Sitecopy

When you need to copy files arround, RSYNC from the guys that brought us SAMBA is probably the best tool arround. But sometimes RSYNC is not an option. The big reason would be when the server at the other end does not actually support RSYNC. RSYNC will support WebDav, but that must be supported too.

So sometimes all that is possible is FTP. And that is where SiteCopy comes in. It is one of those tools that seems to have everything, if only you can understand the manual. Unfortunately if you read the manual, and then read the source code you will find that what you want to do will not work. One mailing list person replied to a help request with a statement to the effect of "Well, you are obviously trying to get SiteCopy to work for you. You need to adapt yourself to SiteCopy'. It was put far better than that, but you get the idea.

So far I have been battleing with two things. The fact that exclude files does not work, and the fact that if you already have files on your WWW site, and it is not up to date, and you want to upload everything from the local side, then you are going to have problems.

Telstra Billing Problems - Part 2

I have previously mentioned that I had some issues with a small charge for MMS on my bill. The charge was for $0.75. Nothing really. Not worth my time . But I complained about it anyway.

I found out today that I have a friend who works in this part of Telstra. I was shocked. So I told him about the problem and he was rather interested. So they looked at it on the back end and found the problem. Interesting.

On a Wing and a Prayer (and a Fuselage)

Friday Afteroon I met Richard at his place in order to pick up the Wings and the Fuselage for his plane. I arrived there about 1PM, and we then took a 2 Ton truck over to Botany to the docks. Over at the Docks, it is assumed that you know what you need to do. For instance the directions are given in street addresses, but the warehouses are marked with dock numbers. This does not make things easy to use.

It took a little while to work out where we needed to go to get the paperwork signed off. The guy asked if we had a truck - we did not look like the normal truckies with the compulsory vests. The guy was relieved that we did have a flatbed, and commented that we would be shocked at what people have done - stupid things with Corollas.

I was rather concerned with the forklift driver. Apart from the fact that it looked like he had been in one too many bar room brawls, I was not inspired when he started picked up the four boxes in one hit with the fork and started moving. This would not have been so bad if the boxes had weighed less than 400 kG, or if the value was less than A$20K in finely machined aluminium.

With the top box being about 4.2m long, and about 30cm x 30cm containing with wing spans, I was concerned. Particularly when it is realised that this was on top of a box that was no wider than 1m, and that was on another couple of boxes. The fork driver did not need anyone to steady the box, but I did anyway. I am not stupid.

It was good once we got the items on the truck. Tieing them down was easy, but the lack of some beams on some of the items did give come concern. Three or four 2x2's were removed from the top and bottom of some of the crates reducing the structural integrity, but things were fine.

The biggest crate was not in immaculate condition. It had a gash about 6" wide and 3" high thanks to a fork prong. Somehow thanks to the aim of the driver and the packaging from Vans, no damage was done to the contents.

Coming home was a bit easier than getting there thanks to Richard working out that first gear on the truck was optional. In fact in most cases it was easier not to use first. Once we got the parts back, the two of us were able to get all the boxes into his garage without too many issues. One of the boxes was heavy enough that we did it in two parts - Got one edge off the truck, and sitting on masonite. Then we worked on the other end, and slid it. Easy. What you need to remember is that the boxes were probably between 75 and 150 kG each.

Once we got the truck out of the driveway we started opening the boxes. I was going to say that I have never seen so much paper in my life. This is not quite right. But it was close. Since the aircraft parts are expensive they are well packaged. We managed to fill up at least five 204l "Otto" bins with butchers paper. It did its job well as could be seen by no parts being problem or damaged - even when someone turned the box over to remove the supports described below.

My late friday night we had managed to empty three of the boxes, which were dumped onto the truck for delivery to Richard's father for woodworking practice. Saturday after we returned the truck we put casters on the last box and used it for storage.

It took me a while to work this out, but I was actually shocked a bit by the ammount of work involved. Overwealmed I think is the right word. How else would you describe being sent probably 10-15,000 rivets?

Getting most of the box

Olympic Security

The Sydney Morning Herald has a Story on security in the Olympics, and how A$1.5 Billion was spent on it. According to the article, they had "12 patrol boats, 4000 vehicles, 9 helicopters, four mobile command centres, and a blimp." This is very little. 9 helicopters is nothing believe me. I had six to play with during Sydney, and there was little we could do with them.

