Since I had to fix it for more than hundred times before – here is once and for all the solution:

Add to the httpRuntime section of the web.config file of your ASP.NET application or webservice:

and you’re done.

Hmm… maybe something in the current Menu Meters version is wrong:

Almost every video game company emphasizes the realism in their racing games. In at least one case this marketing lead to strange consequences: Carl Edwards hits a wall with is NASCAR racing car on purpose.

“Carl Edwards did everything he could Sunday, including purposely bouncing off the concrete wall at Kansas Speedway, but it wasn’t quite enough to beat two-time NASCAR Sprint Cup champion Jimmie Johnson.”

“I planned on hitting the wall, but I didn’t plan on the wall slowing me down that much,” Edwards said. “In video games, you can just run into the wall and run it wide open. That’s what I did, but it didn’t quite work out the same as the video game.”

Source: http://hamptonroads.com/2008/09/johnson-wins-edwards-hits-wall-purpose

“While we moan about the world turning to slow,

many people seem to moan about the world turning to fast.”

(ahzf )

Once upon a time I was told about that cool technology that lets you take several hard drives and glue them “together” to a single big volume. This technology was called RAID – Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks – and that it was. It brought us greater levels of reliability and performance – and it was inexpensive compared with other technologies and since hard drive prices are falling for years and storage space is growing along with that it’s getting even cheaper than anything else you could use to store data securely. Some of us even backup to a independent RAID system.

In the beginning of this all there were several hard drive interface technologies used – mainly it was Parallel ATA and SCSI. It was widely accepted that the SCSI drives are specified for 24/7 server usage and were almost everytime faster than their consumer PATA relatives. It was accepted that if you want to build a reliable industry grade RAID you would want to use SCSI drives – the SCSI bus system even had advantages like up to 7 drives per bus compared to just 2 drives with PATA or hot-swap capabilities.

Over the last years it turned out that SATA is the new interface technology that replaces the old SCSI and PATA. There are several server grade SATA drives available now – these drives are getting cheaper, faster and bigger by the minute. So there’s not a real purpose for anything “more server than server-SATA” you might think. Again if you want to build inexpensive and redundant storage arrays there is nothing cheaper than standard or even server SATA drives. They are fast, reliable and huge.

So some years ago the industry presents: the SAS interface. It’s called “Serial Attached SCSI” and is the “new cool thing in hard disk storage”. There are some niche features that may or may not justify the existence of SAS. A fact is that SAS hard drives of the same size and speed are more expensive.

“SATA is marketed as a general-purpose successor to Parallel ATA and is now common in the consumer market, while the more expensive SAS is marketed for critical server applications.(Wikipedia)

It’s getting worse: The industry started to offer fast hard drives (15000 rpm) only for the more expensive SAS interface. The few 15k rpm SATA drives are not slower in any way than their SAS versions – but they are not widely available and all of a sudden the same price like the SAS version.

But back to the definition of RAID:

So over the years the technology made a giant leap forward and all of a sudden you find yourself using very expensive hard drives while glueing them together to giant volumes (it’s now terabytes…petabytes…). While consumer hard drives are available for about a third (at least) the price of the server version of the same drive. It seems that the widely accepted definition of inexpensive is replaced by independence. I do know that there are use cases when you want to use the fastest spinning drive available regardless of the price – but I also think that there could be affordable fast spinning drives if we shouldn’t be bothered to pay the marketing-fee that SAS brings. It’s plain marketing to make new 15k rpm drives only available for SAS and not for SATA. Marketing and nothing more.

As it turns out many industry (marketing) brains (hey, even wikipedia) are switching to a new definition of RAID. It’s now a Redundant Array of Independent Disks – which I think is a definition that could not be worse. It’s not independence we gain with the new definition.

Source 1: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAID#cite_note-1
Source 2: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serial_Attached_SCSI

AdventureClassicGaming blog has a very cool article about the could-have-been Full Throttle sequel:

“Playing Full Throttle is like tasting a rich bowl of roadhouse chili filled to the rim with biker gangs, chick mechanics (covered in engine grease too), and truckers with badass tattoos. An action packed, comical (albeit short), animated graphical adventure set in the backdrop of an apocalyptic future, Full Throttle touches on the subculture of motorcycle gangs and their steel horses. It is also a story about Ben, a renegade biker who lives and dies by his own rules. Ben’s voice (played by the late Roy Conrad) is every bit as gravelly as the Old Mine Road where he does battle. In this alternate world, cars hover, transport trucks are armored, and desolate towns like Melonweed are sinking fast into the sand. It is a land with many strange locales and even stranger inhabitants.”

