The dishwasher is still under warranty but LG customer service are more interested in annoying their customers than helping them. They refused to honour the warranty so I guess it’s up to me to fix it myself.

After checking for obvious things like blocked nozzles on the spray arms or clogged filters, I tried an experiment. I pointed the top and bottom spray-arms straight ahead then ran the dishwasher. The bottom arm was still in exactly the same position after the wash. So no water was getting to the bottom sprayer which suggests a problem with the diverter valve which distributes water between the top and bottom sprayers. The cause could have been lots of things including:

• Blocked jets or pipes
• Wiring problem
• Faulty sensor
• Controller board or software problem
• Mechanical jam of the valve

Next I put an AC voltmeter across the valve motor. This proved that power was going to it at the right times, it just wasn’t turning. So it must be either a mechanical jam or a faulty motor. I disassembled the valve itself and it didn’t seem jammed so I guess it’s the motor.

A replacement motor costs $54 from LG but Statewide Appliances in Adelaide have exactly the same part for $18. You have to be a bit of a contortionist to reach under the dishwasher and get to the motor but after a bit of swearing, scrapes and bruises I got it out and swapped in the new one.

Three days and about 7 loads of dishes later and it’s running fine. I call that fixed.

There must be some bad technology vibes about this year, or maybe it’s some kind of karmic message that I own too much stuff.

So I climbed in through the back seat and attempted to open it from the inside. Trying to force the catch with a screwdriver didn’t work so before I broke anything by trying too hard, I yanked off the inside trim and had a look. Turns out there is a short cable running from the door handle to the lock and this had broken.

Now that the trim was off, I could yank the lock mechanism by hand and get the tailgate open.

Of course this had to happen on a long weekend so I had to wait until Tuesday before I could call Subaru and try to get a replacement cable.

How much would you expect to pay for a very ordinary-looking cable about 20cm long? $5? Maybe even $15? – Not Subaru. They charge $90 and it’ll take a month to get it!

“Sod that” I thought (or words to that effect). I went to a bicycle shop and bought a gear cable and sheath for $4. I got a gear cable rather than a brake cable because they are thinner and less likely to stretch. Now to fit it.

The first problem was that the gear cable was much larger – both longer and thicker than the Subaru cable and did not have the same kind of connector at the end, cutting it is no problem but I can’t fit it inside the original sheath because it’s too fat. I had a go at cutting the bicycle cable’s sheath down to size but I had some difficulty fabricating an end cap that would fit the car – so in the end I just unwound a few strands from the cable so it was thinner and could fit inside the original sheath.


The next problem was the custom Subaru hook-things on the end of the cable. I just ripped them out and searched my parts box. I found a couple of small bolts with spring washers, the washers have teeth which should grip the cable pretty well. This arrangement also allows me to adjust the tension on the cable. It was a bit of a struggle tightening the bolts because of the position of the lock mechanism, there was no chance of getting a screwdriver down there so I had to use two pairs of pliers, one in each hand to hold the nut and tighten the bolt.

So here’s my finished job. It works pretty well although the action was a bit stiff which I don’t mind but it caused a problem that the return spring was not strong enough to pull the cable back which prevented the central locking from working. Even though I thinned down the cable it was still slightly thicker than the original so I just dumped a load of oil and WD-40 down it and hopefully I won’t have any further issues with it.

Overall, I’m pleased with the result.

For some time I have noticed two puzzling symptoms with this car:

1. The car sometimes lurches forwards or backwards, especially on the highway
2. Sometimes, but not always, the engine revs go up to 2000 rpm or more when stopped at traffic lights

I thought the first one must be mechanical, a worn bearing, excessive play in the 4WD system or something like that. The second fault had to be electronic since the idle speed is electronically controlled.

After doing a lot of reading of Subaru forums, car repair guides and whatnot, I realised that both these problems may be related and caused by a faulty Throttle Position Sensor. The high idle speed is because the engine computer thinks I’m pressing the accelerator when I’m really not, and the lurch happens as I lightly press the accelerator on the highway and the engine computer misinterprets it as me stomping on it – I went for a test drive to confirm this, the lurch even happens when I’m using cruise control.

So I had a look around some spare parts sites and eBay of course for a new Throttle Position Sensor. Now if I was driving a Ford, a new TPS would cost me $25. But a Subaru TPS? How about $400!

Not wanting to spend that plus another $100 to get a mechanic to put it in for me, I thought it might be worth just cleaning the thing. The TPS is essentially a potentiometer and being an electronics guy I know all about those and how they can behave erratically when they get a little bit of dirt or corrosion in them. Or it could even be the connector, dirt in there would certainly mess up the signal.

So the first thing to try is simply cleaning the connector. Before I did that, I had to locate the TPS. It sits on the throttle body on the opposite side from the throttle cable, it just looks like a small black box with some wires connected to it.

To remove the connector, squeeze the release catch while pulling.

I sprayed some contact cleaner in it and blew it out with some compressed air (not having a compressor, that means just blowing into it really hard and having the contact cleaner spray back into my face).

