Heute ist für diesen Winter das erste mal Schnee gefallen.

Lawnmowing can be dangerous – especially for old fences.

The crime scene.

The penetrator.

Luckily, a new fence could be assembled.

Jens Heymann

This past Saturday I had the rare pleasure of being the exclusive attendance (along with a friend) for a screening of the movie “Speed Racer”, the new one from the Wachovski Brothers.

To cut it short – it was a 135 minute cotton candy eye overload. Some nice actors (with cameos of German actors), but nothing real and therefore nothing of deeper interest.

Like rumored before in Hollywood: This movie has the aura of a big flop. My experience now confirms that.

Jens Heymann

From a local bakery.

Jens Heymann

Last month while attending the CeBIT I was looking around in exhibition hall 6 at United Internet and discovered some nice advertising products.

On my interest I got the reply: “Are you a nerd?”

My answer: “Truly, I hope not anymore. But I’ll take one of each.” Too bad they are no stickers.

Some things will haunt you forever, won’t they?

Jens Heymann

Do you know what is pictured below?

Well, this menacing-looking package contains 2000ml shower gel. I guess, that will last a while…

Jens Heymann

I don’t know, but here is a picture of what I ordered of the cherry coke:

(Yes, that are 72 cans.)

Jens Heymann

The most (in)famous action-flick of movie history now has its third sequel, but nowhere a company producing a proper first-person shooter? It’s kind of strange that nobody seems to be interested in picking up a worldwide-known character.

Is it too much guilty pleasure? Too much far-right, political incorrect or just old-fashioned? Maybe it’s the lack of box-office in the US. Or simply no licence is available.

Anyway, back in the Reagan-era these concerns didn’t exist.

The 1985-game with a well-known score by Martin Galway was a huge bestseller.

Jens Heymann

It’s time again for voting: Load down a ballot, make your choices and see tonight (or tomorrow) if you’re an expert.

Home Oscar ballot

Jens Heymann

When today the movie “Earth” aka “Unsere Erde” starts in cinemas around the country you may have the chance to experience something very special: a real cinematic déjà-vu.

Let me explain how:

What many people don’t know for sure: This movie is a best-of of the same-named TV-series previously aired on ARD some time ago and after that on other public stations. So if you are an avid documentation-watcher you are going to pay for something already seen (and maybe even stored at home, not to mention the monthly TV-fees…).

The original series contains eleven episodes of 45 mins (Uncut 48 mins, BBC-airing). It’s not difficult to sum up and recognize what’s missing (of course) in the movie-version.

You still may say: But I wanna enjoy it on a big screen with a crowd and once in my life it’s ok paying for old stuff.

Then I better say nothing about “Deep Blue”…

Jens Heymann

By speaking of unhealthy food in Great Britain: Freshly imported from the Netherlands…

But I have to practice some more before being ready for the Forest-Gump-17-in-a-row-in-one-evening-because-it’s-for-free-challenge.

Jens Heymann

Recently I could lay my hands on a new piece of hardware – a Nokia N95. Nowadays you can do a lot with those shiny new mobile phones – so much that you’ll never know about everything.

This is the special “Spiderman 3″- version.

The interior.

Handy.

Now it’s a mobile phone…

…and now your personal mp3/video/whatever-player.

E.g. the mentioned “Spiderman”.

Jens Heymann

seems to have a nice blot somewhere this year. They really nominated “Norbit”. It’s only one nom and in a lower category, but with such decisions the Academy does itself no service.

At least the counter award – the Razzie – is on track as every year. This time they cracked down on the it-girls. Lindsey Lohan (of course), Jessica Alba (earned) and Jessica Biel (assumed) all got their nominations. Personally I would have added Megan Fox and some others, too.

Jens Heymann

Praised by the critics I was eager to watch this movie. Afterwards I can say that it’s not sophisticated compared with all those other action flicks.

