Tax Time

Oh, Fun. Oh Joy...

Each 3 months I promoise to do things better... And I never do. So I am poring over receipts and bank statements attempting to gain order from the chaos. Ha. Doesnt work. I am not actually planning to close my books for a week or so, but it is still a headache. The worst is when I deposit four cheques at once and forget to do the paperwork. RIght now I have a cheque for $2,350 deposited but I dont know what it was from. If anyone here for some reason just deposited the money into my account can you stand up now.

MYOB has a few interesting missing 'Features' when it comes to reconciling accounts. It can sort by Transaction ID or by Date. It cannot sort by Transaction Name, or by value. Either of which would make it so much easier to reconcile accounts. Still that is what upgrades are for I suppose. Another good feature would be to be able to remove any entries immediately once they are reconciled. This would make it easier to see things.

Visual Studio

I found something out about it today...
"...since Visual Studio.NET uses case-sensitive filenames when looking up embedded resources"

How dumb is that... One more entry on the VisualStudio DUMB list.

PowerLine Broadband

SlashDot.Org is reporting that the Arrl, (Of which I am a member) has an article on Powerline Broadband in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, USA. Basically the experiment has been shutdown thanks to interference issues. Anyone who has read my posts on Whirlpool will know that I have been suspicious of this technology since the start. The problem has been interference with licensed services.

Think about it. The signal is being sent on an un-bounded conductor. There are enough problems with signals leaking from CoAx cables. But he we have what us Engineers call a 'Transmission Line' and like any transmission line, they will tend to radiate. And if the signal radiates it will most likely cause interference. The way that CoAx copes is that so little signal escapes because the braid operates as a faraday shield. The only way that Power Line BroadBand would work without interference is by having the signal sunk into the load, attenuating it. But this effectively causes problems decoding the signal, meaning more power and more signal.

What they are doing which is good is using wireless (802.11) for the final hop into the house. This works well in the USA where stepdown transformers are needed everywhere since the voltage is lower and therefore the currents are higher for the same power. This really means that four times the number of transformer capacity is needed, roughly... It is nice to live in a country where the voltage is a bit higher.

Unstable Windows

Windows crashed today. Again. It is XP Pro, and has 1 gByte of RAM and 128mBytes of Video RAM. So memory is really not an issue. Anyway my machine gets to the point where the machine locks up. I think it might be video driver related.

My machine needed another few reboots... Mainly becase the computer decided to stop recording CD's. This is DUMB. I am beginning to think that I need to do a reinstall of the software... But at the moment I cannot afford the time. And it would cause so much of a disruption. I guess it would take two days to do, once I got the paperwork together to do the complete backup and restore process. Still I think it would be more reliable.

GPRS in the Pacific Islands

One of my contacts in the pacific was due to start playing with GPRS yesterday. They have put that back until July 15, due to problems. But then I found out the real show stopper. I already knew that they were intending to run it as an 'All You Can Eat' payment plan. This is horrible for telemetry, but you can live with it. The show stopper is that they are planning to allow HTTP only for 'Security'. The only reason that I can think of for this is that they do not want people sending SPAM from the mobile device. Apart from that I cannot see security issues.

Remember here, these devices can initiate connections only. They cannot receieve connections. Incoming connections are just not possible. So why add other layers?

WiFi and Unlicensed Space

There is an Interesting Article about how some venues were attempting to restrict the use of WiFi by lease holders on interferece grounds and require them to use services provided by the building owners and managers.

I am not sure that this is the right decision. Sure it is good for the rights of the unlicensed masses, and asserts the FCC's exclusive right to manage spectrum. But at the same time, isn't this just like a building owner requiring that certain telephones are used, or restricting a person at a trade show from renting services from anyone apart from those provided by the show organizer.

I think the reason why this passed was on interference grounds. If the additional access points had been prohibited on any other purpose, including the response that 'we own the building so we can restrict you from doing anything if we like', I am not sure that the FCC would have ruled how they did.

I expect the other issues will come up soon... Just you wait...

Turn It In

There was an article in the paper a few days back about how Macquarie University is paying TurnItIn A$30,000 per year for their servies to stamp out plagarism. Whilst I object to cheating, I even object more to this business.

I have detailed some of the arguments about this business - about how they decided to initally index my writings without my express permission. This organisation is trawling the Web and copying anything that is useful, and then charging for access. And I as an Author get nothing regardless of if they find someone copying my work or not.

To make it worse, these universities have given TurnItIn permission to store students work regardless of their wishes on the subject. In most cases assignments are the sole property of the student since there has not been active involvement of tutors or lecturers in their generation.

I am wondering how many authors have writings stored by this company with no knowledge. Too Many I suspect.

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On the work front today I feel as if I got very little done. With attempting to debug WebServices and modifying Blogger templates (which now look fantastic) I am sure I could have been more productive. Maybe tomorrow will be better. I have so much software to write. So little time to do it.

Fun with WebServices

Developing WebServices is fun. Redefining the word FUN of course to something the oposite of course. The windows security model seems to be written to annoy rather than to protech.

For instance PRB: "Requested Registry Access Is Not Allowed" Error Message When ASP.NET Application Tries to Write New EventSource in the EventLog gives a couple of solutions to the problem. Firstly the registry hack on this page gives an easy solution, but of course I have not got it to work.