Source: http://www.adventureclassicgaming.com/index.php/site/features/376/

I found the almost complete “Computer Chronicles” recordings on archive.org – and boy this is fun!

I picked some episodes and found very interesting things – like this particular episode from 1985. It’s about Unix and obviously one of the presenters has his very own opinion about Unix.

Source: Computer Chronicles 1985 “Unix”

Offenbar spielt da gerade ein von mir nicht zu verantwortendes Skript verrückt – Schrankmonster wird zur Zeit nämlich 1:1 schamlos kopiert

Ich freue mich natürlich darüber und habe direkt mal die Google FeedAds eingeschaltet…

P.S.: Bitte bau noch einer von den Blog Administratoren dass die Umlaute richtig übernommen werden – so ist das ja alles nur halb so hübsch.

Source: http://blog.fem.tu-ilmenau.de/

Da surfe ich hier und da mal herum – schaue mir ein paar Internetseiten über Bamberg an und da werde ich Zeuge einer ganz seltsamen Darbietung.

Bislang wusste ich dass Verbreitungsrechte im Internet auf Länder vergeben werden können – also dass man beispielsweise einen Webseiten Inhalt oder Livestream nur innerhalb der USA abrufen kann.

Nun scheint diese Art der Gängelung auch innerhalb von einzelnen Staaten Mode zu werden. Offenbar kann man in Deutschland nämlich die Rechte nur für ein bestimmtes Bundesland erwerben… Leute Leute wo wird das noch hinführen?

Source: http://www.bamberg-guide.de/bamberg/magazin/artikel.php?id=20080809201222

Okay. Offensichtlich ist bald Weihnachten denn wie ich eben lesen musste gibt es wohl schon Lebkuchen zu kaufen… so langsam aber sicher verliere ich komplett den Bezug zu Weihnachten überhaupt.

Hmm… dabei wollte ich gerade nach Arbeitssuchenden suchen…

Google Streetview is bad. It’s just unbelievable what you can see and since the StreetView Vans are currently here in germany I don’t think I want to get captured…

In this case they captured…well…:

Source: Google StreetView

…they eventually start making their own layout of your site… And you cannot do anything about it but listening to them!

A few days ago a big it-news site in germany relaunched it’s site with a new fixed-with-all-left layout. And more than 3000 comments by users had one and only thing to say: We don’t like it.

They disliked it that much that a few sat down and created their own site layouts by using firefox plugins like “stylish” – where you can create your own styles for sites.

I always wanted to see what these style-altering plugins can do but I never had the drive to think me into it…

Source: http://userstyles.org/styles/9589

“Last week, the Indlebe Radio Telescope, situated on the Steve Biko campus of the Durban University of Technology, successfully detected its first radio source.
The Indlebe Radio Telescope is a transit instrument that operates at the Hydrogen Line frequency of 1420 MHZ and uses a very sensitive radio receiver to detect extraterrestrial radio signals.
Stuart MacPherson, project leader in Electronic Engineering at the university, said he and his students were amazed when they realised the telescope had picked up a signal.
“We had made significant changes to the receiver to increase its sensitivity. When we went in that morning to check the data, we found that it had detected a source,” he said.”

It’s unlikely to be from an unnatural alien source but if you take in account that all the equipment was built by students on the campus of Durban Universit… that is just astonishing.

Source 1: http://www.thirdeyeconcept.com/forums/index.php?page=258
Source 2: http://indlebe.dut.ac.za/

I am reading through the normal gadget blogs and I stumble upon this:

“Hailed as the “planet’s first on and off-site backup solution to use ZFS,” these units provide up to 1TB of local and off-site storage, optional RAID 1 local redundancy, twin gigabit Ethernet ports, OS X / Windows / Linux compatibility and the obligatory rock-solid stability that ZFS is known for.”

Why is ZFS known for anything like rock-solid stability? The last thing I know was that a certain consumer OS manufacturer released his ZFS implementation to the public in read-only-configuration.

Source: Engadget

I used trueSpace years ago when a demo version appeared on one of those CDs that often came with computer magazines… it must be more than 10 years now. I was pleased to read about the availability of the current version of trueSpace as a completely free tool:

“trueSpace7.6 is a fully-featured 3D authoring package that will let you model, texture, light, animate and render 3D content. As well as traditional images and movies, you can also make 3D content for online shared spaces, and for Virtual Earth.”

Source: http://www.caligari.com/Products/trueSpace/tS75/brochure/intro.asp?Cate=BIntro

It seems that I missed that Augmented Reality Toolkit all the way until now. It’s ARToolKit and it’s completely OpenSource.