Now it can be reported how poor security was in Sydney. The picture on the right is actually at the Auburn McDonalds at about 6:30AM during the Sydney Olympics. The motorcycles are actually Police Motorcycles. I love to call this the "Police Car Pool". Of course the police need to eat, but I love this photo.

For those that do not know the geography, this is about 5 km from the olympic stadium.

I was based at Auburn Hospital in one of their other buildings. This is on the top of a hill in sydney. With the scaffolding on the roof anyone within about 5km could see the building depending on the local terrain. On the photo to the left you might notice that there is some scaffolding on the top of the turret. That is where we had people, and we had antennas on the top of the roof.

Not exactly what you would call a normal Olympic building, neither new nor old. This building was built about 50 years before just post war probably, using bricks from what is not the Olympic Park.

Security for the site was sort of poor. The door is shown below. Notice how the door is open. That was normal. Well, there is a glass door just inside, but that was only locked some of the time. Then you just needed to take the stairs or lift up stairs. This was a case of security through obscurity. No guards and good parking. It would have been a real problem if this site had been lost, and even worse if they had done some more at UNSW at the same time.

It is assumed that our six helos could be used if needed to do some emergency work, and were just before the closing start of the mens marathon. We had arranged refueling at North Head, and once one of our helos took off, it spotted a boat on fire about 5KM off shore. So, the pilot contacted Air Traffic Control, and the cameraman sent the pictures to us.

But only to us. So I fed the images back to the IBC, and then it went arround the world on the news. Actually I have not seen the news reports but I heard about it later. And it was a great feeling to know I had helped.

116th Blog Item Spectacular

Wow. This is my 116th post in this blog. Well, I did cheat by about 20 yesterday by adding my Olympic BLOG, but that is really negligable compared to the other posts. I started Blogging at the end fo June, and it is now only the end of August, so that is not a bad outcome. Averaging about one post a day, or actually a bit more than one post a day.

Telstra Billing Problems

I just got my monthly Telstra bill. Of course there are problems. One of the charges is for a Mobile Enhanced SMS message - A.K.A. MMS. This would be fine apart from a few problems

a) The SIM card is in a device that was turned off at the time.
b) The device is fairly well sealed so it is unlikely that someone borrowed it to make an MMS call.
c) Telstra cannot give me any details on the MMS message.

Looks like the billing system has some corrupted data.

A Fiancé Meeting

Sometimes being the secretary of an organisation has its problems. These problems usually have to do with a work requirement. But not always. I always produce the minutes for my church in real time. I type them at the meeting, and then glance over them when producing the agenda for the next meeting, when I print out copies for use by the congregation during the meeting.

It was in this context that someone noticed that I had promised to call a Fiancé meeting. Being quite single, this came as a bit of a shock to the people in attendance. Only one person in the congregation is engaged at the moment, and she was planning to be at the meeting. Actually it was anounced at the meeting that she would be having an engagement party at the church a few weeks later, but that was totally unrelated. Unfortunately I will not be there as I will be in the USA at the time.

What I had promised to arrange was actually a FINANCE meeting. A meeting to talk about FINANCES. Not a meeting for those engaged to me married.

Olympic Memories

Watching the Movies has brought back a few memories for me...

One was that an event started perfectly on an hour - I think it was the race walking. Something like exactly 5:00 or so our time. And I remember that the Sydney Olympics worked in a similar way too. I think that is quite impressive as I cannot tell you how many events Live and on TV run late. But the events on the Olympics are commonly running EXACTLY on time to the fraction of the second.

I have been amazed looking at the quality of the pictures for events such as the road racing. The quality was so good. There was pixelation in many places unfortunately, but without going digital this would have been impossible to do thanks to much of the race being ridden between buildings.

But what could have been done is have auto-switching a few seconds before the signal dropped out. In Sydney, we almost exclusively had signals die on the down links, not on the uplinks - except for areas with extreme tree coverage.

Race Walking was a bit boring of course. But then again it was in Sydney too. The most exciting part of the Race Walking in Sydney were the complaints from the Tenis people about our helicopter. In the famous Womens event where the Australian got disqualified, I got to speak to the race director that afternoon. He did not know the rules of the event, but knew that she was running.

