It was held entirely in a parking lot – there was no street driving portion. There were no speed related tests – no braking, no swerving, no cornering at speed. The whole test consisted of driving around a tiny course painted in an area of the DMV parking lot. You have to drive around it twice, once with a slalom around some cones, and once with a couple of straight portions instead. There were no points, just pass or fail. If you drove outside the lines, hit a cone or put your foot on the pavement, you failed. That was it. Crazy.

Also, while I was waiting to get plates issued for my bike, I saw a Chinese lady waiting to take the written test. She was holding what looked like some pages ripped out of a phone book – they even had some English at the top of the page that said something like “Chinese language yellow pages”. The rest of content on the pages was a copy of the DMV multiple choice tests in Chinese, with the answers marked in. What I’m wondering is if this is just an attempt to disguise these study materials, or if there actually is a section in some legitimate phone book that contains these pages…

stty -F /dev/ttyS0 -onlcr

So that’s that – now I can get back to working on a utility to encode some colour bitmaps to store in the remaining 10K on the ATMEGA168 I’m using

It works great – except – that whenever I send a command containing the byte 0×0A, the command gets misinterpreted somehow.  If I ask for a large 3 digit display showing the number 10, it displays the number 13.  Every time.  Every other number from 0×00 to 0xFF is unaffected.  If I send a command asking for some text at 10 pixels across, n pixels down, the text appears only as blank spaces, and in a different position.

I’ve confirmed that the byte is being received by the AVR correctly.  I store it in a buffer, waiting for the whole command to complete, and I’ve confirmed that it is still stored in the buffer when I go to execute the selected command.  The problem appears when I actually unpack the buffer into the arguments needed for the display function calls.  Inside the function body, the value that should have been 10 is changed.  This happens even if I just pass in the whole command buffer as a uint8_t *.

This makes no sense to me.  Especially since I can hard-code a 10 and have everything work without issue.  The only thing I can think of is that this is somehow related to the call being made from an interrupt handler, although this hardly explains why only calls involving the number 10 are affected…

I’m going to try moving the main switch into the main loop and see if that changes anything.

I do have to calculate repairs into that though – one of my rear brake pads just fell apart last week, so I’m just in getting it replaced. Even with that included it still doesn’t put the cost over the train.

Anyway, I should be back on the road again shortly

There is no option to tell yum to force the install of a package – if it appears in the rpm database, yum won’t install it. I was able to get around this by first removing the package from the db, using:

rpm -e --justdb --nodeps PACKAGE

Now that the package no longer appeared in the database, a simple:

yum install PACKAGE

Was enough to patch things up.

Although it meant a bit more work for me, and ended up costing a bit more, I still really like the idea of shipping a container rather than hiring a moving company. At least this way I knew how things were being handled – since I was the one handling them. I felt a lot better about my computer and stereo equipment having arranged the container myself, and knowing that my stuff wouldn’t be transferred between trucks and warehouses along the way. Since I’ve arrived here I’ve seen smaller containers in the parking lot from other moving companies as people move in and out, so I guess I’m not the only one thinking like this.

I’m still going to be living in a hotel until I can get to the POD to retrieve my bicycle and portable bed. The rest of the furniture will have to wait until next week. Oh well.

Also, I went up to San Francisco to meet Florian for lunch on Saturday and he gave me a quick tour of the Embarcadero and downtown. And yeah, San Francisco is as hilly as you’ve heard…

I’m getting the hang of the local transit system, as my motorcycle won’t be shipped down until I get my I-94 corrected, and this morning I found the northbound San Carlos Caltrain platform had been ‘decorated’. Yes, I do know the way to San Jose

Also, while I’m looking for a more permanent place to stay I’ve been staying in a hotel in San Carlos, not too far from the airport and air museum. This weekend there was a helicopter air show, which I mostly missed due to house hunting, but I did pass by the airport and grab a couple of photos:

This little guy was flying loops and rolls and all sorts of other crazy maneuvers. Unfortunately I only got to see the preview on TV – I was in Sunnyvale at the time of the show. This morning on my way out a whole group of military helicopters had showed up:

I’m not going to get to see them in the air either, it seems. Oh well.