Today in Spontaneous Computer Drama…

Ran routine package upgrades, rebooted as normal and, upon logging in, was greeted with a black screen. Not actually the first I’ve seen that, but upon some poking it seemed KDE wouldn’t start because of a problem with XRandR, despite it all being installed.

Just as I was ready to reinstall everything from scratch, I found that Xinerama was enabled, which was preventing RandR from initialising. So, to any fellow souls desperately searching ‘RandR extension missing’ or, perhaps, ‘there is no XRandR 1.2 and later version available’, try this: make sure your …

There was an online discussion regarding ‘magic numbers’ in software – numeric constants serving an important role with no description or justification for their value – and one static analysis tool’s assertion that the only numeric constants permissible in statements are -1, 0, and 1. Although the significance of undocumented numbers in written software is often not readily apparent, sometimes the function of a number really is nothing beyond its literal value, and this sort of overzealous rule is guaranteed to complain about expressions whose intent actually is readily apparent – but none of that actually matters because someone soon ported the …