Today, I’ve been hunting down a bug in Mono for Android (4.4.55). This bug flooded the Android log with this entry (thousands of times):

02-04 17:09:32.010: W/(4300): Bad call to mono_mutex_lock result 11
02-04 17:09:32.010: A/(4300): * Assertion at /Users/builder/data/lanes/monodroid-mac-monodroid-4.4-series/6418373f/source/mono/mono/metadata/loader.c:2181, condition `ret == 0' not met

This flood of log messages made the whole deployment process very slow (54 seconds to deploy a fresh project).

As workaround I found that disabling Use Fast Deployment in the project settings “solved” the problem for me.

I’m still waiting for an answer from Xamarin on this issue. Update: This problem is tracked here.

Mono for Android provides a window to view all Android log messages directly in Visual Studio. However, you can’t copy these log messages.

Since I’m a well-behaved programmer, I filed a bug report for this.

For now, I have to use monitor.bat from the Android SDK’s tools directory to work around this issue.

For me, Windows Server Backup (2012) is actually a huge bug itself. Just have a look at my backup history:

Best of all: Every failure gives a nice cryptic error message (without any details), like:

• “There was a failure in creating a directory on the backup storage location.”
• “None of the items included in backup were backed up.”

• “The specified component was not reported by the VSS writer.”

So far, I haven’t been able to get a reliable backup via Windows Server Backup.

So, until I get this fixed, let’s start with something light:

Take a good look on how the dates are sorted. Nice, isn’t it?

Today I got this error when I tried to install an extension in Google Chrome:

After some searching I found the solution: I needed to go to google.com and log me in with my Google account. *sigh*

The screenshot’s message reads:

OKI-LPR service program is active

and it asks me: Yes or No?

Where the heck is question in this message???