till's blog

A Fan Error in this case is not when your Facebook fan page is down. I received this message after my Lenovo X61s notebook decided to quit and I restarted it. The screen said "Fan Error", and the notebook refused to continue to the boot process.

A rescue party

Of course this is the last thing you want on a Sunday evening, but in true GTD fashion, I wanted to fix it right away. Here's how.

Precaution

In order to not electrocute myself, I removed the battery and unplugged the notebook.

Get in there!

I basically unscrewed every screw there is at the bottom of the notebook, until it would let me remove the upper part of the casing and keyboard.

Then I tried to carefully clean the inner of my notebook from dust and dirt that accumulated over the past 14 months since I purchased it. I think had dust (and what not) from North America, Europe and South America in there. It was kinda gross. It really didn't look pretty. And that is despite all efforts to not eat and drink near it.

Fan

When I got to the fan, it wouldn't really move. Hence the fan error!

I forced it a little and white dust came out of it. So I decided to take more drastic measures and sucked it clean using my Dyson. In the beginning it wouldn't really move, but it took only a minute to resolve that. (Word of advice: If you are not super careful, the Dyson will try to suck in whatever it gets. So make sure to not vacuum the insides of your notebook. ;-))

Reassembly

Reassembly is pretty simple. The case clicks, and then you fill in the screws. IBM/Lenovo were smart enough to only use screws of the same type. There was a total of ten (or maybe nine), and they are all gone. So that must have worked.

Conclusion

Don't try this, unless you have to. And know what you are doing. This blog entry comes with no guarantees or extended warranty. Being able to fix little things yourself, feels good though.

I got this error message tonight when I tried to allocate another EIP from within RightScale's dashboard. So it turns out there is a maximum of 5 (E)IPs on all AWS accounts, but there's a contact form to request more. Meh.

I wish AWS would make this part slightly easier, e.g. by announcing a customer's own IP space.

This year's DevHouseBerlin is almost over, and this is what I managed to do.

Planet-PHP

Planet-PHP's code has been opensourced for a while and when I started setting up a planet for PEAR I wasn't exactly happy with what it did. Aside from the obvious PHP4 vs. PHP5 issues, the unfortunate lack of documentation, I don't understand why anyone wants to transform an XSL with PHP, to generate PHP. And the bottom line, it didn't work always and I didn't want to debug it any longer.

The notable features include:

• Restructured the code to only expose what is necessary in the document root.
• Fixed/improved configuration handling.
• Extended/improved templating.
• Code cleanup, where possible.
• Fancy URLs and front controller pattern using Net_URL_Mapper! :-)
• Webbased admin to add and remove feeds to the planet.

Long story short — the code is on github. It's semi-complete, on the list of things to do are removing the libraries which became obsolete, a (new) submit form, a cache and maybe re-writing the importer/aggregate script.

Also, kudus to Christian Weiske for contributing the admin and generally helping out. :-)

Scr.im

scr.im is a nifty service which allows you to spam protect your email address. So, for example, instead of display name@example.org on your website, you'd provide a link where people enter a captcha to see your email address. I know this is not compliant with the German law and what not, but I wrote a service wrapper for their API anyway. I'll put it online when I find time. The code is on Github, check the README for an example.

Net_URL_Mapper

I never had a chance to explore Net_Url_Mapper before and I must say, this is definitately one of the (many) raw diamonds in PEAR. Raw because its lack of documentation is not exactly helpful when it comes to adoption. Since I spent some time with the package on the Planet-PHP rewrite, I decided to contribute documentation. If you're anxious to check it out, follow this link, or wait until next week when the manual on the official website is updated.

[English: German content ahead. ;-)]

Habe eben bemerkt, dass der Mobilfunkanbieter meines Vertrauens (die Mobilcom) jetzt zu Debitel gehört, oder anders herum. Auf jeden Fall hat sich im Zuge dieser großartigen Fusion der Kundenbereich der Login grundlegend geändert — anscheinend habe ich jetzt einen Benutzernameich muss mich mit meinem Benutzername einloggen.

Auf zum Benutzernamen

Der theoretische Weg zum Benutzernamen (und neuem Passwort) ist wie folgt:

• Ich gebe meine Telefonnummer in ein Formular ein und bekomme dafür die Kundennummer per Email zugeschickt. Wohin weiss ich nicht. Zum Glück hatte ich da bereits eine Emailadresse hinterlegt.
• Danach gebe ich die Kundennummer und meine Telefonnummer in das nächste Formular ein und bekomme danach meinen Benutzername zugeschickt.
• Dann gebe ich meine meine Kundennummer und meine Telefonnummer in das nächste Formular ein um ein neues Passwort per SMS zugesendet zu bekommen.

Und dann kann ich mich schon einloggen!

Äh, ja.

Die Fragen die sich zu diesem Vorgang stellen sind:

• Warum habe ich jetzt einen Benutzernamen?
• Sind Telefonnummern nicht eindeutig genug?
• Wofür brauche ich eigentlich eine Kundennummer?
• Wieso kommen alle Daten nicht per Email oder per SMS?

Spontan ergibt sich sich hier die eine oder andere kleine Rationalisierungsmaßnahme.

Und sonst?

Ich bin bereits im zweiten Schritt gescheitert — der Benutzername hat sein Ziel nie erreicht. Außerdem gab's auch noch zufällig jene Meldung:

Danke!