That afternoon I got a lift from the Olympic Stadium to the Car Park. What was strange was that I was in a car in Sydney that was registered in the USA. Also I was on the Right Hand Side, but in this case there was no steering wheel in front of me. Since it was a Left Hand Drive car. [Our motorcycles were left hand drive too :-) ]

I have also been thinking about the dynamics of the Olympics - and I remember two distinct phases on the event. There was the leadup, and then there was the event. I can now look back at things knowing that the two were distinct, but also that there was a few days where we went from leadup to production. It was sort of a ramp up, or actually a ramp down. For me, the Olympics were a quiet time, preceeded by three weeks of hard work.

Remote Electronics

A friend is working on doing some wiring of a GPS so that it works with a Laptop. Which means that he is needing to do some wiring with soldering up a cable with me doing the design.

So we have been talking on the phone. But to do this I needed visual feedback of what he was doing. So he set his WebCam up on his desk and I was watching his work. This is a strange way to work, and the webcam is not all that clear thanks to the less than perfect results. It really needs a cameraman to manage the focus. But it worked well in general. We have still not got things working but it is easier than doingt it without the webcam.

Music: Well, actually this is something missing. The Seekers - The Carnival is Over. I do not have it on my catalogue of music. And it is a clasic. The other piece of music is anything by the band BOND.

Ampache - For the love of music

I have recently rebuilt my main linux box. Moved to SuSE Linux rather than RedHat. The reason was that RedHat killed off RedHat Linux, and moved to Fedora. If they want to upset me I will get rid of them. I have been using Redhat for a LONG time and I am disappointed to move. But there are some things that have to be done. And from what I could see, SuSE was the best of the commercial distributions.

Anyway one of the reasons for moving the Linux box was to create a new document repository. That is place my scanned documents online and also my music. By online, I mean firewalled so that I can use things inside the house. A fileserver. Anyway I was looking for a way to serve the music, so I did a search on the SuSE disks for MP3.

On SuSE I found %5BA%5D m p a c h e %3A For the love of music since May 5th 2001. Ampache looks as if it will be good when it gets some more development done. There are some things missing that Gomp has, but overall it looks great.

What it is missing seems to be streaming capability with management of the queue. I am sure that this will come. But that is not there yet. Also missing in voting on good and bad songs. Also, since the data import uses MP3 tags, I think I will need to re-rip my CD collection.

I did have a bit of fun getting the software to run. I needed to comment out line 348 of libglue/auth.php which was @mysql_close($mysql_link);

Working on the Plane...

There is the old engineering joke about a plane in the mountains with a whole lot of polish nationals on it. The pilot pounted out a mountain on the left side. All the polish rushed to that side and it caused the plane to hit the mountain on the left thanks to the shift in weight. The moral is that you should not have too many poles on the left side of the plane. If you got thaty then you are really an engineer. And it has nothing to do with aeroplanes, and has everything to do with graph paper.

But that is a digression. Yesterday I spent most of the day building a wing jig at my friends house. This is for a real aeroplane, and we are picking up the wing parts during the week. So we needed to build a jig to mount the wings on during construction. This is something that I had not thought too much about, but richard had. The frame needed to be 4x4 in the old imperial measurements, so he had made it from 2x4, and it worked well. We needed to bolt the jig to the concrete floor so that the wing would work.

So I get out the rotary hammer drill. Richard had not seen this, and was amazed. It went into the concrete almost better than his drill went into pine. His comment was that "It should be illegal". No. The drill is efficient, but not all that powerful. It is actually just under one Horse Power.

One pole is bolted to a wall with a horizontal. The other one goes to the roof. To distribute the force, we used a 1000mm 2x4 with screws at 450mm to bolt into the beams through the gyprock. First try we put the screws in out by 20mm. Next try worked better. Much better. So that was bolted into the roof, but we stripped the head on one of the bolts. OOps. So we needed to put the upright under compression to hold it. After some playing we decide to chock from below. But we are out by about 5-8mm.

