Up-Grayed

Posted on by Daniel Kirstenpfad

Last week I upgraded my iPod touch to an iPhone… well actually I got a new iPhone 3GS aside the iPod.

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It’s a fast device – even noticeably faster than the 2nd gen iPod Touch. It’s got almost the same battery life like the touch for me and it was a plug-and-play experience to use it the first time.

What I wasn’t expecting is that the smooth experience suddenly came to a stop when I tried to plug the iPhone into my car – just where the iPod touch did the job for about 5 months (including that the touch got charged by the car along the way).

With the iPhone I got two error messages simultaneously:

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“Charging not supported by this accessory”

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“This accessory is not supported by iPhone”

Damn you Apple! What’s the problem? There’s a standard USB port which powered 2,5 inch hard disk drives previously and the iPhone just states that it cannot be charged with this accessory (e.g. the car).

On the other hand everything else just works as it was working with the iPod. I can browse my music library on the iDrive I can listen to music – everything works, beside those two error messages and the not-charging iPhone. Thank you Apple B-) Maybe I need to up-grayed my car too?

massive parallel computing with FPGAs

Posted on by Daniel Kirstenpfad

Today we had a great meeting with SciEngines. These guys offer a great platform for everything that needs massive parallelism and IO bandwidth scalability. They even brought a small copacobana cluster to our headquater.

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Source 1: http://www.sciengines.com
Source 2: http://www.sciengines.com/products/computers-and-clusters/copacobana-s3-1000.html

Killer .NET 4 feature: Memory Mapped files

Posted on by Daniel Kirstenpfad

“So what is it? A memory mapped file allows you to reserve a region of address space and commit physical storage to a region (hmmm, sounds like virtual memory, isn’t it?) but the main difference is that the physical storage comes from a file that is already on the disk instead of the memory manager. I will say that it has two main purposes:

  • It is ideal to access a data file on disk without performing file I/O operations and from buffering the file’s content. This works great when you deal with large data files.
  • You can use memory mapped files to allow multiple processes running on the same machine to share data with each other.“

OMG! You can even specifiy views on a memory mapped file… from different processes… .NET 4 FTW!

Source: http://blogs.msdn.com/salvapatuel/archive/2009/06/08/working-with-memory-mapped-files-in-net-4.aspx

there goes another Dell Latitude D630

Posted on by Daniel Kirstenpfad

I always asked myself when this particular notebook will fail. Almost everybody I know who got this notebook got his mainboard replaced in the last year. Now it seems that it’s time for my Latitude to get a new set of chips.

It crashed while I was using it and since that it only boots up like this:

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Oh I looked up which graphic chip that actually is. It’s a NVidia NVS135 chip – not like I thought the NVS160 which is embedded in my current generation latitude. Thank god I got 3 year repair and replacement….

the .NET Framework sourcecode release and how to unpack it…

Posted on by Daniel Kirstenpfad

It’s great to finally have the .NET sourcecode for debugging purposes – inconveniently it’s in a format you might have your difficulties just browsing along. A little tool is here to help!

After you installed, let’s say the WCF sourcecode and debug symbols you get a directory structure similar to this:

wcfsource

This source.zip.tmp file holds the whole sourcecode as one big package. It can’t be unpacked – even one would suggest that by just looking at that .zip ending in the name of the file.

Instead this is a plain-text file of a certain yet simple format. I wrote me a little tool to unpack this file into it’s original files and directories.

You can get the little tool, including sourcecode, here: UnpackMSSources.zip

To start the magic, you would like to go to the command line and start the tool with two parameters. Parameter 1 is the path and filename of the source.zip.tmp file. Parameter 2 is the part of the Path that needs to be cut-off. For the WCF Sources it’s “/DEVDIV/depot/DevDiv/releases/Orcas/SP/ndp/cdf/src/” for example.

The tool will then start to whirl through the file and extract all the files it founds into directories it’s creating along the way. After some seconds you would end with a directory tree like this:

unpacked

Have fun!

Source 1: http://referencesource.microsoft.com/netframework.aspx
Source 2: http://www.schrankmonster.de/content/binary/UnpackMSSources.zip