It's *ALIVE*!

I just took Echo's Geo Metro around the block for the first time since our "little repair adventure" started 9 months ago! It's making a lot of shaky-whiny noises, but the clutch, the main object of our repair, now officially works! It turns out the cable from the pedal is *very* sensitive to even minor adjustments, and it took some fine-tuning (and might take just a bit more) to work properly.

The next step is to make sure everything under the hood is locked down, and see if that makes the unhappy noises go away. The battery tray, the battery itself, and the air intake assembly all need to be tied down, and who knows what *else* we might have missed?

Get Motivated!

I went with ethanhunter to the Get Motivated seminar today after my Dr's appointment as part of the Austin Personal Development Group. Many thanks to ethanhunter for arranging tickets! The appt. cost me hearing Colin Powell, but I *did* get to see Zig Ziglar, Rudy Giuliani, and Suse Orman, along with a couple of other salesperson types. There was a certain amount of trying to sell things, but it was much more low-key than at the Celebrity Conference I went to last time. Most items were $50 or under. I signed up for a web marketing course for all of $30, which I split with ethanhunter and could use for several different vectors of my future plans. Overall the speakers were quite good, and it was interesting to note which techniques they used to help keep the crown interested and get their point across. It turns out that Zig Ziglar is having some short-term memory loss due to a fall, and his daughter was helping him do the presentation to keep him on track. Overall I'm glad I went, and I had a great personal development conversation with ethanhunter at Koriente afterward, redeeming an earlier fiasco looking for lunch all over downtown Austin.

Go to the Source

Or, if you don't have the source, go to the assembler. :)

I made a bit more progress in using the GNU Debugger to run around inside MIDIStroke, and also made some progress in disassembling the entire program using otool. It does look like it might be possible to actually figure out the encoding scheme for program changes and control changes using this method, thought it won't be easy. For those generally unfamiliar with this sort of thing, what I'm doing is taking a complete program and looking at it's guts to try to figure out something about how it works. When you create a program, you have something called "source code", which is a sort-of englishy-language description of how you want the program to run. The computer can't read this, though, so it has to be translated into machine language, which is called assembler. Generally, when you're using an existing program you didn't write, you only get the assembler to look at, which is very much akin to trying to figure out how a car works without having the design diagrams or any manuals.
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