Guitar-ing
Jun. 6th, 2012 09:51 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
altivoThe guitar is a vice that requires constant practice. By neglecting the instrument for years, I have of course lost all the callus on my left hand and consequently I now have sore fingertips. At least it's a familiar condition and I know it will go away.
I think I am at the bottom of the problem with the Literati upgrade. It appears that the firmware update, which is downloaded as a compressed tar archive, does not download correctly if you are using a current version of Firefox. It ends up with many spurious characters (probably carriage returns or linefeeds) inserted into it, corrupting the file. At first I thought this was because I used a Linux system to download rather than Windows. However, repeated tests have now shown that if the file is downloaded by Internet Explorer it is saved correctly and has the expected length and checksum. If downloaded by Firefox the file is longer than expected and has an incorrect checksum. I suspect that the server offering the download is set up improperly as well, so that Firefox doesn't get a correct mime type for the file and tries to handle it as text. IE assumes from the file suffix that it is an unknown binary blob and as a result performs a correct download. In other words, FF follows standard more strictly than IE does, and this server isn't following the standards either, so the results are unpredictable.
I know have what should be correct copies of the update file, and will attempt the upgrade again very soon. But not tonight. I'm too tired and might mess it up.
Got up early, turned out horses and sheep, and went to a practice session for Saturday. Went directly from the practice to work for eight hours. Came home from work, had supper, and I'm more than ready for bed. Tomorrow we do it in a reverse order. I'll go to work first, and we'll practice in the afternoon.
Had an interesting GPS malfunction too. After practicing this morning, Gary and I had lunch on the east side of Woodstock. We debated what the shortest route through town and out the west side would be in order to get onto US14 and head for Harvard. Finally I decided to just let my GPS choose. Very odd. I plugged the Garmin in and turned it on. It acquired satellite fixes. Then I asked it to plot a route to the library in Harvard, an address it has stored in memory. Two attempts produced an error message: "Unable to calculate route." I've never seen that. It's the GPS equivalent of "You can't get there from here," I suppose. The third time it claimed to have a route, but I should have been tipped off by the fact that it was estimating travel time at 2 and 1/4 hours. It should have been closer to 25 minutes.
So I started out and it immediately told me to turn away from the direction I knew I had to go. It kept trying to get me to turn around and head for Chicago, preferably by way of the Northwest Tollway. This made no sense at all, so I ignored it and picked my own route. It never quit trying to turn me around. I didn't shut it off because I wanted to look at it and see where it thought I was going.
Once I was parked at the library, I examined the entire plotted route. It was trying to take me to Portage, Indiana to a friend's apartment. How it got that turned around I have no idea. When I left work I let it calculate a route home, and it did that correctly. Or at least as correctly as it ever does. It makes one odd choice that may shave a few feet off the distance covered but just seems illogical. However, it has alwasy done that on this particular route.
I think I am at the bottom of the problem with the Literati upgrade. It appears that the firmware update, which is downloaded as a compressed tar archive, does not download correctly if you are using a current version of Firefox. It ends up with many spurious characters (probably carriage returns or linefeeds) inserted into it, corrupting the file. At first I thought this was because I used a Linux system to download rather than Windows. However, repeated tests have now shown that if the file is downloaded by Internet Explorer it is saved correctly and has the expected length and checksum. If downloaded by Firefox the file is longer than expected and has an incorrect checksum. I suspect that the server offering the download is set up improperly as well, so that Firefox doesn't get a correct mime type for the file and tries to handle it as text. IE assumes from the file suffix that it is an unknown binary blob and as a result performs a correct download. In other words, FF follows standard more strictly than IE does, and this server isn't following the standards either, so the results are unpredictable.
I know have what should be correct copies of the update file, and will attempt the upgrade again very soon. But not tonight. I'm too tired and might mess it up.
Got up early, turned out horses and sheep, and went to a practice session for Saturday. Went directly from the practice to work for eight hours. Came home from work, had supper, and I'm more than ready for bed. Tomorrow we do it in a reverse order. I'll go to work first, and we'll practice in the afternoon.
Had an interesting GPS malfunction too. After practicing this morning, Gary and I had lunch on the east side of Woodstock. We debated what the shortest route through town and out the west side would be in order to get onto US14 and head for Harvard. Finally I decided to just let my GPS choose. Very odd. I plugged the Garmin in and turned it on. It acquired satellite fixes. Then I asked it to plot a route to the library in Harvard, an address it has stored in memory. Two attempts produced an error message: "Unable to calculate route." I've never seen that. It's the GPS equivalent of "You can't get there from here," I suppose. The third time it claimed to have a route, but I should have been tipped off by the fact that it was estimating travel time at 2 and 1/4 hours. It should have been closer to 25 minutes.
So I started out and it immediately told me to turn away from the direction I knew I had to go. It kept trying to get me to turn around and head for Chicago, preferably by way of the Northwest Tollway. This made no sense at all, so I ignored it and picked my own route. It never quit trying to turn me around. I didn't shut it off because I wanted to look at it and see where it thought I was going.
Once I was parked at the library, I examined the entire plotted route. It was trying to take me to Portage, Indiana to a friend's apartment. How it got that turned around I have no idea. When I left work I let it calculate a route home, and it did that correctly. Or at least as correctly as it ever does. It makes one odd choice that may shave a few feet off the distance covered but just seems illogical. However, it has alwasy done that on this particular route.
no subject
Date: 2012-06-07 07:38 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-06-07 03:36 pm (UTC)I've never seen the "You can't get there from here" behavior before, though. Just to check, this morning I asked it to route me from home to work, which it did without difficulty. That's the same destination that caused it to freak out yesterday.
I would understand the erroneous route if Jon's place had in fact been the last destination I used, but it wasn't. I selected at least two other destinations after that, just in the process of getting back home.
Just goes to show that we shouldn't become totally dependent on these things, or always believe them. And it makes me really suspicious of these claims Google is making about robotic vehicles. You're not getting me into one of those, no way.