Mark Wahlberg plays a gifted sniper who gets cheated and consequently seeks revenge. Now bullets and bodies are flying around.

An interesting setup ends in standard-type action. First Wahlberg gives us some nice knowledge about sniping, but then he just mows the enemies down in series. Neither big psychology nor character developing. That may be the purpose of the movie, but it is nothing special anymore this way.

If you combine the terms “star-vehicle” and “drawing board” you know what’s behind of this production. Mark Wahlberg “is doing a movie” instead of “a movie that features Mark Wahlberg”. The lead actor is simply more important than the script.

Next you have Michael Pena as the (usually funny) sidekick who delivers the cues to the main actor. Kate Mara serves as the nice-to-look-screaming-must-be-rescued female with merely 20 mins of screen time and nothing much to say.

The only things elevating this film a little bit are the not so meaningless intro action sequence and the zero-tolerance finale. Overall too straight to be outstanding.

Jens Heymann

One of the most spectacular and grossing movies of ‘07 and finally I have seen it, too. Last spring people invaded the cinemas like the Persians Greece, spent some money and went home again.

The story of the 300 mighty Spartans, who defended a narrow pass against the superior numbers of Persians until death should be familiar to everyone around. Also uncontroversial are the well-made CGI-backgrounds as well as the entertaining ability of the whole thing.

But:

Is it pro-Bush and assists on his war in Iraq or (possibly) against Iran?

A clear no, because too far-fetched. There are no politics in it. The big box office is also no indication of a widely hidden pro-war predisposition among American viewers. I guess, it’s rather the recent popularity of Frank Miller and his comics.

Is it fascistic?

That is a typical European critic, but the martial quotes and looks are fortunately paired with just as much irony. Lastly, the Spartans lived this way despite some SS-like “blood and honor” jabbering.

Is it really better being a “free” Spartan than a “slaved” Persian?

My impression was the Persian acted much more like the so-called decadent occident. Lots of tolerant and hedonic people, who didn’t get discriminated because of their religion, looks and behaviors, or? Xerxes didn’t deny the wishes of Ephialtes, e.g. The Spartans by contrast with their euthanasia and their strict living kept unfamiliar to me all the time.

Millions of Persians?

This is of cause pure fiction. How can someone supply such an amount of soldiers even only one day? The whole Persian food production would had to accompany them.

Are the Arcadians cleverer than the Spartans by withdrawing from the lost battle?

I would say yes, and there you see why a civilian might be a lesser tough warrior but superior when it comes to thinking.

Let’s hope (for the sake of mankind) that nobody in the world (especially the thin-skinned Iranians) takes this comicesque movie at face value.

Jens Heymann

It’s been a long time since my last blog entry – but here it is:

One of my favourite “we’re-just-a-bunch-of-fanboys”-site is mactechnews.de. These guys are always on the line when it comes to Apple and their beloved hard- and software but something strange happened a few days ago: they relaunched their website which is now a from-the-scratch rewrite with all new Ajax and what-not. The point is though: They did not only rewrite it, they did make a choice.

Now mactechnews.de is based completely on Microsoft .NET and ASP.NET 2.0 powered by Windows Server 2003 machines…

Source: http://www.mactechnews.de/news/index.html?id=139708

Wer letztens in Ilmenau mal fix zu McDonalds wollte, hatte ein Erlebnis der besonderen Art…

von außen

von innen

Nun ja, die Burger gabs ja trotzdem irgendwie…

Jens Heymann

Once every while I want to know how many lines of code I’ve written so far. And because I did not find a well working and integrated tool for this job yet I was searching one everytime. But it seems that I’ve found the tool: it’s called “Line Counter” and it’s Freeware. It’s a Visual Studio Add-In which means it’s fully integrated.

And it does the trick:

You can even get the sources of this Add-In. Go and enjoy!

