Reseting the Video Settings the Wii

eduardofv

If you kept the video setting from widescreen/480i and moved the Wii to a CRT, here’s how to reset them:

– Power on Wii, give it a few seconds to boot
– Hold DOWN on the directional pad of the Wii remote
– While holding DOWN, press the RESET button on the Wii

The Wii reboots and the screen settings are back to default. All my other settings (wifi, console name, etc.) were intact.

Link (look for ch0mp’s comment). Also, you can switch to the A/V and the go back to the composite cables.

 

Ruby: Error with Gems 1.2.0 + Win32_Process + $KCODE + DRb

eduardofv

This is really awkward. The problem was found after moving some scripts that worked fine on one server to another server with rubygems recently updated. The script normally spawns several processes that are DRb Servers, but it failed silently. After some testing I found that with every other thing being equal (Ruby 1.8.6 patchlevel 111 and win32-process 0.5.3 on both machines) the script crashed with gem 1.2.0 and not with 0.9.4.

The script iterates calling Process.fork with a code block that creates the new DRb server. The DRb object is loaded via require at the begining of the script. I’m posting here a reduced example for clarity.

puts "iniciando"
require 'rubygems'
require 'drb'
puts 'loading pingpong'
require 'pingpong'
puts 'loaded pingpong'
puts 'loading process '
require 'win32/process'
puts 'loaded process'

def start_server(port)
  uri="druby://0.0.0.0:#{port}"
  trap("INT"){puts("Interrupted"); DRb.thread.exit}
  DRb.start_service(uri,PingPong.new)
  puts("Listening #{uri}")
  DRb.thread.join
end 

puts "here #{ARGV.inspect}"
2.times{|port| puts("Sending #{port}");Process.fork{start_server(5850+port)}}
puts "out"

The PingPong class is defined in the following script. Note the $KCODE declaration since it turned out to be the problem:

$KCODE = 'UTF-8'

class PingPong
  def ping
    "pong"
  end
end

In the current implementation of win32_process, Process.fork works by creating a new Windows process calling Ruby with the same script and passing an argument indicating which child is creating. This is very important as indicated in the documentation since one would expect that each child’s execution started at the code block passed to the fork.

The process failed like this with gem 1.2.0 (but worked perfectly on gem 0.9.4:)

C:\>test_fork_simple.rb
iniciando
loading pingpong
loaded pingpong
loading process
loaded process
here []
Sending 0
Sending 1
out

After some hours debugging I found that the problem arised when the $KCODE assigment is done on the child processes; if the assigment is deleted the processes are created correctly:

C:\>test_fork_simple.rb
iniciando
loading pingpong
loaded pingpong
loading process
loaded process
here []
Sending 0
Sending 1
out

iniciando
iniciando
loading pingpong
loading pingpong
loaded pingpong
loading process
loaded pingpong
loading process
loaded process
here ["child#0"]
Sending 0
loaded process
here ["child#1"]
Sending 0
Sending 1
Listening druby://0.0.0.0:5850
Listening druby://0.0.0.0:5851

But in the real programs the line can’t be left out since it’s critical. Oddly enough, the workaround consisted on switching the ‘require’ statments for the child class and win32/process:

#Crashes silently:
require 'pingpong'
require 'win32/process'

#Works!
require 'win32/process'
require 'pingpong'

It’s also very strange that, when the script fails, the child processes are not even created (as you can see on the first output, the “iniciando” message is never sent). I’ll post an update if I found what’s happening here.