work – Page 2 – Kiel the Coder

Office Treasure!

I love going into our office and exploring our kitchen / break room / storage closet when I’m waiting for my coffee to brew. There are so many strange things we’ve held onto for who knows how long. Like today, I just noticed this nice Pelican case sitting behind the refrigerator:

What treasure could we be hiding in such a nice case??

A Sanyo XGA projector?! It’s a $400 case for a $40 projector! I love it! I wonder how long this thing will sit next to the fridge… We should really clean out a lot of this junk we’ve been hoarding.

Org Capture

I’ve been getting better at using Org Capture to keep a work journal (as in, actually remembering to write in it). It was especially useful during Crestron Masters to keep everything organized. Org is a very powerful tool, and I’ve found that working with the parts that are easy to understand, it’s easy to slowly build from there. For me, that’s logging journal entries.

I stumbled onto Org by reading Sacha Chua‘s blog. She has an excellent post on taking notes more efficiently in Org. I’ve set myself up with 3 files to organize my thoughts:

journal.org – This is where I jot down quick ideas or reflect on something. I typically post links to tasks here as I’m working on them.
tasks.org – This is where I track progress on project work. Anything that could potentially have a TODO placed next to it goes here, then I link it into my journal so I remember the context for adding it.
notes.org – This is where I organize study notes on different subjects. It’s also where I’ll write down passwords or secrets if I’m using any type of 3rd party service.

So far this seems to be working well. It would be great if I could write everything in Org and export as needed. This might work well with my developer site, but I don’t know how I would be able to pull in posts and format them correctly in WordPress. There might be plugins that can handle that?

Org has helped me write more (one of my goals for 2020). I’ve been writing in my journal a few times every day since April 16th, 2021, and I’m already up to 16K words (plus another 7K in my notes). Org lets me tag entries too so I can quickly return to them. For example, I put masters on everything from Crestron Masters this year:

So if you’re looking for a good note-taking system, I’d recommend Org Mode in Emacs.

The Time I Almost Got Fired

Back in 2010, I had just started at a new company as a full-time AV programmer. I already had a couple years of AMX programming under my belt, and I’d just started getting the hang of Crestron and SIMPL Windows. Most of our engineering and programming team were East Coast-based but I was the lone West Coast programmer. On top of that, I was brought in with the expectation I would work on new installs as well as handle service calls. That meant I had two people I treated as a boss, and those two people rarely coordinated on my schedule. Anyway, I’m getting off-topic. Let me tell you about the time I almost got fired.

The Future of AV Programming: Part 5

It’s been about a year since the last time I thought about where AV programming is headed. The world was a different place then. COVID-19 has caused the shutting down of shared workplaces, diminishing the need for complicated spaces even further than before. What’s a programmer in the AV industry to do?

Easy Insurance for $10

I highly recommend purchasing an external SD card for your Crestron processor. They’re cheap and will increase the lifespan of the flash memory built into the processor. This one was only $10!

You can even setup logging to write to it instead:

> FORMAT
> RMLOGERR ON NOTICE
> RMLOGERR
RMLOGERR status:
    Current Log State is ON
    Current Log Name is /rm/RMLOGS/Crestron_00.log
    Current Size is 262144
    Current Number of files is 1

CP4

My employer purchased a CP4 for me to mess around with, and wow is this thing fast! File transfers are at least twice as fast. It’s hard to tell how much quicker it is since the progress window disappears almost immediately. I haven’t thrown any large programs at it yet to see how it handles, but I’m keeping my CP3 racked above it just in case. And then there’s the poor NI-3100 I need but once a year.

When Worse Is Better

Let me pull back the curtain a bit on how my work week ended up. I think this is a good example of Worse Is Better that’s worth sharing.

Crestron MC3 Tear-down

Saw another wave of failed MC3 processors while browsing the Crestron forums so I decided I’d better make a backup of my SD card while I still could.

To get the cover off, I had to remove all visible screws from the outside (including the grounding screw). There’s also a lock nut on the RF antenna that had to be removed. The whole board slides out from the rear of the unit.

Once out of the chassis, there are two plastic screws holding a daughter board down. I removed those, then pulled the daughter board out. This exposes the SD card below. I had to slide the SD card to the right to unlock the socket, then I could remove it.

Daughter board removed to expose SD card slot

Using Ubuntu, I made a copy of the SD card and compressed it for storage in my Dropbox:

$ dd if=/dev/sde of=mc3-sd-card.img
$ bzip2 -v9 mc3-sd-card.img

Now I have a copy of the SD card saved, I wondered what was actually on it. First I tried fdisk to see what it reported:

$ fdisk -l mc3-sd-card.img
Disk mc3-sd-card.img: 1.9 GiB, 2027945984 bytes, 3960832 sectors
Units: sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes

So fdisk didn’t detect any partition scheme. Maybe it’s just a FAT file system?

$ sudo mount -t vfat -o loop,ro mc3-sd-card.img /mnt
mount: /mnt: wrong fs type, bad option, bad superblock on /dev/loop6, missing codepage or helper program, or other error
$ sudo mount -t auto -o loop,ro mc3-sd-card.img /mnt
mount: /mnt: wrong fs type, bad option, bad superblock on /dev/loop6, missing codepage or helper program, or other error

What’s in this file? Using hexdump, I can page down and find messages about the Windows CE Ethernet Boot loader…

000219a0  31 39 3a 34 31 3a 33 33  00 00 00 00 4f 63 74 20  |19:41:33....Oct |
000219b0  20 37 20 32 30 31 35 00  57 69 6e 64 6f 77 73 20  | 7 2015.Windows |
000219c0  43 45 20 45 74 68 65 72  6e 65 74 20 42 6f 6f 74  |CE Ethernet Boot|
000219d0  6c 6f 61 64 65 72 20 25  64 2e 25 64 20 28 25 73  |loader %d.%d (%s|
000219e0  20 25 73 29 20 66 6f 72  20 43 72 65 73 74 72 6f  | %s) for Crestro|
000219f0  6e 0d 0a 00 50 52 4f 47  52 41 4d 20 52 45 51 20  |n...PROGRAM REQ |

I’m sure there is some information to be found reading Microsoft’s documentation. Maybe I’ll come back to this again someday?

The Future of AV Programming: Part 4

This is the final entry in my series on the future of AV programming. I started writing it over a year ago, but kept putting it down. It’s probably time to just get something out there and move onto the next idea. Getting my thoughts organized on this topic has been difficult because they keep changing. It’s an underwhelming finish, but the road ahead is widening, making it hard to pin down what’s good or bad about where we’re currently at.