I reconnected the plug and went for a test drive. The car was much smoother. Problem solved in five minutes (if you don’t count the hours of research to figure out what to fix).

I’d call that a win!

Looks like a good job. It’s sure to work better than before!

I want to create a month-by-month summary of these figures. Here is the (rather complex) formula to make that happen:

=SUMPRODUCT(A1:A5>=DATEVALUE("01 Jul 2009");A1:A5<DATEVALUE("01 Aug 2009");B1:B5)

That formula will give the total of all amounts for July. By repeating this for each month, you can get monthly summaries for the whole year.

I’m still doing some contract work here and there but am spending most of my time looking after the kids and doing housework. To be perfectly honest, I’m enjoying it. Its really nice to take a break from full-time work, the first time I have not been working flat-out in about twelve years.

So where to from here? While kids and housework keep me reasonably busy, I’m not the kind of guy who can just sit around. So I’m planning to create some products for sale. I’ve set up a new site called siliconsparrow.com where I will base my professional operations. I am excited about the possibilities.

Unfortunately it means this blog will become a bit neglected. I’ll only be posting personal and hobby stuff here, and perhaps more housewife-related stuff like recipies!

One of the little rules in our house is that kids are not allowed to watch TV before school in the morning.

But these two are so addicted to the glow of a screen, they watch my screen saver and pretend it is a movie!

Sometimes they are quite amusing to watch, they come up with things like “Oooh, watch out little blob, that big blob is going to get you” or “That’s two cows dancing!”.

My screen saver is Electric Sheep by the way.

A couple of months ago, it so happened that I bought a Toshiba laptop and a Dell screen in the same week. Both products offered a $100 cash-back deal. What happened next showed very dramatically the difference in attitude towards customers of these two companies.

How the Toshiba cash-back works

The cash-back cannot be claimed in the store, you need to go to Toshiba’s web site and fill in a form.

But there is no form on Toshiba’s web site. So I phoned Toshiba and after the usual phone menu maze and having to hold for quarter of an hour, the Toshiba representative told me I need to go to a different web site.

Next were several screens of web forms to fill in including all my personal details, the model number and serial number of the laptop, when I bought it, where I bought it, the address of the shop, the ABN number of the owner of the shop and more and more and more. So then could I submit my claim ? No. They require you to print out the forms and then photocopy the purchase receipt and write a note, put it in a paper envelope and go to the post office and post it!!  This all took me about two hours.

So Toshiba eliminate people who are not web-savvy, do not have a printer and a photocopier, cannot be bothered spending an hour filling out forms or cannot be bothered going to the post office.

I received my cash-back about 6 weeks later in the form of a postal money order. I had to physically go to the bank and deposit it over the counter so you can add an extra hour to the total time spent by me to claim this money.

You can also add to that, another half an hour I spent writing a letter of complaint about all this to Toshiba. Did I receive so much as an acknowledgement that they received my letter ?  Nope.

From a business point of view I can understand why they do all this. They figure if they make claiming the cash back difficult they can save money because I bet that less than 30% of customers actually go through all that bother. If they sell 1000 laptops, they’ve just saved $70,000.

Of course, this comes at the expense of aggrivating their own customers who like me, will probably never buy another Toshiba product again. Can you put a dollar value on that kind of customer resentment ?

How the Dell cash-back works

Dell credited my VISA card with $100 the next day. No forms to fill in, I didn’t have to do anything. Dell want to keep their customers.

Summary

I know who I will choose next time I buy a laptop.

UPDATE: This Dilbert cartoon says it all…

As a bonus, I have added a new feature to allow you to customise the colour and font used in the image captions.

You could use the source code from this to make your own more fully-featured slide show application, or just use it as example code for writing whatever. I hope you find it useful.

CLICK HERE to go to the download page. It’s free!

Amazing thing #1

I had a corrupted disk and I wanted to run some recovery tools on it but to be safe, I wanted work with a copy of the corrupted disk. So I created a raw copy of the entire disk and piped it to a different machine which had enough storage:

cat /dev/hda1 | netcat -q 1 192.168.0.15 9998

That created a file of 1128GB in size – probably the single biggest file I’ve ever created. It took more than 12 hours to copy to the other machine!

Then I created a loopback device so the system could pretend the file was a real disk:

losetup /dev/loop0 /home/adam/recovery.raw

Then I ran xfs_repair on it and recovered all the files. In the old days I would have to physically install a second hard drive in the corrupted box – did I mention that I did all this remotely from off-site through an ssh session.

