dpk’s weblog

Woo. Well, once I completely gave up on the TV I figured I might as well try to fix it myself. I figured I would probably destroy it in the process, but it was already dead, so what difference would it make? I followed the example found at Home Theaters Hack, which is for a larger TV, and basically made a little “pressure screw” assembly (looks almost exactly the same as Iscallio’s) and installed it in the metal frame surrounding the lower of the two left boards (when facing the back of the TV). The plate on the end of the screw is pressing up against the DNIE BGA chip. I guess it was enough pressure to get the thing working again.

At first I wasn’t sure where the chip would be. I knew I was looking for a BGA chip but I didn’t see one on the upper left board, and I failed to recognize that there was a lower board, so I went for the center assembly instead. The problem chip is in fact in the lower board.

I took apart what turned out to be the light engine after seeing a few BGA chips in there. After realizing my mistake I managed to put it back together again and had it installed in to the TV, but the image was shifted about 6 inches too high. I had to unscrew and rescrew the light engine assembly a few times to get it right. In the final attempt I heard a sharp crack — I guess that was the sign I had it in the correct position! (or, I got lucky).

I’m feeling like a badass now.

I submitted the I-1068 petition half full of signatures. I’m pretty happy with that, even though it’s a drop in the bucket when compared with the overall signature requirement. If you’re still interested in signing the petition, no worries, you can still sign the petitions at these locations. Today was merely the deadline for submitting them via USPS.

Like many folks around the region, I have in my hands a petition for I-1068: the Marijuana Reform Act, taken from a copy of The Stranger. This act calls for the removal of civil and criminal penalties of marijuana possession and use. I’m not normally a fan of initiatives but I feel that this is one area where our representatives have absolutely failed us, time and again, and will continue to do so for generations. Although this act would have no bearing on the federal government it is an enormous step in the right direction.

They need about 300,000 signatures in order to meet the legal requirements and have a buffer to cover for rejected signatures (which run at about 18%, apparently). Each petition sheet only has 20 blanks and I hope to fill them all. 4 down, 16 to go. Don’t be surprised if I come a-beggin’ for a signature.

There are so many great, bizarre, fun things in it. Like when a crocodile shows up, kills a few dwarves (one by lopping off his head). And then when you order a squad of dwarves to kill the crocodile you end up with:

One of the dwarves that was killed had a pet cat, and it reverted back to a stray (but apparently it kept its name). Unfortunately, the dwarves that were killed were the only trained masons in the fortress, so someone else will have to make their coffins. In retrospect, I should have created coffins earlier, just in case.

This game exposes so much detail for each dwarf and creature. It’s crazy. It tracks injuries down to the specific finger that was scratched. It’s definitely for nerds.

If you’re interested in Dwarf Fortress, I recommend checking out this tutorial rather than simply diving in. This tutorial was the first result for “dwarf fortress tutorial” but it also happens to be a good one. Don’t worry about it being for a previous version. I believe it’s all still applicable, and it will, at least, get you through the interface.

If I was at Google, I think my 20% project would be adding voice support to Google Calendar. It would be pretty sweet to be able to press a button on my phone and say “February 3rd, 3PM, doctor’s appointment, remind 1 hour”. It would read back what it heard and you’d say “confirm” to set it.

I guess it would be like Jott but free, and not requiring phone calls. Your voice would be HTTP POST’d up to the server or something like that.

I realize I’m probably way late to the game here, but for whatever reason I did not notice this problem until today. Comcast has started responding to bogus DNS requests, sending people to some crap-tastic search portal.

Up until now Comcast hasn’t given me too much to complain about. The service is reliable, the speed is good, they usually get techs out when needed. But this right here is despicable Internet-breaking behavior. I hope it backfires on them in a very big way.

They do offer a method that supposedly allows you to opt-out, I’m waiting to see how that works out.

I’m seeing some funky “new” (to me) behavior that I’m having trouble tracking down. Maybe y’all have seen it before. Using kernel 2.6.18-6-686 (debian etch), I can have a shell script open in vi, and suspend vi to run it. But on 2.6.26-1-686 (debian lenny) I get this error:


host:~/dir# ./shellscript -foo
-bash: ./shellscript: /bin/bash: bad interpreter: Text file busy


If I exit out of vi I can run the script just fine. I can also run the script with “sh shellscript”. strace reveals that the failure is happening super early on:


host:~/dir# strace ./shellscript -foo
execve("./shellscript", ["./shellscript", "-foo"], [/* 19 vars */]) = -1 ETXTBSY (Text file busy)


It looks like the kernel must be checking for exclusive advisory locks before proceeding. I have checked around Google and I see others have had the same trouble, and they’re always told to make sure the file isn’t open by some other process. But I can’t find where new behavior was introduced. Best I can gather, it’s just accepted as the norm now. Seems awfully weird to me.

UPDATE: As noted in the comments, the kernel isn’t doing flock before execve. It’s just preventing you from running commands if the file is open for writing. It’s old behavior. I only saw it now because old nvi didn’t keep the write file handle open (or at least, not in the same way) and new nvi does.

It’s official. Esther and I are now married. We don’t have any photos from the wedding (on our cameras), but it’s assured that we will be receiving digital pictures of us in various staged and unstaged poses. When we do, we’ll post them somewhere.