Joe's Random Ramblings

I have owned a Roomba for some time now. Some time ago, I wrote about my positive experience with the iRobot customer service, which resulted in me getting a new Roomba.
After extensive use, this Roomba now developed some problems: The engine would run idle, and the brushes would not turn. Since the warranty is now long expired, I set out to investigate this myself.
I found that the gearbox at the brush motor was broken. Some gears had flat spots:

A look at eBay showed somebody selling the gear set. So, I ordered that, and replaced the old gears in the gearbox:

The result: the Roomba works fine again.

A while back, I reported that the National Federation of the Blind apparently bought email addresses and spams them.
I am saddened to report that they still do that. After a lull, I again got one of their spam emails.
Their members really should put pressure on the leadership to stop this despicable practice.

Apple recently seems to have taken a hint from Microsoft, and turns to be evil.
They have sent cease-and-desist letters to people who try to figure out the hash in the iTunesDB database that is part of every iPod.
I have three iPods, a 1st gen Nano, a 2nd gen Nano, and a 2nd gen Shuffle. I am using Linux, and Linux only. iTunes doesn't run on Linux, so I have been using gtkpod to put music on my iPods.
I am ready to buy a 4th gen Nano, but I need to be able to use it under Linux. Apple's strong-arming of independent developers prevents that.
So, I'll be spending my money somewhere else, until Apple comes to its senses. In these economic times, they should be happy that others try to increase the market for their devices, instead of sending in the lawyers...

An unelected official who represents a European monarch apparently has the power to shut down the democratically elected parliament in Canada.
It was a good move that the US threw out these emperors long ago...

Some time back, I wrote about problems with the Windows ShellExecute/ShellExecuteEx functions if the filepath is longer than the predefined value of MAX_PATH.
The workaround I described was to use the short path name instead of the long path.
The Windows API has a function for that, GetShortPathName.
However, I recently found out that this function is broken, at least on Vista.
Apparently, the GetShortPathName function doesn't really get the short path by looking at the data on the disk. Instead, it seems to blindly truncate the full directory- and filenames, and appends ~1 at the end of each component. This works by accident on XP, but can result in problems on Vista.
To illustrate: Vista has directories C:\Program Files and C:\ProgramData. The short names of these directories are C:\PROGRA~1 and C:\PROGRA~2, respectively.
Using GetShortPathName on a path that starts with C:\ProgramData\..." results in "C:\PROGRA~1\...", though, as I found out during a debugging session.
This is of course completely unacceptable, and renders the GetShortPathName function unusable.
Typically, the MSDN documentation doesn't say anything about this...
And then MS wonders why they are hated by everybody...