Source: http://www.wndtabs.com/index.html

FeM is in need of one… for more than two years now… maybe this will do the job? It’s bright, nerdy and cat-compatible (needed for keeping certain Mr. S’s out of the office)

Source: http://www.evilmadscientist.com/article.php/tablekits

“Once upon a time — on June 6, 1995, to be precise — we were playing racquetball, not well but gamely. It wasn’t our intention to become “the pirate guys.” Truth to tell, it wasn’t really our intention to become anything, except perhaps a tad thinner and healthier, and if you could see our photos, you’d know how THAT turned out. As we flailed away, we called out friendly encouragement to each other -”Damn, you bastard!” and “Oh, jeez, my hamstring!” for instance – as shots caromed away, unimpeded by our wildly swung rackets.

On this day, for reasons we still don’t quite understand, we started giving our encouragement in pirate slang. Mark suspects one of us might have been reaching for a low shot that, by pure chance, might have come off the wall at an unusually high rate of speed, and strained something best left unstrained. “Arrr!,” he might have said.

Who knows? It might have happened exactly that way.

Anyway, whoever let out the first “Arrr!” started something. One thing led to another. “That be a fine cannonade,” one said, to be followed by “Now watch as I fire a broadside straight into your yardarm!” and other such helpful phrases.

By the time our hour on the court was over, we realized that lapsing into pirate lingo had made the game more fun and the time pass more quickly. We decided then and there that what the world really needed was a new national holiday, Talk Like A Pirate Day. “

Source: http://www.talklikeapirate.com/about.html

BMW just released a free racing sim for your Windows PC. It’s based on the same GMotor 2 Engine that poweres GTR 2 and RFactor.

Source: Downloadlink

With every UMTS/3G card comes a tool that tracks your connection information, your traffic and everything… and it looks like this for a Vodafone UMTS card:

That’s not even close to cute and well useable. So someone took the task and created this:

A small tool that is compatible with almost any available UMTS/3G hardware on earth and has these features:

tiny executable: 0.3 MB, very little CPU load

• permanently displaying:
• up- and download speed in kBytes/s, used data volume in kByte (with round option), used online time (with round option), mode of operation UMTS(3G)/GPRS, signal strength in percent and dBm, network name and cell id (if provided by pc card), homezone status
• movable mini window with information display:
• sitting on the task bar, at upper screen border, in front of the start button, as dynamic tray icon with gauges
• warning when exceeding data volume or online time
• optional beep output for signal strength,network change and cell change
• manual or automatic selection of network and mode
• optional warning when using not listet networks
• determination of receivable networks
• retrieve and charge prepaid credit
• automatics:
• start/terminate connections,start extern programs such as Browser or Ping, reconnect after errors/freezes, generate network entry, dynamic com port determination
• adjustable connection error tolerance
• connection test by “smart Ping”
• SMS reception can be activated
• PC remote-control by SMS
• SMS transmission by batch job
• logging of data volume and connection information
• connection statistics as semigraphics
• timer for program end or shutdown
• deactivate graphics compression (some networks)
• scriptable
• service terminal for data card commands
• shows data card netlocks
• service log for data card control communication
• for Windows 2000/XP/Vista/embedded

And the best of all is that this is a freeware tool. Unfortunately it’s not available for OSX.

Source: http://www.mwconn.com

Switcher is the name of the tool that is available since some months and if you ever used Flip3d in Windows Vista you maybe know what it means when I say: Switcher is the Flip3d that should have shipped with Vista.

There are several usability issues with Vistas built-in Flip3d, take a look:

First of all you just don’t see the content of the windows… then you don’t see their name… then… who came up with that layout?

Compare that to the UI of Switcher:

Neat, isn’t it? Try it, love it.

Source: http://baostuff.spaces.live.com/default.aspx

When I first saw a review of “Microsoft Windows Home Server” I was impressed by several features. One that I never thought about is that little icon on each Home Server client that shows you the overall status of your home network:

This little icon can look like this, depending on the status:

As you can see – it’ll give you a clean and fast status by telling you that everything is okay on your network or that anything needs your, maybe immediate, attention.