As a matter of fact there are a ton of demos available… HOW could I possibly miss that for so long?

“ARToolKit is a software library for building Augmented Reality (AR) applications. These are applications that involve the overlay of virtual imagery on the real world. For example, in the image to the right a three-dimensional virtual character appears standing on a real card. It can be seen by the user in the head set display they are wearing. When the user moves the card, the virtual character moves with it and appears attached to the real object.

One of the key difficulties in developing Augmented Reality applications is the problem of tracking the users viewpoint. In order to know from what viewpoint to draw the virtual imagery, the application needs to know where the user is looking in the real world.”

Here is a short video demonstration of what you could start with:

…not talking about the things that would be possible if someone had a great idea

Source: http://www.hitl.washington.edu/artoolkit/

It’s really a piece of art with only 256 pixels space – it’s the remake of the Defender game you won’t be able to play in Full HD:

“DEFENDER of the favicon is a JavaScript remake of Eugene Jarvis‘ brilliant arcade game Defender written by Mathieu ‘p01′ Henri and inspired by Scott Schiller‘s experiment with generated favicons VU meter. The idea was to push the concept of generated favicons further and pack a thrilling retro shooter in 16×16 pixels using JavaScript, canvas and data: URIs.”

“Each frame of the game is generated on the fly in JavaScript into a 16×16 canvas element, then converted to a 32bits PNG image and used in place of the favicon.”

To be clear: This is not a joke – it’s an actual game… the size of:

Source: http://www.p01.org/releases/DHTML_contests/files/DEFENDER_of_the_favicon/

I often have to share files with people – files which most of the time can be publically accessible – the problem is though that it’s far to much copy-n-paste involved to get the file uploaded and the URL of the file put together. I just made my life a bit easier and invested some minutes to write a small “DropBox” application that uses a custom webservice hosted on one of my machines to upload, list and delete files and to allow users that have the correct URL to download files.

The path scheme is obviously just that I added a dropped folder in which the files will be stored and the webservice itself – that’s all on the webserver machine (having this folder setup as a website using ASP.NET 2.0)

For the client I wrote this little app:

It’s no rocket science but it’s a good example for a small app that utilizes a webservice. If you want to use it you have to configure the webservice and the Client Application:

for the webservice:

You have to adjust the paths, URLs and the Password.

for the application:

You just have to set the right Password.

If you’re set everything up correctly you should be able to drop files onto the Client Application window and get them uploaded to your webserver – the URL is automatically in your clipboard when everything worked.

If you click on the “Manage” tab in the Client Application you can get a list of all files on the server – clicking on the name of the file will automatically add the url to that file to your clipboard – if you want to delete a file – just click on it and click “delete selected file”.

The code can be considered public-domain and can be downloaded here.

I used the open-source icons from the Tango Desktop project to make a simple icon for the client application.

Source 1: DropBoxService-v1.rar (94,09 KB)
Source 2: http://tango.freedesktop.org/Tango_Desktop_Project

The answer is: 2 Terabyte.

“You can see physical memory support licensing differentiation across the server SKUs for all versions of Windows. For example, the 32-bit version of Windows Server 2008 Standard supports only 4GB, while the 32-bit Windows Server 2008 Datacenter supports 64GB. Likewise, the 64-bit Windows Server 2008 Standard supports 32GB and the 64-bit Windows Server 2008 Datacenter can handle a whopping 2TB. There aren’t many 2TB systems out there, but the Windows Server Performance Team knows of a couple, including one they had in their lab at one point. Here’s a screenshot of Task Manager running on that system:”

P.S.: Thx boonkerz.

Source: http://blogs.technet.com/markrussinovich/archive/2008/07/21/3092070.aspx

Amazingly enough OEMs could license WfW 3.11 for this long period of time…

“we recently announced that effective November 1st, 2008, OEM’s will no longer be able to license Windows for Workgroups 3.11 in the embedded channel.”

but it’s time to say goodbye.

Source: http://blogs.msdn.com/jcoyne/archive/2008/07/09/it-s-the-end-for-3-11.aspx

In the newest Firmware update of the Playstation 3 there’s support for “Trophies” – which plain and simple are a copy of the Achievements available on the 360.

Create your own Achievements with the Achievement Generator.

Source: http://achievements.schrankmonster.de

Ähm… was hat das zu bedeuten? (Sorry, german article again…but it’s a german website…)

“nur in der ehemaligen DDR”, gesehen auf Spiegel-Online Fussball Liveticker.

Spooky. Hilarious!

Since we already got them this is not an option for us… but maybe for your wedding:

Source:http://www.etsy.com/view_listing.php?listing_id=10501732