Thilo Klein wrote:
> Now children, I want you to stop playing.
What a great way to start an e-mail. I'll pretend I didn't read that.

> Python was meant as a huge resource - as any opensource software -
> which was founded and cultivated by many people and given to all
> people for free.
> 
> Python equals not only a high amount of data but also high quality
> information. Anything is restricted to what is necessary in the
> documentation but there are still thousands of pages for it.
> 
> I recommend anyone to read a programming language manual to know what
> this means.
> 
> If everyone had thought about getting money for it, how could this
> opus have been made ?

You can get plenty of free implementations of IR receiving on the 'net. 
Just because it isn't nicely packaged as a Python module doesn't make it 
useless. Your original gripe isn't about people making money. It's about 
imperfect documentation and modularity. Stop throwing random arguments 
around and mixing things together.

> Engineers don't have this thinking. They expect themselves to be
> superior to others whereas they are not even superior to nature. They
> are using nature.
> They are unsatisfied and grumbling species with a lack of empathy.

I'm not an engineer (yet), but for the sake of the argument let's assume 
I were one. Here's your logic: you want something. A particularly 
esoteric something, I must say (there are certainly more people around 
who would like a language like Python than people who need IR decoding 
routines for microcontrollers). You don't know / don't care / don't want 
to write it yourself, so you go looking for it on the Internet. You find 
that most people who wrote their own versions did so either without 
particularly worrying about portability, modularity, or comments. 
However, instead of trying to use the code and/or documenting it for 
others to use (which is what people - yourself included - should do, 
according to your own arguments), since you can't understand what the 
code does, and refuse to learn, you go on a rant on a mailing list 
insulting everyone and demanding a free solution. Last time I checked, 
this sort of behavior was pretty characteristic of -gasp- a child.

I'm going to need a PIC development environment under Linux that 
supports my custom bootloader by calling an external programming tool 
(which I wrote in Python, by the way, and which I DID document well 
enough to be used by pretty much anyone with half a brain). PikLab is 
great, but only supports built-in programming algorithms, and I didn't 
want to reimplement the entire loader in C++ for inclusion in PikLab. 
Did I go on a gripe on the PikLab mailing list about the absence of such 
a basic feature as running external programming tools? No, I went in 
myself and CODED IN A BUTTON TO DO IT.

I'm going to need all this in a live distro to use in a workshop I'll be 
giving in a few weeks. There is no PIC-oriented distro that I know of. 
Did I go whining at Knoppix or Ubuntu for not including PikLab and 
gputils? No, I'm making my own derivative.

Moral of the story: ranting about subpar (by your standards) open-source 
or free software (or hardware) has been tried over and over and over 
again. It has never worked, it will never work, and you'll be best off 
not doing it. This applies to everyone, and has nothing to do with 
engineers in particular. Get your ass together, grab a scope or a logic 
analyzer, figure out the codes for your remote, write the code, and post 
it somewhere. (Or don't. Unlike you, others won't demand it from you, 
and won't whine if it isn't perfect). The "no money for a scope" excuse 
doesn't work here, by the way. You've got a perfectly good scope built 
in to your computer that can handle IR bitstreams. It's called a sound card.

For what it's worth, I'm sure if the "gods" that programmed Python saw 
your message, they'd get a really good laugh out of it.

-- 
Hector Martin (hector@marcansoft.com)
Public Key: http://www.marcansoft.com/marcan.asc

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