I am administrating round about 12 Windows servers and I always looked for a clean and easy to use tool to monitor them. So I came up with a plan: Build my own tool.

Since I am extensivly using Windows Communication Foundation in the last weeks I was intrigued to try it on that matter. So I built a WCF selfhosting service that makes the eventlog of the machine it is running on available. Then I built a small client that fits nicely in your tray. I am not quite done yet but it’s a good start.

As you can see. There is the Host, running on the server and making all Eventlogs of this machine available. Then there is “SmallClient” – being exactly this: a small client for testing purposes only. And thirdly there’s the EventLogClient – giving you the full blown user interface…

This is how it looks when you add a server to the client:

And this is how it looks when you configure a filter:

I thought it would be nice to have this workflow:

1. configure/add the server and select the eventlog that you want to monitor
2. create and configure a filter that is matched upon the particular eventlog source

For the icons (see above) I used one of the icons from the Tango Icon Gallery as a starting point and added some color and stuff.

So why do I even talk about all this? I want YOU to take the code and use it…add more functionality…I am releasing the code(except the icons) under the BSD license. So you can do almost whatever you want with it – but I would love to hear about the things you’re doing with my code and idea.

You can download the sourcecode of my little project here. (200 Kbytes)

Source 1: Home Server Homepage
Source 2: http://tango.freedesktop.org/Tango_Icon_Gallery
Source 3: Sourcecode.

Finally someone started to port the Windows Communication Foundation to Mono. That’s great news because the only thing that keeps some of my newest works from running under anything different Windows is the WCF.

“Implementing peer-to-peer (P2P) communication was the main objective. WCF ships, by default, with predefined bits for making P2P connections in an easy way, being possible to build services which hosts a mesh of nodes (a node represents a potential client), taking care of everything related to registration of new nodes, message flow over the mesh, etc.”

You can get the plan as pdf here.

Source: Mono Olive

Uhh it seems that someone got hold of a power cord … and did a bad bad thing:

Wir haben uns vor kurzem 2 rote Thai Krabben gehohlt.

Das Weibchen “Isabell”

Das Männchen “Gregor”

Wir haben im moment als Landteil “nur” eine Wurzel. Der qm Styropor, das Epoxidharz und der Sand für den neuen Landteil liegen schon bereit. Wenn er fertig ist gibts natürlich Bilder von dem Bau und dem Ergebnis.

Source: http://blueturtles.schrankmonster.de

The Team Foundation Server 2008 Feature list is finalized and available… read it here:

“Administration, Operations & Setup

• Share Point 2007 support
• Enable use of Sharepoint on any server and any port
• Support for MOSS 2007
• Enable support for Reporting Services on any server and any port (new) (RTM)
• Support for SQL Named Instances – This will allow customers to share a SQL server between multiple TFS instances, or with other applications. This has been a commonly requested feature by enterprises.
• “Longhorn” server support – TFS will support the next version of the server (and corresponding new version of IIS) that is currently under development.
• Sync Large Groups – This is a set of work to improve the performance and robustness of TFS’s handling large groups of users (~30,000 or more) granted permission to a TFS instance. Today this can result in a support call to recover from it.
• Non-default ports – We’ve gotten a bunch of feedback from enterprise customers about TFS’s limited support for alternate web sites and ports running afoul of data center policies. We are going to be improving TFS’s configurability in this respect in Orcas.
• Simplify installation – In Orcas, we will be doing a variety of things to attempt to make installing TFS easier and quicker than it is now. Improvements include eliminating the separate data-tier installation, simplifying the requirements around required domain accounts by supporting the built in machine accounts (like Network Service) where we can, etc.
• Official testing and support for more configurations – This includes clustering, mirroring, log shipping, Virtual machine deployment, and more.
• Support for client certificates
• Upgrade from TFS 2005
• Support for SQL 2008 (aka Katmai) (new) (RTM)
• TFSDeleteProject now permanently deletes (destroys) version control content (new) (RTM)
• New role for many operations activities (new) (RTM) – You don’t have to be server administrator to run many of the admin utilities any longer.
• Enhancements to tfsadminutil (new) (RTM) – New capability to configure accounts, connections, etc on both TFS and the TFS proxy.