Amazing thing #2

I needed to find all the Makefiles for an older version of my projects and update them. This command searches through a bunch of folders for files which contain the string “1.6″ and loads them all up in a text editor for me. It sure beats manually going through dozens of folders and eyeballing every file.

find /usr/src -name Makefile | xargs grep -l "1.6" | xargs kate

Anyway, onto the odd device, my TwinHan remote control. Setting this up is much easier under Mythbuntu 8.10. Here’s the step-by-step:

Step 1 – Configure LIRC

Plug the IR receiver into a USB port. Wait a moment for it to register and then type the following command:

ls /dev/input/by-id

It should produce output like this. This step is just to verify the correct device name for the remote.

usb-Twinhan_Tech_Remote_Control_1111111-event-kbd
usb-Twinhan_Tech_Remote_Control_1111111-event-mouse
usb-Twinhan_Tech_Remote_Control_1111111-mouse

Now edit the file /etc/lirc/hardware.conf and enter values for REMOTE_DRIVER and REMOTE_DEVICE:

REMOTE_DRIVER="devinput"
REMOTE_DEVICE="/dev/input/by-id/usb-Twinhan_Tech_Remote_Control_1111111-event-kbd"

Due to a bug in this version of Ubuntu, you will also need to run the following command:

lshal | grep input.product

It will spit out a few lines of text. Verify that it produces a line like this:

  input.product = 'Twinhan Tech Remote Control'  (string)

Then edit the file /usr/share/hal/fdi/preprobe/20thirdparty/lirc.fdi and make it read like so:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>

<deviceinfo version="0.2">
  <device>
     <match key="info.product" contains_ncase="Twinhan Tech Remote Control">
        <merge key="info.ignore" type="bool">true</merge>
     </match>
  </device>
</deviceinfo>

Finally, download this file:

lircd.conf

and put it in /etc/lirc/

At this stage, I had to reboot so that everything loaded properly. Once you have rebooted, you can test the remote control by typing:

irw

Now every time you press a key, you should see it printed on the screen. Press Ctrl-C when you are done.

STEP 2 – Configure MythTV commands

We are getting closer now. The next step is to set up a file called ~/.lirc/mythtv which contains the mappings between the keys on the remote and the functions in MythTV. Once again, I have already prepared this file which you can download here:

lircrc-mythtv

Rename this file to mythtv and move it to ~/.lirc/ Once that is done, restart MythTV. Here are the key mappings you will end up with:

STEP 3 – Configure MPlayer

The final step is to configure the mapping between the remote and the commands in MPlayer. Since MPlayer is a separate program, it needs to be configured separately to MythTV. To configure it, we need another lircrc file but this time is has to be called ~/.lirc/mplayer. Download it from here:

lircrc-mplayer

Rename it to mplayer and put it in ~/.lirc/ and that should be that! Here are the key mappings for MPlayer:

If you do not like the key mappings I have chosen, you may edit the files in ~/.lirc. The format should be fairly easy to follow.

The address is http://serialgadget.com/

<?php

// fx.php - PHP Code to convert currencies using Yahoo's currency conversion service.
// by Adam Pierce <adam@doctort.org> 22-Oct-2008
// This code is public domain.

class ForeignExchange
{
	private $fxRate;

	public function __construct($currencyBase, $currencyForeign)
	{
		$url = 'http://download.finance.yahoo.com/d/quotes.csv?s='
			.$currencyBase .$currencyForeign .'=X&f=l1';

		$c = curl_init($url);
		curl_setopt($c, CURLOPT_HEADER, 0);
		curl_setopt($c, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
		$this->fxRate = doubleval(curl_exec($c));
		curl_close($c);
	}

	public function toBase($amount)
	{
		if($this->fxRate == 0)
			return 0;

		return  $amount / $this->fxRate;
	}

	public function toForeign($amount)
	{
		if($this->fxRate == 0)
			return 0;

		return $amount * $this->fxRate;
	}
};

?>

Because it creates an object, that object will remember the exchange rate so it doesn’t need to look up the rate again and again if you want to do multiple currency conversions on the same web page.

Usage Example:

<?php

// Create an object to convert Australian Dollars to Euros.
    require 'fx.php';
    $fx = new ForeignExchange('AUD', 'EUR');

// This function formats a value with 2 decimal places.
    function fmtMoney($amount)
    {
        return sprintf('.%.2f', $amount);
    }

    $auPrice = 25.50;

    echo '<p>Your price is AU$'. fmtMoney($auPrice)
        .' which is approximately &euro;'. fmtMoney($fx->toForeign($auPrice)) .'</p>';
?>

…enjoy.

   $custFirstName = $_REQUEST['cust_first_name'];
   $custLastName = $_REQUEST['cust_last_name'];
   $custEmail = $_REQUEST['cust_email'];
   $custAddr1 = $_REQUEST['cust_addr_1'];
   $custAddr2 = $_REQUEST['cust_addr_2'];

I always try to neaten it up by adding spaces like so:

   $custFirstName = $_REQUEST['cust_first_name'];
   $custLastName  = $_REQUEST['cust_last_name'];
   $custEmail     = $_REQUEST['cust_email'];
   $custAddr1     = $_REQUEST['cust_addr_1'];
   $custAddr2     = $_REQUEST['cust_addr_2'];

Which is a little fiddly but I always do it because like I said, I like my code to look neat.

But now I have a tool which does it automatically. I’m very happy.

It will even handle proportional fonts so I’ve been experimenting with the decadent pleasure of coding in more beautiful type faces and still having everything line up.

Unfortunately it is only for gedit at this time (which is a fine text editor but just a text editor nevertheless). If this were available in Eclipse or MS Dev Studio, I’d be in heaven!