So I notch the top. Use a hacksaw to cut the slots, and then start cutting the wood out with a hammer and screwdriver. Not working well, and richard threatened me with the camera and a trip to Westmead Hospital. We we borrow a real chissel from Richards father. Worked perfectly.

Getting ready to go...

G'Day All.. I am not sure how many people read this, but I write it anyway. I like to think of this as a slightly censored online diary - something that I write no matter who reads it (Not as I wrote during the first draft "Something that I read no matter who writes it").

Two weeks from Today I will be preparing to leave for three weeks away. Three weeks from today I will be preparing to give the first of two talks in the TAPR/ARRL Digital Communications Conference in Des Moines, Iowa.

How well have I prepared? Well, fairly well. I have most of the server things set up on this end. I still need to write some procedures in case of power failure. Or more correctly I need to test to see if the UPS' will work, and make sure that the firewall will re-start. I would love to be able to remotely power up and down the equipment. But that is not here yet since I have not had that PCB made up yet.

My eventual plan is to have a power distribution rack with two power busses internally - so that load can be shared. I have done the PCB, and I know that I had the capability to run two UPS'. What I cannot remember is if I had a UPS on each incoming supply, or if one supply came in and then went out. Each 1U rack case will supply about six devices. I woule like more but that is about all that will fit in the case. And I wanted to use a 1U case since it is sexier.

I will probably put a cellphone modem into the controller too. Maybe. Well, it is either that or build a micro so that I can control throgh the APRS system. That might be more useful - if I can work out how to send the right packets through a WWW interface

Darryl

Imperial Hotel, London

In london in a few weeks I will be staying at the Imperial Hotel. I got this email back in response to a query about what data ports in rooms means. In this case it means that SOME rooms can have dialup. And they charge a one-off fee for setting up 800 freecall numbers which is not too bad.


Dear Mr Smith, thankyou for your enquiry.

We do have modem points in our rooms but as we only have a few of these, they are only on request. Although, this is on request we do our very best to oblige our guests, but unfortunetly cannot guarantee.

The connection is dialup, which is done so through the switch board. They charge a one-off payment of £2.00 for a 0800 number. Any other number is charged at the hotel rate, but you have to check with the operator before hand.

Hope this information is satisfactory.

Regards
CHARLENE
CRO

Olympic Statistics

The Australian Statistics Mob yesterday came up with a set of dodgy statistics that showed per capita that Australia would be number two on basis of gold medals after Saudi Arabia or the UAE. This was on the basis of about one gold per three million people.

This would work if there were no other constraints. But there are constraints which restrict things - causing the analysis to be more log than linear. The first is that some events do not allow more than one person per company. This would be events such as relays.

In order for linear to work, it is assumed that it is possible for a country to have a pro-rata number of teams in an event. This is not possible in relays.

Then there are limits on some events - such as no more than three competitors from a country. This also produces a bias towards smaller countries for a similar reason.

I am surprised that the ABS has produced such dodgy work.

Microsoft Support

I love it when I am ahead of a big organisation. I am attempting to get access to Microsoft MapPoint Web Services. This should be easy, but I am in Australia. That makes things harder.

Now, I dont care if I get access to the Australian data. I would be happy with the North American data if needed. And this is what I expect to get access to.

I keep getting nowhere from Microsoft. I rang them yesterday, and they were not sure at all about anything. I got a phone call back wanting my MSDN details. They could not find them. OK - well I am an Empower-ed person. So I am special.

Also after my enquiry yesterday MSDN Flash came out talking about MapPoint too.

So as a result of this all, I Microsoft MSDN people in Australia find out this morning that there is actually something happening for Oz.

So I am making a difference. That makes me feel good. Strike a win up for me.

Olympic Rowing and Canoeing

I was just watching the Olympic Rowing, and I saw a spectator. OK, So I was watching it on TV, but that does not matter - I saw a competitor. There must have been about 15 slabs of stands. I guess I saw enough to fit one slab.

Also, I saw the slalom canoes last night - using an invention of my former employer Pacific Power. It is really cool - it is a Power Station water system pumping water in a circle. Works really well.

Olympians and Olympian problems

Just found out - there is an Olympian from Ingleburn where I live - a swimmer named Geoff Pike. I think he got silver yesterday in swimming in a relay.