Build (more detail)

• Support multi-threaded builds with the new MSBuild.
• Continuous Integration – There are many components to this, including build queuing and queue management, drop management (so that users can set policies for when builds should be automatically deleted), and build triggers that allows configuration of exactly how when CI builds should be triggered, for example – every checkin, rolling build (completion of one build starts the next), etc.
• Improved ability to specify what source, versions of source, and other build properties.
• Improved extensibility of the build targets – such as ability to easily execute targets before and after each solution/project is built.
• Improved ability to manage multiple build machines.
• Stop and delete builds from within VS.
• .NET Object model for programming against the build server.
• Simplified ability to specify what tests get run as part of a build.
• The ability to store build definitions anywhere in the version control hierarchy.
• Scheduled builds – You can schedule builds to happen at specified times.
• Improved build agent communication – We replaced .NET binary remoting with WCF web services, simplifying some configuration and security aspects.
• Ability to run GUI tests as part of a build – Automated builds used to run tests in such a way as to prevent access to a GUI desktop.
• New checkin policy for broken CI builds – Preventing checkin while the CI build is broken.
• Support for HTTPS communication to the TFS server (new)
• Continuous Integration build checkin policy (new)
• Support for incremental gets and builds (new)

Data Warehouse

• Add support for checkin policy overrides to the warehouse – an oversight from V1.

Migration

• Migration toolkit – A toolkit for building conversion and mirroring solutions between TFS and other systems. In addition, we will release one or more new tools to integrate with popular alternative systems.

Version Control

• Annotate – This is based on the TFS Annotate Power Tool but includes numerous improvements.
• Folder Diff – Also based on the TFS Tree Diff Power Tool with numerous improvements.
• Destroy – The ability to permanently delete version control files/folders from TFS. It can also be used to destroy the file contents while preserving the change set history.
• Get Latest On Checkout – There have been many requests for this feature (which was a change in behavior from SourceSafe). There is now an option that allows you to specify that you want TFS to download the latest version of files when you check them out.
• Workspace improvements – Workspaces will now support mapping a folder or file under a cloaked folder and wildcard mappings so that you can map all files in a folder without mapping sub folders. Based on experience with large projects, this will simplify workspace definitions for many people.
• Performance improvements – A variety of Version Control performance enhancements that will improve virtually all aspects of version control performance. The gains for smaller servers/projects (< 10,000 files) will be modest. The gains for larger projects (particularly where the file count approaches 100,000’s) will be substantial.
• Scale improvements – Fixed out of memory problems on the server when operating on more than a few hundred thousand files at a time.
• Offline improvements – We’ve signficantly improved the experience going offline and integrated the tfpt online capability into the IDE for going back online.
• Extranet support for the TFS Proxy – allowing you to access a local TFS proxy with a different set of credentials than the TFS server.
• Command line help – You can now type “tf command /help” and get a console dump of the usage of that command. This is much more convenient than always being launched into the richer GUI hypertext help when you just want to remember what the options for a command are. You can still launch the GUI help by running “tf msdn”. You can get a console dump of available commands by just typing “tf help”.
• Source Control Explorer refresh improvements – This includes less redrawing and reloading but even more important it enables updates based on changes made in other instances of TeamExploror or the command line. That’s right, if you checkout a file from the command line, any instances of TeamExplorer you have running on the same machine will automatically refresh.
• Async loading of the Source Control Explorer (new)
• The SCE local path can now be selected and copied (new)
• Merge improvements (new) – Improved the logic that detects merge conflicts to generate fewer false positives and handle more scenarios.

