Rage Against The Mac

I brought home a new project on Sunday: a 1991 BMW 318is. I’ll post more on the car itself at some point in the future, but I thought I’d quickly document the first fix (of many, I’m sure). The power mirrors (standard on all E30s in the US, I think) didn’t work properly when I got the car. They’d move in only one direction, and not exactly in the direction the switch was pointed, either. Moments after buying a replacement switch from someone on r3vlimited.com I found a writeup with some very vague notes on removing the switch from the door and drowning it in WD40 until it worked properly.  I thought I could do a little better!

The first step is to remove the switch from the door.  I found this was easiest by popping the joystick hat off with a screwdriver (or use your fingers) and then using a screwdriver to gently finesse the switch mechanism out of the handle via the exposed holes.  The switch is bigger than I expected.  Once the switch is free from the door, pull the connector off the back (it’s keyed, so you don’t have to worry about labeling it).

Now go find a clean workspace where you can disassemble the switch.  It contains four dumbbell-looking balls supported by four improbably small springs, all of which are just waiting for an opportunity to escape down your floor drain.  Just use a small screwdriver to gently pry the outer black switch housing away from the translucent yellow backing on either end.  Keep the switch oriented with the joystick facing straight down so that you don’t dump the balls out.

Once you’ve got everything apart, you’ll see something like this:

There was obviously some sort of dielectric grease on the back of the copper contacts which over time stopped inhibiting corrosion and corroded itself.  I think we’ve found our culprit!

I swabbed some Tarn-X (purchased from Lowe’s for another project) onto the copper with a paper towel and kept rubbing until all of the green was gone. Then I finished it off with a vigorous rub with a green Scotch-Brite pad. I expect this will last about 20 minutes before starting to oxidize again, but it’ll do for now. Unbelievably, I failed to get an after shot of the contacts after cleaning them up.

Next I used more Tarn-X on the roller balls; you can see the kind of results I got with this side-by-side shot of a clean ball and a dirty ball (heh, heh):

Finally, I reassembled the joystick components:

If you have some dielectric grease, this would be the time to slather some on the piece with the connectors.  Then just snap the two pieces back together.  The back piece clips neatly back into place; there’s a key that aligns it with the joystick housing.  Installation, as they say, is the reverse of removal.  You should now be able to move your mirrors in all four directions!

Some people are like Slinkies: not really good for anything, but they still bring a smile to your face when you push them down a flight of stairs.

(via)

Humanity is rife with enterprising idiots who final words may well have been “hold my beer and watch this.”

Looks more like a Ghostbusters particle accelerator than a spud launcher to me…

(via MAKE)

I’ve been meaning to take a picture of this for a while now. It’s good to know there are still some bureaucrats with a sense of humor.

Yep, these people are all real happy-like that they shelled out a week’s worth of grocery money for a non-race. At least my tickets were free…

Coasting to a white-knuckle world record – Yahoo! News

While the hardened coaster pros enthused over such elements as Kingda Ka’s “hang time” (the feeling of weightlesness as the train crests the top of the incline), there were some whose ashen faces betrayed more delicate constitutions.

“Horrifying. Everyone else was screaming happily. I think I managed one long, extended gurgle of panic,” said Drew Parker, 35.

The postman and eBay were good to me today. USPS dropped off my autographed, pre-ordered copy of John Brown’s Body’s new CD Pressure Points. As anyone who knows me will testify, I’m damn near rabid when it comes to these guys, having gotten to see them and a bunch of their off-shoot projects live when I lived in and around Ithaca. I was utterly delighted to see them showcased over on Internet Archive’s Live Music Archive. There are 18 shows archived at the Archive and the current most-downloaded show does indeed rock, especially if you like picking out little-known small-town guitar players.

The other tidbit I picked up today (in the virtual sense; it hasn’t been delivered just yet) is Lincoln’s self-titled album, with the track “Sucker” on it, which will make for a great addition to my driving mix:

I hit the pedal like a trucker
Flip the finger, so long sucker

Apparently this is their first and only CD, and it was relased in ‘97, as near as I can tell. There is almost nothing on the mighty Interweb regarding these guys, aside from the above-quoted choice lyrics. After searching Amazon, CDBaby, UBL, and wading through Google, I found a single copy on eBay for the low, low price of three dollars (plus another 50% for shipping). It wasn’t an easy mission, I’ll tell you. I’m just hoping Zach was wrong when he quipped “maybe there’s a reason they’re so hard to find?” Cynic.

After reading Joey Hess’ article on keeping your “life” (or at least your home directory) in subversion, I started tinkering with that myself. I work on a number of different *nix systems (OS X, AIX, Linux, for a rough count of a dozen…) and not having my working environment similar on them is a real PITA. One glitch that I ran into when doing this was that subversion doesn’t store unix permissions for files, so I was extremely wary of versioning my .ssh directory (and other private directories), as they usually end up being world-readable (based on my umask). Hess also mentioned versioning system configuration files (such as the contents of /etc) but I think this same problem, including the one of user/group ownership, remains an issue.

I took a couple of hours last night and whacked together an sh script to store and retrieve unix permissions and user/group ownership into versioned svn properties. It isn’t terribly elegant, but does work fairly well. It should also be fully POSIX-compliant, so that you don’t need bash, just sh.

It still needs some work; it’s a little too recursive, and doesn’t print out full pathnames when descending into a directory. The usage it a little obtuse in that “setting” permissions sets the property value in svn and “getting” permissions sets the file’s permissions from that value.

Here’s how I use it:

• set the appropriate permissions on a file using chmod
• store the permissions as svn properties with svn_perms.sh -s <filename>
• svn commit the changed properties
• use svn_perms.sh -g <filename>to set the permissions at a later time, probably after a svn up

The script can also work recursively, using -r, but, in the interest of not polluting svn with properties I don’t really care about (only some directories and files need to have their permissions explicitly set) I’ve been using that sparingly.

Finally, I also have support for storing user/group ownership as a separate property, which should be useful when running as root, but I haven’t found a need for that just yet.

The script is available here.

So, what exactly does this mean?

Kernel
CVE ID: CAN-2005-0970
Impact: Permitting SUID/SGID scripts to be installed could lead to privilege escalation.
Description: Mac OS X inherited the ability to run SUID/SGID scripts from FreeBSD. Apple does not distribute any SUID/SGID scripts, but the system would allow them to be installed or created. This update removes the ability of Mac OS X to run SUID/SGID scripts. Credit to Bruce Murphy of rattus.net and Justin Walker for reporting this
issue.

This seems kind of severe. Setuid programs have always been a liability, but removing a part of UNIX?

The Morning News – MiniDisco

Them: And you can’t record faster than real time?

Sad, but true. I went through a MiniDisc phase. Even went so far as to hard-wire a remote for it into the left switchgear pod on my motorcycle. Unfortunately, the MD player kind of degraded from “skips a lot” to “doesn’t play much”. When I finally made the jump to the iPod, it was like “what the hell were you waiting for? Isn’t this just so much easier?”.