Really sneaky card snooping

I just did something I thought was pretty neat. I was trying to validate that my approach of dumping the card log was OK. This is mostly because I get some gunk out of there sometimes, and it just doesn't look like completely correct data, like I'm missing something. It is hard to do an apples-to-apples comparison with the official software logs because the log on the card is constantly being written, and you can never fetch the exact same data twice.

So, I turned off all the file writing in my control application. Then, I started it up like normal and told it to do a log dump. It sat in its loop, waiting to get the control sequence that it never wrote back from the card. (Remember that the manager writes a number to a file, then expects to get that same number back when the command is done). It'll never get out of that loop, right? Well, no.

Simultaneously, I told the manager to dump the card's log. My software sat there and read the files along with the manager, but I let the manager do all the writing. My software walked along in lock step with the manager as it went about its business dumping the entire log. This let my software do the reading, but the official software do the writing (and its own reading).

What I ended up with was two virtually identical logs, except for the last byte, which my software truncated. I need to go fix that now.