Work Item Tracking

• Performance & Scale improvements – A variety of improvements that will make both the work item server and client faster and able to handle larger servers.
• Query builder usability improvements – Drop down filtering based on current project, better MRU lists, column drag & drop, shift-click mouse based multi-column sorting, etc.
• Attachments improvements – Save button, drag & drop for adding an attachment, multi-select for attaching files.
• Tooltips on field names contain the field name used for querying
• Server side support for deleting work items & work item types – We didn’t have time to do client UI support for it but we plan to release a Power Tool that will take advantage of the new server side feature.
• Support for security on the iteration hierarchy (new)

Web Access

• Adding Web Access UI to TFS – As you’ve seen many places, we acquired devBiz and their TeamPlain Web Access product. We are releasing it as a Power Tool in the next few months and plan to release it as an official product in the Orcas timeframe. We have not figured out how the release date will line up with the Orcas date but it will be in the same general timeframe.

Bug fixes

• In addition to all of the feature work, we’ve spent months testing the product and fixing any bugs we’ve found. We expect Orcas will have even better stability and robustness than TFS 2005.

Compatibility (no change since last time)

As Orcas is an adoption focused release, we have put a lot of emphasis on compatibility with VS2005. We are striving for near 100% compatibility. The Orcas client will be able to work with a VS2005 server and a VS2005 client will be able to work with an Orcas server. There are only a few compatibility issues.

• Client side VS add-ins will need to be recompiled (or have policy changed) because the TFS OM assembly versions will change and add-ins will need to bind to the new assemblies. The APIs themselves are generally not changing, so we don’t expect much in the way of code changes – just recompilation.
• Build is the only area where we plan to have some compatibility disconnects. In general, most build operations – listing build definitions, starting and stopping builds, examining build reports, etc. will work both with 2005 client -> Orcas server and Orcas client -> 2005 server. However, here are a few caveats:

1. An Orcas TFS server will only work with an Orcas build server – so you’ll need to upgrade your build server when you upgrade your TFS server.
2. For an VS2005 client to start a build on an Orcas server, the build definition needs to be stored at $//TeamBuildTypes/. In Orcas, you have more flexibility as to where to put them.
3. Changes made to properties in the .proj file that are in the database in Orcas will not be updated in the database and will no longer be in sync.
4. VS2005 will be able to start a build, but it can’t queue a build, see the list of builds in the queue, see the list of build agents, etc.
5. An Orcas client will not be able to create a new build definition on a TFS2005 server.
6. When starting a build, an Orcas client will not be able to change any parameters in the dialog for a TFS2005 Server.”

Source: http://blogs.msdn.com/bharry/archive/2007/08/08/final-tfs-2008-feature-list.aspx

I just started the formating of a 3 Tbyte truecrypt volume which is located on a Promise Vtrak m500i connected via 1 Gbit/s iSCSI…

This is some serious big truecrypt volume, isn’t it? (at least today it is…)

Ahzf took some pictures… coooooool:

Source: blog.ahzf.de

Everybody needs more than one job these days and so does FeM. One team at the Chaos Communication Camp 07 and one at the Hockenheimring, recording and live streaming the events.

You may ask what “Formula Student” is…:

“Students build a single seat formula racecar with which they can compete against teams from all over the world. The competition is not won solely by the team with the fastest car, but rather by the team with the best overall package of construction, performance, and financial and sales planning.

Formula Student challenges the team members to go the extra step in their education by incorporating into it intensive experience in building and manufacturing as well as considering the economic aspects of the automotive industry. Teams take on the assumption that they are a manufacturer developing a prototype to be evaluated for production. The target audience is the non-professional Weekend-Racer, for which the racecar must show very good driving characteristics such as acceleration, braking and handling. It should be offered at a very reasonable cost and be reliable and dependable. Additionally, the car’’s market value increases through other factors such as aesthetics, comfort and the use of readily available, standard purchase components.

