarrior, an open-source time and task management tool, for quite sometime now. I wanted to find a way to synchronize it with my smartphone too and, sometime ago, found an unofficial taskwarrior app for Android that could synchronize via inthe.am. However, aside from not being very user-friendly, configuring synchronization with a taskwarrior server was quite convoluted and, to make it worse, after working fine for a few days, it completely messed up the data files both on the phone and the remote server. So, I switched to foreground which appears to be easier to use, easier to configure, and more stable and reliable (well, at least so far). Yet, I recently ran into an issue where it failed to synchronize while showing the following error:

Could not find property with key 'taskwarrior.auth.organisation' in 'file:/data/user/0/me.bgregos.brighttask/files/taskwarrior.properties'.

It took me a while to discover that the problem was actually with the way I was entering my user credentials. As it turned out, I was only entering the hash. But all it takes is a quick look at the label on the field to realize that I should be entering something in the following format:

organization/user/hash

Just doing that (i.e., doing the right thing!) solved the problem. The thing, though, is that I'm pretty sure it had been running fine before with only the hash. Oh, well. {link to this entry}

Not sure when it started, but I have been seeing this for a few days now when launching Firefox:

[GFX1-]: glxtest: VA-API test failed: no supported VAAPI profile found

Unfortunately, searching around wasn't much help. All I found was this entry from the Linux Mint forum, which ends up inconclusively. So, I had to turn to the source code. The error shows up on line 1172 of the Firefox source code. The next step is to find out where WEXITSTATUS is defined vaapitest_status, but I haven't had time to check that yet. It amazes how, from time to time, in spite of all the information available out there on the Internet, one still comes across cases like this. {link to this entry}

My son shared the following picture supposedly based on a quote by Bjarne Stroustrup, inventor of the C++ programming language:

The quote may very well be apocryphal, but I think it reflects pretty well the way many of us who work with technology feel like these days. It seems clear that we are not on a path towards simplicity, and never have been. On the other hand, taking into account that we continue building more and more complexity in every other field, this is not surprising. The question, though, is whether this is truly sustainable or, on the contrary, it is meant to end up collapsing under its own weight.{link to this entry}