Yesterday I had two issues with blogging. First was that I typed up a Blog using the WWW interface, and then it disappeared. Not sure if this was an ISP issue or a Blogger.Com one, but it was a pain for me having to retype my Blog.

What was even worse is that I found that my blog was not rendering correctly. The ATOM/RSS feed was good, but not the Web Page. Turns out the template was killed. And I did not have a backup. I need to make one after working on the thing last night. Playing templates is not my idea of fun.

Visual Studio Ad-In Contest - Add-in Contest

The awardees of the VisualStuidio Ad-In Cnest have been announced on dev.magen.com. Of all the entries, the best is Increment Version which will increment the version number.

Now, the versioning in VS is horrible. It is one more thing that our friends at microsoft broke when they went from VisualStudio to VisualStudio.Net. Now, I only wish I could get this macro to work.

Astaro

This is my second attempt to write this BLOG. The first attempt went into the Ether. I did save a copy in the clipboard but I killed it off almost accidently. I have been using ASL for about three years or so. Basically I got sick of writing firewall rules for Linux - there were just too many things to do.

Well, that was becasuse I wanted incoming and outgoing rules, and worked out that I really needed a seperate firewall. ASL is an amazing piece of software. I will not say it is impossible to break into. I will say that it is several orders of magnitude harder than any other Linux box I know of, and if you did get in then it would be almost pointless as to how the system works.

For instance if you break into my SMTP proxy, you do not have access to any other parts of the system. You cannot have access since this is in a CHROOT environment. This is very secure since it is such a basic concept in Linux and Unix.

It is easy to admin through a Web interface, and most of the time works very well. I have been using it since version 1.8 I think - and I have just upgraded to version 5.0. And the product has improved a lot.

The machine needs to be relatively well powered - like a 1 GHz machine with 256 mBytes RAM. It does need this and something like 8 mBytes HDD for all the proxy caches and logs.

I love the firewall software. Really cool.

Music: Well, 4872 songs being listened to at the moment. My MP3 collection is fully legal and has just been moved to my fileserver so I can now play it with Windows Media Player. Really Cool

Lazy...

People

I have been a bit lazy lately with blogging - other things on my mind. Like organizing a trip arround the world and things like that. A lot of things on, and a lot of things to do. So far I just need to arrange my accomadation in Italy, or more correctly get my client to organize that.

I also need to get some maps together and make sure that I will have broadband access... I will be traveling 26752 miles in total. Too far.

How not to install into a clients vehicle.

It has been said that mistakes are a good learning experience. I certainly did learn yesterday doing an install in a *NEW* Holden Statesman. I mean 63Km on the clock. This seems like a nice vehicle. Anyway I needed to install a GPRS tracker. Getting the GPS and the cellphone installed were not hard. Power was another issue.

In the Statesman, there is a cigarette lighter in the boot. OK, so I place the unit paralell with this. Good idea. Except that during install I short the power. Fine. It is not turned on. But it was turned on I found. This is ALWAYS ON. So I search for the fuse. Like, how hard can it be. There must be a dedicated fuse. After too long searching I cannot find it, and decide to look for another power source. The client did not care since he never intends to use the socket.

So I find another power outlet - another T connector. Decide to test this first. No voltage. Cant understand it. Decide after a while to use the F-Set to use tones to find the fuse. Ahh, the 20A fuse is not installed. Put one in - borrow one in fact. Looks like a 20A SLOW BLOW. Still no power according to my multi-meter. OK. Something strange. I have a screwdriver with a light. Put that to earth, and found that both the connectors had power on them. Ahh. One is switched and one is unswitched. Perfect. Find an earth and all is sweet...

Well, except for the fact that I put the power cable in backwards. Quick fix of removing a surface mount part from the PCB, and placing a link there.

And so the story ends. Except that the vehicle would not start later when the client tried. Seems that the cigarette was in paralell with the engine management computer or something and the fuse blew...

SUSE Linux

Ok. I have finally upgraded my RedHat box to SUSE. Well, by upgrade I mean that I have built a new machine and installed SuSE, and now I have moved most things across. It has been a tiny bit hard in places to get things to work, but overall it has been good. This has been another of those cases where a private BLOG would be good since not all of the information is useful.