The challenge the teams face is to compose a complete package consisting of a well constructed racecar and a sales plan that best matches these given criteria. The decision is made by a jury of experts from the motorsport, automotive and supplier industries. The jury will judge every team’s car and sales plan based on construction, cost planning and sales presentation. The rest of the judging will be done out on the track, where the students demonstrate in a number of performance tests how well their self-built racecars fare in their true environment.”

Overview map of the event

As soon as the Live-Streams are available I will keep you updated…

Source 1: http://www.formulastudent.de

Die Koch Media GmbH sucht ab sofort Studenten und interessierte für Testvorführungen neuer Video- und Computerspiele:

“Wenn Sie bereit wären, natürlich gegen eine kleine Gegenleistung, die Entwicklung eines neuen Spiels (plattformunabhängig) zu verfolgen und zu beeinflußen und dies auch mehrmals in den kommenden Monaten machen würden, melden Sie sich bitte unter der Telefon-Nummer: 089-24245196.”

Source: http://www.kochmedia.de

As ususal here’s the schematic overview of the things behind the curtain:

Source: http://www.implementierungsdetail.de/index.php?n=Main.TeamStreaming

Once again FeM is recording and live streaming a Chaos Computer Club event. The Chaos Communication Camp starts today and you can watch everything live:

“The Chaos Communication Camp is an international, five-day open-air event for hackers and associated life-forms. The Camp features two conference tracks with interesting lectures, a workshop-track and over 30 villages providing workshops and gettogethers covering a specific topic.”

Chaos Communication Camp 2007
The International Hacker Open Air Gathering
8|9|10|11|12th August 2007
Finowfurt near Berlin, Germany (Old Europe)

“You can participate! Bring your tent and join our villages. The Camp has everything you need: power, internet, food and fun. The 100.000 square meter areal features enough space to camp, cozy places to hang out and a nice pool and lake to swim and do nautic experiments.”

There are two lecture halls called “foo” and “bar”:

Live Stream (WMV) “foo”
Live Stream (WMV) “bar”

Of course like at every CCC event you can grab an up-to-date schedule called “Fahrplan” here. The only thing I did not mention yet is the FeM-Village Wiki page…oh well..done

Source 1: http://www.fem.tu-ilmenau.de
Source 2: http://events.ccc.de/camp/2007/Streams
Source 3: http://events.ccc.de/camp/2007/Fahrplan/
Source 4: http://events.ccc.de/camp/2007/FeM_Village

There was this update. My 360 died right after it. Well: Coincidence?

The support / repair experience is quite good so far – besides the fact that I have to get a coffin by myself and that they won’t add the lost Xbox Live Subscription Time to my account….

Now this is my second 360 that craps out. If you want to know what happened in 2006 to my first 360 go here.

Source: http://www.schrankmonster.de/PermaLink,guid,944f2bb2-696b-48fb-b06a-d8734f5a6f44.aspx

I am currently involved in a very interesting project which utilizes a massive load of threads and in-memory data structures. The downside if this is of course: how on earth do I make that thread-safe?

Along the journey I stumbled upon Ralf Westphals thoughts and code on that matter. Ralf comprehensively writes about a technology called “Software Transactional Memory“. “What’s that?” you may ask. And here’s the answer provided by the wikipedia:

“In computer science, software transactional memory (STM) is a concurrency control mechanism analogous to database transactions for controlling access to shared memory in concurrent computing. It functions as an alternative to lock-based synchronization, and is typically implemented in a lock-free way. A transaction in this context is a piece of code that executes a series of reads and writes to shared memory. These reads and writes logically occur at a single instant in time; intermediate states are not visible to other (successful) transactions. The idea of providing hardware support for transactions originated in a 1986 paper and patent by Tom Knight. The idea was popularized by Maurice Herlihy and J. Eliot B. Moss. In 1995 Nir Shavit and Dan Touitou extended this idea to software-only transactional memory (STM). STM has recently been the focus of intense research and support for practical implementations is growing.”

