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Wow, one month since last post. Thought I'd use some of the extra time I've got on my hands to post stuff. Wrong.

Anyway, here's a simple story to blog about a small recent computing incident... I had managed to fill up the startup disk. I had mostly ignored the OSX warnings, though I did some half-hearted attempt to free up some space by deleting the low-hanging crud.

But the other day the warnings turned out to having been warranted. Login failed to start the Dock; and also didn't start finder. Which makes you pretty restricted.

Mysteriously, logging in managed to slowly launch a Chrome process. Weird, I don't have it set to open on login, and it doesn't normally do that, but this weirdness saved my bacon. Although surfing was not possible since the network wouldn't work at all, which is weird. Which, by the way, made the system updater report the lie that there were 'no changes', after a couple minutes.

Now, how did Chrome manage to save me? Well, it was not Chrome per se, but the system menu accompanying an open app. Chrome was the only open app. No finder, no cmd-tab app switcher. In the system menu, there is the "Recent Items" submenu, with an Applications section in it. And there it was, the bacon-saver: Teminal.

So, using a Terminal session to clean the start disk leaving upwards of 1GB, after a logout and login everything was back to normal.

Learnings: launch terminal now and then, to keep it available in the Recent Items. Or heed the OSX warnings and free up enough space to be able to log in. Or perhaps one can make Terminal start during startup.

Or perhaps this idea might work: always keep a file of some size, perhaps 100MB will be enough, in the tmp/ folder. It should be deleted during system boot, which should free that amount of disk space. But creating it in a login script might offset the purpose.

Of course, the real fix is to have Dock not require disk space to start up. Or make the OSX low-on-disk-space warning explain what might happen if you don't act -- that'd scared me into action, for one.

AWS Alarm Super Easy to Set: Warning

Mea culpa: I must've not clicked the link in the confirmation email. Just tried adding my email, and now it shows up in the SNS console of 'NotifyMe'. Me bad,AWS good!

However... it would be nice if the AWS alarm GUI could warn me of such a condition as where a notification has no confirmed endpoints.

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In a previous post, I stated that the AWS alarm feature is super-easy to use. That may be the case, but it seems to not have sent me the notification mail I expected.

So now I am trying to find out information about what happened, and that turns out to be not so easy.

Clicking the link next to the alarm status icon gets you alarm info -- good. Then you can get history data pertaining to this alarm -- fine. And even some JSON describing what happened -- might be useful.

What seems not possible to get, is information about the action connected to the event. I am pretty sure that I filled in the e-mail field correctly, but what else might cause me to not get that email? So I want to check the settings in the connected action, which happens to have the name "NotifyMe".

In the "Edit" view, there is this information: "This is an SNS Console managed topic and cannot be viewed". 

That's an unexpected complication. By the way, 'SNS' means 'Simple Notification Service'.

Entering the SNS Console, there is no trace of the email I entered back when I created the alarm. Mysterious. 

Why did I think that it'd be easy, and Just Work? It's a rare event -- like diamonds -- when something just works. I should've tried the alarm out, of course. 

Maybe there is an email sent as confirmation when the notification is set. Then you could check that email, and if you don't get that email, something is wrong.