I installled SuSE Professional 9.1 on the server. This worked well enough. I did most of the setup on one box, and then moved it to an essentially identical box when I decomissioned the old box. The options I chose worked well, but not all things were installed that I needed. WML was one of these, and it installed most of the bits I needed to go with it. gFont was missing though so I needed to install that myself. Telnet server needed to be added too, and SiteCopy.

Swat was not running - a SAMBA configuration program running on localhost:901. I also needed to configure FTP to allow non-anonymous internal connections.

But the most infuriating one of them all was that ^#&* POP3 was not working with outlook. Neither SSL or un-encrypted. Argh. After a while I found out I needed to create a file called /etc/c-client.cf. In it I needed to place three lines. They are

1. I accept the risk
   
2. 
   
3. set disable-plaintext 0
   

This is *NO* joke. This took too long to work out. I also needed to added the main.cf for the mail server so that it would accept domain mail.

Adding ADSL Central Splitters

Telstra have released some informatioon on theirBuilding Information Web Site about moving the network boundary.

Us poor cablers are still not allowed to add an MDF, but we can play a bit. Whilst not specifically allowed, one option may be to place the first socket in the wall. This allows most things to be done :-)

Blast from the past.

I got a blast from the blast when I was told about a paper from 1999 that seemed to make some superfical statements about GPS tracking using Packet Radio. The paper is available on a Canadian Uni Site.

Reading through it there are statements such as "In March 1999, Greg Jones stated that...". Well, I know Greg Jones, and have known him since 1997. Wow. He is the former president of TAPR of which I am a board member. Cute. The I read more. And I see a map from the WinAPRS software. Ok. Looks a bit dated, but those were the maps available at the time.

Then I read a bit further, and they mention "Mr Darryl Smith, VK2TDS", and I am really impressed. My client was raving about this paper, and the paper mentioned me. Look further. It turns out that they included a screen shot of software I wrote. I am amazed. Even better, it turns out all the maps in the paper were produced using my software - software I was giving away.

I used LookOut to search through my email and found a few emails back in 1999 from the author asking about my software and noting some bugs. But he never did tell me that he had published my name. Gosh.

network feature codes datasheet

I know I meant to BLOG this at the time, but I think it slipped my mind. If it is a dupe, then sorry. Every now and then I search for codes to do things such as call divert, or number readback. Telstra will NOT tell you the number readback number, and finding the call divert numbers on the Telstra Web Site is hard. So I found a page on Access Comms that lists all the useful numbers.

Programming Windows Services

Last night I almost made a post with a big mistake. I was thinking about the X-Copy deply in VB.NET and realised that it did not work for Services. I know it does not - but not in that way. With ASP.NET you can overwrite the old copy of an exe even whilst it is running since ASP.NET takes a copy and places it in RAM or something until it is not needed.

But with services they are kept on the disk. And they are locked. So you need to uninstall an old version before adding a new version.

One of the other things that I want to do is to run a program either as a service or with a GUI depending on how the program started. After a lot of searching I found an article on the DotNet 247 Site. Now this is a site I normally hate because they look like one of those horrible search engines that contaminate Google and never have the keywords when you go to the page. But this time I eventually found what I was looking for.

One of the replies states
If the parameter is set, start as a service, if the parameter is not given,
start as a normal executable. Basically in your Sub Main, if the parameter
is given do the ServiceBase.Run else do Application.Run.

Looks good, but being able to automatically determine it would be better. I am starting to 'GET' services. Now that is worrying.

Music: Nothing. It is 8:24AM on a sunday morning... Argh

VB.Net Services - No public installers with the RunInstallerAttribute.Yes attribute could be.....

I have been playing mroe with services. I have an install to do on monday and i am working with a new GPS receiver that is smaller and less conspicuous. I am also playing with a server for the GPS. When I tried to install the server software I started getting an error

No public installers with the RunInstallerAttribute.Yes attribute could be
found in the d:\projects\test\mywindowsservice\bin\mywindowsservice.exe
assembly.

By looking at DotNet247 I found that the solution was very easy. The problem was that the environment for the path was pointing to the Version 1.0 of the .Net framework, and not to Version 1.1. The solution was to change the path being used to run InstallUtil. It is as simple as that.

