So the good thing about being a production geek is that you can have some off the wall, crazy problems. Like today for example. I had to stuff a Osiris light personality into a Avolite Diamond III console. Props to Brad from AVO and Darren from Royal for their help. The problem all started when there was some miscommunication about the console that was being used for the show. The Diamond didn’t have the correct settings (known as personalities) to control the lights we were using. No problem, download a file from the Inet. Hum, Inet has no file to download. Avo has some of the best support I have seen from a company. Brad whipped up a file and emailed it over. No dice.
Now AVO does some interesting things with their file format on the disks. Yes, this old dog uses 3.5″ floppies. (Had to keep running back and forth to a computer on the other side of the hotel to make changes but that’s another story.) On the disk are three types of files. A personality file, a personality list file and a definition file. The personality file looks very much like your typical scripting language files. The one that was the problem was the per.lst file. This one holds all of the names of the different files on the disk. Kinda of like a FAT. The purpose of this file is to provide names to the display so you can see what file you are calling up. Now, unknown to me, this file is white space sensitive. It took me a while and several trips to the computer with the floppy drive to figure this out. Seems like you have to account for every space available in the display before you can move to the next line of text. The problem that we had is I think that the display was larger then the one on this particular console so it didn’t know what to do with the extra white space. This in turn caused the file not to show up in the display to be loaded.
So that is my bit of lighting geekness for the day. Helps to know a little about everything I guess.