MicahCowan

Blog: [http://micah.cowan.name/]

Email: micah@cowan.name

Launchpad: [https://launchpad.net/people/micah-cowan]

IRC: micahcowan

Activity

My activity in Ubuntu has been mostly bug triaging, bug-solution hunting, and bug fixing. I am also on IRC with fluctuating consistency. I sometimes lurk on #ubuntu and #ubuntu+1 and give support when I can.

Bugs I've Worked on

Showcases

• Helped LinuxProbie get his wireless card up and running.

  LinuxProbie gave me shell access to his box (which was connected to net via Ethernet), and also admin access (though I strongly advised against it). I walked him through setting up a multiuser screen program, so he could watch me input commands and see what their output was. We also used screen to chat during the process, by using it in split-screen mode to view a terminal with just "cat > /dev/null" running (similar to old-style Unix talk program). He was attempting to use ndiswrapper to support his Brother wireless card (the model escapes me). He had a ubuntuforums.com page that described how to disable the Free driver and enable the Windows driver in ndiswrapper. It appeared that he had followed all the instructions; however, the device was not being recognized. Through a good deal of toying around, it was discovered that:

  1. ndiswrapper does not work together with the specific driver that he was attempting to use (his was a Dell laptop, so he was using Dell-provided drivers; ndiswrapper, however, desired ones provided by HP/Compaq).
  2. ndiswrapper may have been of a too-old version, so we upgraded to a different version of ndiswrapper.

  The user was very happy to have his wireless card working properly, after we sorted these out.

• [https://launchpad.net/distros/ubuntu/+source/joystick/+bug/45930 Bug 45930]

  This was the first bug I dealt with. I was trying to run the jstest program on my USB joystick, but it wanted to segfault on a regular basis. My first response was to get a backtrace in gdb, but I noticed the backtrace happened during an attempt to print a string, obtained from an array. A little investigation revealed that an invalid index was being used into that array. I fixed the problem in the code and generated a debdiff. I'd found an already reported bug that fit my description, so I added some discussion, along with my patch, to the report. This patch went into the next version of the joystick package.

• [https://launchpad.net/distros/ubuntu/+source/tuxpaint/+bug/49079 Bug 49079]

  I happened across this bug by accident. I don't have access to the printer for which this bug was reported, and despite the fact that the guy who wrote the TuxPaint program is a friend of mine, I'm not a regular user of the program. I am, however, pretty proficient with the PostScript language, and since I was somewhat familiar with TuxPaint, my curiosity was piqued. I went ahead and looked into the code, and found a few points of interest that I thought might be contributing to the problems. I contacted the author of TuxPaint, and when I found out he didn't have much to do with the PostScript code in the program, I joined TuxPaint's development mailing list to discuss the problem and possible solutions. This resulted in a few possibilities, which I then submitted to the bug report for the reporting user to examine. Unfortunately, we haven't heard back from the user in order to verify whether the modifications have produced a solution. [http://sourceforge.net/mailarchive/forum.php?thread_id=30198556&forum_id=44504 Discussion on TuxPaint development list].

• [https://launchpad.net/distros/ubuntu/+source/gawk/+bug/58256 Bug 58256]

  Unaware that this had actually been addressed by this point in CVS (I didn't know where to find the current development version), I hunted down and found this multiple-free() bug over a weekend. When I pointed it out to the developers, along with a request for help as to approach for the fix, they responded that [http://www.nabble.com/multiple-frees-in-awk%2C-sometimes-leading-to-crash-tf3536179.html it had already been addressed in CVS]... :/ ...so I found the fix and submitted a debdiff to address the problem in the currently available package.

To Infinity... and BEYOND!