Now, the only problem is that my code for parsing is not working correctly with this new GPS. Something slightly different with the NMEA sentence. Or it might be the server code not accepting a good packet. Time for some debugging after I watch The Bill.

Music: Real McCoy - Automatic Lover

Actually, if you have not heard it have a listen to Sleeping With An Angel. Well worth the listen. Sounds like a modern day Neil Diamond with a group of female backup singers.

DIY FAQ

I was looking for PinOuts for the LeadTek GPS receivers and stumbled on a site listing the pinouts of many GPS recievers. Sure they leave one or two out - like the Garmin GPS16, but it is cool none the less.

Music: Bette Midler - and on the Jukebox Right Now - My One True Friend from the Bathouse Betty

(Lack Of) Windows Stability

Pet Peeve with this PC. Sometimes the computer crashes. But what is strange is that it seems not be the PC that crashes itself - it seems to be the video system that crashes. It seems that all the system resources get taken up, and nothing can be done to fix things. CTRL-ALT-DEL fails. Or more correctly they work, but not well.

One time when it recovered after some persuasion (today) I had about 30 copies of the Task Manager running. That took a lot of resources I can tell you. Argh.

I am hoping that XP Service Pack 2 will fix the problem but I am not confident of this.

Installing Windows

Well, notice how the description here above does not actually say which version of windows I am instaling. There is a good reason for this. Let me first say that I am doing everything on this PC. Let me explain

Yesterday I picked up a new mother board, and built that into a new server. Only 2.4 GHz with a gByte of RAM. Well, the gByte of RAM was what this box needed. This moring I installed Windows Server 2003. After else what else would a home user want to use? Nothing but the best :-). OK. Stop laughing now.

So, I have this new box to play with. But I dont really have a need for a machine like this. After all the main reason for this machine is to test software. And mainly desktop stuff at that. So I have this useless PC.

I am using Remote Desktop to work with this PC though. Sort of cool, and much much faster than VNC. VNC is nice. This is great. So, here we are with this cool machine.

Now for the other toy - a program called Microsoft Virtual PC 2004. It retails for US$129, and is really cool. I wish I had been able to use this a few years back when I was at Pacific Power. What it allows me to do is to run Windows software on this server.

Didn't I just say that this was a Windows server already? Well, yes. But I did not say what windows software I was installing. I am installing Windows XP on this machine. And to confuse matters more, I am typing this on the machine I am installing XP onto.

But how can that be? That is impossible. Well, yes, it is. But I am doing it, and it is doing it well. You see, windows can now run Windows on Windows. It is sort of cute to have Windows XP installing right now in a small window of my screen and being able to type this blog at the same time.

And then I will be able to clone the XP Install at will, just by copying the file. Therefore I will be able to rollback changes at will. I even chose how much RAM I installed. In this case I chose 128K, but I think I can change that.

Should work well... I hope.

Services under VisualBasic.Net

This blog is a way to help those unfortunates who are wanting to write a service in VB.NET. I have done this and I have seen the light. I am saved, since I read it all in a good book :-)

There is an article on WROX about an error of System.ComponentModel.Win32Exception: The account name is invalid or does not exist, or the password is invalid for the account name specified. The simple solution to this is when InstallUtil is used that the full account name MUST be used. Rather than use "Darryl", you must use "DELL-8600\Darryl". And the slash must be the right direction. And then you MUST get the password case right too.

This assumes that the user exists. You can add a user and edit the password in the control panel. But what you cannot do is to give the user the permission to actually do what it needs to do. You must go to Local Security Settings, and then find Local Policies, and then User Rights Assignment. There you must open up Log In As A Service, and add the user.

Another trick is making sure that the service starts when it is started. If OnStart does not stop, then the service will stop. Read that again, and it will make sense. If OnStart does not return quickly, the service will not be killed.

Now, another thing that happened was that I was having the service die soon after starting. This took some figuring, but looking at the event viewer found the solution. I had forgot to init a variable. Simple mistake.

So, how do you start a service by hand. Well, you run InstallUtil, and tell it to install it. Fairly simple. But you must have already told VB that there is an installer in your code which this installer looks for in order to install.