It seems that this different approach to in-memory data management could a solution for most of the difficulties I and maybe you might have with thread safe programming. Even better: it make the code easier to read and is completely written in C#.

Since I am still in the evaluation phase if or if not to use the NSTM implementation, I will keep you posted on that matter in future updates.

Source 1: http://weblogs.asp.net/ralfw/archive/tags/Software+Transactional+Memory/default.aspx
Source 2: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_transactional_memory
Source 3: http://www.codeplex.com/NetSTM

So here’s the problem I had: There is an Exchange 2007 server I am forced to use for some of my daily work and that’s where the problems start: Due to the work of some evil geniuses there’s a load of user and security policies associated with that server. That’s not a problem per se: It’s just that things like “forward all mails to this account” don’t work. You have to use Outlook Web Access or the heavyweight Outlook to get to your mails… Till today I had an Outlook 2007 running on my private IMAP mailserver machine just for the purpose of downloading all the mail from the Exchange server to the local harddisk. I had setup a client-rule to copy all the mail to my IMAP server but despite the fact Outlook is running on the exact same machine as the IMAP server it just did not work for more than 1-20 messages… connections were lost and stuff screwed up. So I had to move all the messages manually (Select-All -> Drag-n-Drop onto the IMAP folder inside Outlook) which took me quite some time each month.

Two days ago I read an article where namenlos wrote about his journey with his employers Exchange server. He wrote a Python script that did the job for Exchange 2003 by using the WebDAV features. These features unfortunatly are deprecated in the current 2007 release of Exchange. So I decided to write a tool in C# that does the trick and uses the brand-spanking new Exchange 2007 Web Service.

The Exchange 2007 SDK is a wasteland to say the least when it comes to documentation. It took me some time and a good search engine to get to something useful out of it. But I think it’s worth the pain: When you got over the first annoying steps you’ll just like me will start to love the possibilities this Web Services give you.

In my case I am using the webservices to do these things:

1. allocate my inbox and obtain a listing of messageIDs
2. get the complete messages out of my inbox
3. reformat the messages and send them via smtp to my own mail server

What I’ve written is not feature complete (as in: no attachements, …) but it’s a great and working start and does the 3 point-trick from above quite well. I will refine the code and add the missing features (e.g. attachements and stuff) in the future… or maybe you are faster than me. In that case it would be well appreciated if you send me your code/a link to the code (find my email in the sourcefile…)

get the code here. (90 kbytes)

Source 1: http://blog.slash-me.net/archives/235-fetchmail-fuer-MS-Exchange.html
Source 2: http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa562613.aspx
Source 3: http://www.schrankmonster.de/content/binary/Exchange2IMAP.zip

There’s an interesting Windows PowerShell e-book available for free download. You can grab the e-book and the associated demos at Microsoft Switzerland.

Source 1: e-book
Source 2: demos

Maybe he’s just stupid…

Source: http://modblog.bmezine.com/2007/07/26/best-windows-tattoo-ever/

I had a Skype call today with a colleague and we came across the remaining 1,40 Euros on his SkypeOut balance… As many of you will know this SkypeOut balance is limited to 180 days. So when you’re not using it for 180 days it’ll be deactivated. We didn’t know this at that very moment we just talked about it what would happen.

And minutes later this happens:

I did not do anything with skype. I did not search on skype.com nor did I do anything else except talking about the subject with my colleague over skype. And there it is: The information we just talked about… you have to do a call once every 180 days to keep your SkypeOut activated…

Am I a bit to paranoid on that matter? It just matches a bit too well … and that would explain why Skype is using that much CPU cycles while calls are made…