Side point, and for once, some positivity
Feb. 1st, 2010 10:21 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
pyoor_excuseMy mum's G-Wiz decided to stick it's 'Service' light on during the very, very cold phase and snow. It has, during that time, been sat in my mum's garage on charge, so this came as a bit of a surprise. Thus it was that during our little sojurn in the garage of my mum's house, the MacBook was to be connected to the G-Wiz, for the pokeage of it's software and with the avowed intention of finding out what ails it.
With this in mind, en-route to my mum's we stopped off at Maplin obtaining a USB->Serial adaptor. Made by BAFO this item was on offer... and had two (not one) serial ports. How delightfully handily archaic I thought.
Unfortunately, when we got there no amount of poking, prodding, beating with sticks, insulting or denigrating publicly would coax the evil little pile of crap into being recognised as a USB Serial converter. It would go 'Hey, there's a Moschip USB Device' and then not load drivers for it, because they weren't the right ones. At least, that was Windows approach to it. MacOS just looked at it mockingly before stalking off.
Even remote-James-WindowsFu wouldn't make it work.
So I took it back to Maplin, expecting a fight - because if you plug it in it goes 'hey I'm here' just doesn't work *properly*. But no, all credit to maplin there was no problem at all. I went into some of the details about what we'd done to persuade it to work, and the guy offered a refund or exchange, and I came away with the Prolific USB Serial converter, which I installed the drivers for and which promptly worked.
Now I just need (a) a very long serial cable, or (b) to remember to take the Mac down to my mum's again.
Also on the positivity front - Topps Tiles, who when I bought the floor tiles said 'bring extras back when you're done for a refund' - well, it's been over 2 months since I bought them, and while the lowly store clerk wasn't sure, the manager said that he'd overlook the over 45 days (apparently on the back of the receipt it states it must happen within 45 days) because it's a tile they stock all the time. And so we now have the two edging strips we require to finish the flooring in the lounge.
So, big-ups to JLH (who rock), Maplin and Topps Tiles for all exceeding my expectations.
And big downs to the filler which has, for the 2nd time disappeared unused. I have no idea where it's going, but I really would like to know.
With this in mind, en-route to my mum's we stopped off at Maplin obtaining a USB->Serial adaptor. Made by BAFO this item was on offer... and had two (not one) serial ports. How delightfully handily archaic I thought.
Unfortunately, when we got there no amount of poking, prodding, beating with sticks, insulting or denigrating publicly would coax the evil little pile of crap into being recognised as a USB Serial converter. It would go 'Hey, there's a Moschip USB Device' and then not load drivers for it, because they weren't the right ones. At least, that was Windows approach to it. MacOS just looked at it mockingly before stalking off.
Even remote-James-WindowsFu wouldn't make it work.
So I took it back to Maplin, expecting a fight - because if you plug it in it goes 'hey I'm here' just doesn't work *properly*. But no, all credit to maplin there was no problem at all. I went into some of the details about what we'd done to persuade it to work, and the guy offered a refund or exchange, and I came away with the Prolific USB Serial converter, which I installed the drivers for and which promptly worked.
Now I just need (a) a very long serial cable, or (b) to remember to take the Mac down to my mum's again.
Also on the positivity front - Topps Tiles, who when I bought the floor tiles said 'bring extras back when you're done for a refund' - well, it's been over 2 months since I bought them, and while the lowly store clerk wasn't sure, the manager said that he'd overlook the over 45 days (apparently on the back of the receipt it states it must happen within 45 days) because it's a tile they stock all the time. And so we now have the two edging strips we require to finish the flooring in the lounge.
So, big-ups to JLH (who rock), Maplin and Topps Tiles for all exceeding my expectations.
And big downs to the filler which has, for the 2nd time disappeared unused. I have no idea where it's going, but I really would like to know.
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no subject
Date: 2010-02-01 12:43 pm (UTC)That reminds me of one of my very first paid programming gigs. The client had an ancient piece of legacy machinery that communicated via a serial port to a DOS-based user interface. The trouble was that the machine was somewhere in mainland Europe and they wanted to move the user interface over to their head office here in the UK. Nowadays I might just run the UI in VMWare or something on a small embedded PC next to the machine and access it via VNC, but back then bandwidth limitations ruled that out.
The solution I came up with involved the UI running under DosEMU on a Linux PC in their office, the machine plugged into a second Linux box in Europe, and a couple of custom programs I wrote that transferred the serial data and control signals via a TCP/IP connection.
It seemed to work OK in testing but the client kept complaining of terrible latency problems. After much time spent monitoring the network traffic between the two sites, I eventually traced the problem to a bug in my own code: for efficiency reasons it was buffering the serial data into 1KB chunks before writing it across the network. Where this failed is when the UI sent a short query and then sat around waiting for the machine's response. The query wasn't long enough to fill the buffer, so it didn't get sent out until the UI had timed out and resent the query several times. The solution was to set up a timer that automatically flushed the buffer if it wasn't full after 100ms or so.