Phillips Go Gear SA-31 Media Player - Repairing Firmware

I purchased Phillips Go Gear SX 31 Device on 14th Feb 2008 from the Next's store. This is a beautiful black device with easy interface. This was working fine up to Tuesday last week when it started to misbehave. Any song I tried to play was being played in the fast forward mode. It was producing strange sound in the earphones.
Thinking that any key might not have released, I pressed all the keys. But that doesn't work. I switched the device off and then switched it on again. Hopefully, I tried to play the song. But again it was running like a jet plain - skipping 4 seconds at a time. The seconds count was 1...5...9...13..so on. Being a software professional (Microsoft technology), I thought of giving the device a hard boot. But the device has in-built battery and there is no way to remove its battery.

Today while I was enjoying my Sunday morning (at 11:30 am!), suddenly I remembered that the software that came with the device has an option to repair its firmware. I switched on my PC and tried the option of repairing the device. The device was repaired successfully. Thinking positively, I removed the device from USB connection and tried to play the song. But there was no song. The music folder was empty. With blowing heart, I checked my videos and pictures. All was gone. Even I lost my recorded sounds. The device came loaded with a video, that I like most. And not all was gone.

One thing that irritated me most, in the whole scenario, was that the repair software did not prompt me that my data may be lost. Although, I have the backups of my music, videos and pictures, I can't get back my sound recordings. The lose is non-recoverable.

Steps to Repair:

1. Open the Phillips SA-31xx device manager.
2. Connect the player to the computer while pressing and holding the on/off button of the device (the inner round button.). Windows will tell you that a USB device is connected in the repair mode.
3. The device's screen will look like:

1. On the device manager, click on the Repair tab.
2. On Repair tab, click the Repair button. It will show the message that the device is repaired. The device will also show that it's being repaired.

3. After the device has been repaired, below message will be shown.

 

4. BEWARE ALL DATA WILL BE LOST from the Phillips Go Gear SA-31xx Media Player without any warning.

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• PhillipsGoGear SA3115/97 Portable Media Player

 

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True / False in classic VB

In classic VB (and classic ASP as well), zero is considered as false and any other non-zero integer is considered as true.

While debugging an asp page, I come across following line:

If Not Request.Form.Count Then
...

Now form count was 2 (true) so the condition should evaluate as false (Not true). But this was always evaluating as true. It took me half an hour to find the catch.

What actually happening here was that Not is a bit-wise operator in VB. It flips the bits. So,

2 is 0000 0010 in binary.
NOT 2 is 1111 1101 in binary.

Considering that the last bit is sign bit, this becomes -3.

Now our condition If NOT (2) becomes If (-3), which always evaluates to true (non-zero integers are always true in VB).

 

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