And the preferred microsoft solution? Well, wite a short bit of code... And compile it as a DLL

Imports System.Diagnostics
Imports System.Configuration.Install
Imports System.ComponentModel

_
Public Class MyEventLogInstaller
Inherits Installer
Private myEventLogInstaller As EventLogInstaller

Public Sub New()
' Create an instance of 'EventLogInstaller'.
myEventLogInstaller = New EventLogInstaller()
' Set the 'Source' of the event log, to be created.
myEventLogInstaller.Source = "TEST"
' Set the 'Log' that the source is created in.
myEventLogInstaller.Log = "Application"
' Add myEventLogInstaller to 'InstallerCollection'.
Installers.Add(myEventLogInstaller)
End Sub
End Class


Of course this gives me a great view of security. After all, what hacker would not think of actually adding a DLL to do something that has security implications as extreme as writing to the DLL... So far I have spent most of my morning on debugging this issue, and things are not helping... Having to do most of the debugging remote does not help either...

It is all good learning experience though... Maybe I should just RTFM. I have learned how to install a WebService for IIS though... Just like a normal install, just install it to the IIS directory. Simple like it should be. On the other hand why VB.NET needs to edit a WebService through WebDAV or similar mechanism I do not know...

But anyway it is now a bit after 1pm and time for breakfast.

[Several hours later]
Found the problem(s). Basically I had a few.
* Two missing stored procedures in the database that did not import correctly
* VBNull in some text strings
* A recursive function that would recurse almost infinitely if an object pointed at itself.

With these fixed, things are improved significantly... At least the software does not immediately crash.

Weather Data wants to be free

CWOP is the Citizen Weather Observation Programme, a part of NOAA. You can find the data on http://www.wxqa.com/ [wxqa.com] all about this data. The problem for the private weather industry is that all this data is freely available, and is not able to be restricted in availability thanks to the infrastructure...

With CWOP, all the data is sent to http://www.findu.com/ [findu.com] where anyone can retrieve the data.

Weather data is free this way, thanks to the support of Ham Radio operators internet infrastructure.

From SlashDot.ORG

netAPRS Software Update

Our netAPRS is getting another upgrade. This time it will have the ability to actually tranmit GPS positions on air. Right now the GPS MUST be connected to the serial port, not through OziExplorer. This is because OziExplorer and .Net do not work well together yet - with position callbacks. It seems to loose it after about 10 callbacks or so.

It could be Garbage collection but I dont think so... My normal trick of making things global to stop GC has not fixed it - and besides, it does not Core Dump so that does not seem to be the problem. My suspicion is that a callback is taking too long, and confusing things.

I have just added the setting saving in netAPRS for beaconing. Took a little while to work out the logic for sending. It is if AGWPE menu is Selected *AND* BeaconTXRate > 0 then we can send the beacon. The beacon is set to trigger at 50% of the BeaconTXrate in the CRON subroutine.

To test this I need to properly comission the GPS port code. This required getting more settings working. But the beaconing is now working. Dumb functions only, to a single AGWPE port. It is working...

The GPS Transmission sub-system needs a lot more work, but it is looking good.

.Net Compact Framework... Fun and Games

This post is from a week back... and was originally in WORD format...

netCF. Missing things such as VisualBasic.FileOpen. Do you realize how hard it is to actually find information on the web or in generic VB.Net books about how to actually open a file. The Microsoft CF FAQ essential.

OK… I have found the FileStream object. But do you think I can find a .writeline function. Ha. This is Microsoft.

It is now a week later. Experts will tell me that of course I am doing something stupid. Why would I be stupid enough to use the FileStream object to read a file. I must use the StreamReader object. Then the READLINE function works. Of course. Why didn't I know that... What is the difference between the two anyway? Programming is supposed to be fun, but things like that make me want to take up subsistance farming big time.

One thing that is really missing from .NET is a decent grid and list control. I got a custom control written on my favourite Rescue Me WEB Site for the PocketPC... So that I can do things like .item (3,4).text = "JUNK". Why a function like this is not in CF I will not know... But I also wanted a more advanced list control.

Resco have an advanced list control that is not badly priced for the NETcf framework. I could not get it to run, but there is a FAQ. Unfortunately for them, after spening $25 to get a C# code fragment translated on Rent-A-Coder, I could that the OpenNetCF people have a more advanced list control. It has two shortcomings as I see it. Firstly it does not have an ITEMDATA property for each item. The other issue is that any graphics attached to an entry is only ever one line, even if the text is forced to two lines.

OH... I have signed up as a Microsoft ISV. More information is available on Micosoft's Partner WWW site. It allows you to get MSDN Universal for A$825 containing a lot of cool software to assist in development. If you are doing any microsoft development, this is a MUST.

Start of Blogging

OK... This is the start of my blogging attempt - at least on a professional level. Right now I am just getting started, and one of the things that I want to achieve is that I will document some of the things that I find during my work and fun... Such that other people can learn about what I am finding.

Right now I might describe some of the things that I am working on. This list is always incomplete since there will always be projects I cannot talk about... The things include
* WinCE/Pocket PC mobile application
* VB.NET & SmartPhone project
* WebServices
* GPS/GPRS tracker.

That is just a small part of what I am working on. In many ways this post is just to get things started on the blog for formatting purposes...

Oh, I have bitten the bullet, and gone over to the Dark Side... I (as Radioactive Networks) have registered with Microsoft as an independent Software Vendor. I mainly did this to get a cheaper version of the MSDN Universal software, but also for the support that they can give my company as it slowly grows.

Oh... I should thank my friend Steve Stroh for his assistance in getting started with Blogging... He managed to get me up to speed with some of the technology, so that I could do things my way.