Author: mikal

This author has written 1340 articles

irtrans remote control stops working

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I've been using a Zalman HD160B media center case for quite some time, and I love it. It came with an irtrans based LCD and remote control built into the case, which has always worked nicely as well. Until yesterday when the remote stopped working. When I run the irserver command in a terminal so I can see the output, I get this: # ./irserver -codedump -debug_code -loglevel 4 /dev/ttyUSB0 Name : Version: D5.03.08 FW SNo : 18780 Capab : Power On; FW Cap : 3964953 USB SNo: Node : /dev/ttyUSB0 IRServer Version 5.7.08 [ 0]: D5.03.08 SN: 18780 Remote zalman compiled: 1 Timings - 45 Commands Total: 1 Remotes - 1 Timings - 45 Commands 0 CCF Data - 0 CCF RAW - 0 CCF Error No joy. Rebooting the machine, replacing all the batteries, and restarting the server all did nothing. The server still doesn't see events from the remote. I'm not sure how to determine if this is a receiver hardware problem or not -- I'm kinda out of other ideas. Suggestions welcome. Update: of course, disassembling the PC and reseating all the cables fixed the problem. I wonder if it is temperature related?

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Finding locking deadlocks in python

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I re-factored some code today, and in the process managed to create a lock deadlock for myself. In the end it turned out to be an exception was being thrown when a lock was held, and adding a try / finally resolved the real underlying problem. However, in the process I ended up writing this little helper that I am sure will be useful in the future. import gflags import thread import threading import traceback import logging ... FLAGS = gflags.FLAGS gflags.DEFINE_boolean('dumplocks', False, 'If true, dumps information about lock activity') ... class LockHelper(object): """A wrapper which makes it easier to see what locks are doing.""" lock = thread.allocate_lock() def acquire(self): if FLAGS.dumplocks: logging.info('%s acquiring lock' % threading.currentThread().getName()) for s in traceback.extract_stack(): logging.info(' Trace %s:%s [%s] %s' % s) self.lock.acquire() def release(self): if FLAGS.dumplocks: logging.info('%s releasing lock' % threading.currentThread().getName()) for s in traceback.extract_stack(): logging.info(' Trace %s:%s [%s] %s' % s) self.lock.release() Now I can just use this helper in the place of thread.allocate_lock() when I want to see what is happening with locking. It saved me a lot of staring at random code today.

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Bill the Galactic Hero on the Planet of Bottled Brains

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(Edited by Harry Harrison.) This book started off better than Planet of the Robot Slaves, but I found the random Star Trek and Star Wars rip offs in the middle of the book intensely annoying. This isn't so much a satire it is a disjointed list of ideas. I'm disappointed to be honest. [isbn: 0380756625]

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Foundation’s Triumph

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This book is pretty good. I'd say its the best of the three Second Foundation Trilogy books in fact. Unfortunately, you need to read the other two in order for this one to make any sense, which is a shame because the first one sucked, and the second one was ok. A lot of loose ends get cleaned up in this book. Why did Earth get abandoned? Why did everyone forget their history? Why is Trantor built much like the cities in the Naked Sun? Why are there all those habitable worlds for the galactic empire to reside on? It seems odd that there would be 25 million habitable worlds out there. There are other examples as well, but I wont bore you with them all. Another good bit of this book is the time line of all Asimov Foundation stories at the back of the book. I am sure it would have been useful to know about that earlier. [isbn: 0061056391]

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Belgarath the Sorcerer

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This book is a follow on from The Belgariad and The Malloreon written from the perspective of one of the protagonists in those two series -- Belgarath the Sorcerer. This book has quite a different style from the others. It is written in the first person as Belgarath's personal memoir. The book is really long at over 700 pages, and covers a 6,000 year (ish) period. That means that the book tends to skip around and over some things at a very high level. That's probably a good thing, as it stops you from getting bogged down in boring detail you don't care about. One problem with this book is that to people who have read the previous series, this is all old territory. You totally know what is about to happen, and that makes it a lot less fun to read. I'm also not sure I'm a big fan of the first person style either. However, I did enjoy this book more than some of the others I have read recently, despite it not being Eddings' best work. [isbn: 0345403959]

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Books read in October 2008

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Seeress of Kell Iron Master The Stainless Steel Rat Goes to Hell Magician: Apprentice Magician: Master Foundation and Chaos The Stainless Steel Rat Joins the Circus Silverthorn Bill the Galactic Hero: Plant of the Robot Slaves You Can Be The Stainless Steel Rat

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You Can Be The Stainless Steel Rat

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This is a Stainless Steel Rat book, although different from the norm because it is a choose your own adventure. Its also the last of the Stainless Steel Rat books in the series, and the only one I hadn't yet read. I figured I'd document my path through the story, so here goes: 30 - 42 - 62 - 90 Well, that was a disappointment. 90 makes no sense in the context (62 talks about meeting someone and deciding to talk to them, 90 talks about someone accepting a bribe). Lame, I think I found a bug already. Let's go with the other choice then: 30 - 42 - 62 - 14 - 99 - 106 - 65 - 48 - 67 - 97 - 186 - 33 - 12 - 65 I think I hit another bug... I was meant to go back to before a fight, but ended up after it instead. I give up. [isbn: 0441949789]

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Bill the Galactic Hero: The Planet of the Robot Slaves

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The previous Bill the Galactic Hero book was awesomely bad. This on starts out well: Bill, that's what they called him. They called him that because that was his name. I didn't realize when I started reading this series that only the previous book and this one are actually written by Harrison. The rest of them are actually farmed off to others, with Harrison editing them before publication. According to Wikipedia, Harrison later considered this approach to be a mistake. I think my confusion is at least partially because LibraryThing lists Harry Harrison as the author for the entire series. Overall I don't think this book is as good as the first one, and while its easy to read the style becomes annoying after a while. It was a quick read though. [isbn: 0380756617]

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Silverthorn

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The characters of the Magician Books battle a new enemy in this book. The book centers around Prince Arthura's poisoned wife and the quest to find the cure. There seems to have been some criticism of this book for being a fantasy cliche (something which people seem to say about a lot of Feist's books), but that's a pretty easy accusation to make with fantasy works -- they all seem to have the same basic them. I guess that's what a genre is -- a shared theme. The book is well written and quite readable. Wikipedia page on Silverthorn has this rather startling accusation to make: Since its release, the term 'Silverthorn' has been adopted to describe any book in a series (although typically the middle book of a trilogy) that has served little purpose other than to set up a climax in the final book. This term can also be applied to a similar phenomenon in film or television series. This style of book typically has little overall substance, and is often quite poor when compared to the other books in the series. That's a pretty unfair thing to say. This book has a story that stands on its…

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