i summon one kim

I’ve been writing in Markdown for nine years now, because it allows me to spend more time on content as opposed to formatting. Using it with WordPress has required a couple of bug-hunt sessions, but overall I feel it has been a time-saver.

This week I spent a little bit of time experimenting with formatting code snippets. While looking into my earlier writing I realized I’ve had an issue with code snippets repeatedly. Today I took the time to fix the problem by changing the Markdown parser slightly. (more…)

Debian 7.0 “wheezy” was officially released about a week ago. I’ve been running it on a couple of systems for a few months already because of the more recent software versions available on it. Today I upgraded one of the shell servers, a couple of days ahead of the originally posted schedule due to security updates to MySQL (DSA-2667). As usual for Debian, the upgrade process is well documented¹ and robust. However, here are some notes for upgrading the next instance. (more…)

Content management systems are being targeted by brute-force password attacks. Improve the security of your self-hosted WordPress blog by installing the Google Authenticator plugin. (more…)

Turns out one has to turn off File Vault to resize the underlying partition. However, resizing does not work when running off of the recovery partition (which you might be doing to run fsck on the primary partition). (more…)

SIP appears to be broken in the Asterisk 1.6 packages released to address DSA-2550. I resorted to a hasty upgrade to Asterisk 1.8 from backports. (more…)

I noticed my Cambridge Audio DacMagic Plus was no longer recognized by my iMac and music was coming out of the built-in speakers instead. I had no idea when the DAC had disappeared, as I hadn’t listened to music in the office for a while (and had been traveling for a week as well). I moved it to another USB port and it was recognized, but the signal it received was at 48 kHz instead of 192 kHz.

I tried:

• connecting a USB headset to the problem port: it was not recognized.
• connecting the DAC to a Macbook Air: the DAC indicated a 192 kHz signal.
• an SMC reset: no change.
• a PRAM reset: I got the USB port back, but still at 48 kHz.

My searches on Google weren’t turning up anything useful about the sample rate on USB Audio. Then I happened to search for just “imac usb audio 2.0” and started reading the top hit: USB Audio on the Mac. It has a section on Clock Entities showing the Audio Midi Setup tool.

For some reason the Mac had the clock for the external DAC set at 48 kHz. Using the dropdown menu I could set it at 192 kHz and all was instantly back to normal.