Here endeth my brain dump. I wonder where I can buy a farm cheap - one where there is no electricity or a phone so I want even be temted to use this horrible PC.

Blogs - Not to be read by [Insert Name Here]

I have been thinking - well that is dangerous - but there are a lot of times that I would really enjoy being able to write something without needing to worry about what a particular person things.

That is, I would like to be able to publish this particular blog, but if for some reason my mother, or my child (which I dont have, but this is just an example) came across the Blog, it would appear blank.

It would also be good to be able to mark a Blog as private - like an online diary. In that way I could write about a girl I am interested in or anything else, and only I would be able to see it. I am sure that this does exist online somewhere, but it would be cute in Blogger...

Music: Eurythmics - Peace

Subsistance Farming

There are times that I love IT and Engineering. There are other times like today. There is more on this earlier in the Blog, but I have found some amazing things out.

Firstly, despite what the advertisers say, stay away from riser cards for PC's, unless they are designed for your mother board. They will not work. And if they do it will not be reliably. I spent MANY hours today attempting to get cards on a riser card to work, and nothing would behave. Not Happy.

Then there are software upgrades which do not work as well as they should. Then my switch decided to only pass packets once I had used a seperate switch between two ports to convince things to work.

Now to top it all off, it looks like my ISP is filtering Active-X Web Components. I would not mind, but that is how I can download Windows Server 2003 as a bootable ISO file. Argh...

Sounds like time to take up farming...

New Computers...

New computers can really be a pain. Really.

Last night a friend of mine provided me with a couple of rack unit cases for ATX PC motherboards. That was fine. So I went to buy a motherboard from the computer shop today. They actually seemed dis-interested, and did not want to touch this since it was slightly out of the ordanary. Argh. I had money and wanted to spend it.

Then I went to another computer shop. They sell me a CPU and Motherboard. No problem. Anyway, I get them home and assemble the first one. It is a problem when I put the old HDD in since it did not recognise some of the hardware. Argh again.

So now I decide I need to get things running. Put another network card in and things are fine. Then onto the 2nd machine, using the first computers motherboard. Move it across. No problem. Until I install the firewall software. Then I have problems. Network cards do not work. So, change network cards. Replacements do not work. By that I mean they do not work with the software. This is wrong.

So right now, the only reason I am doing anything is that I have played arround, and hacked things together. Mail is not working. This is not fun.

More on TechEd

OK. More on TechEd from last night. TechEd had so little for me as far as I could tell that I left Canberra just after 5:00, and I can assure you it was getting really cold. So back to Syndey, stopping off at Golbourn for some dinner... Dominos Pizza actually, and it was good. Right as I was starting to eat it I had a phone call from a friend who was proctoring at TechEd, so I let him know what I was doing.

He did not realise I was only there for an Open Day, so promised to go to the MapPoint thing this morning.

MapPoint - 12 month eval for all attendees

I ran into the MapPoint speaker at TechEd on the Microsoft stand. A guy called Steve Milroy, from Connected Innovation in the USA. Actually their WWW site is useless but they seem to have some cute MapPoint stuff. They may be my competitor or may be a supplier - not sure yet. Seems to know some of his stuff.

And as part of the release of MapPoint over here they are giving all TechEd people a 12 month Eval of MapPoint Web Services. You heard it here first - this will be released in a few hours. Now if I could only get Microsoft to give me access - I have signed up last week for any access, and have not heard back. Time to escalate back to Redmond.

TechEd 2004 Open Day

Ok. Here I am at TechEd 2004 in Canberra, and I am not quite sure if this is what I expected. OK.

Correction. I know that this is not what I expected. The whole thing looks organised in a disorganised way. Let us just ignore infrastructure problems like car parks at the moment.

Open Day

For us poor people attending as part of the Open Day things could be a bit better. The thing seems like an afterthought, and one that has not been totally thought out.

So, rather than give us a real ID with the kneck lanyard, they have stuck a clip onto the back, But this obstructs any swiping machines, unless it has been installed properly. Of course it will not have. One of the vendors gave me some double sided tape to fix things.

Also for us poor people who often have never been to an event like this before, there is no orientation. Here is your badge. That is that. No paper telling what is on where. Nothing. That is for the people who have paid their money - not for us who may pay in future years.

Then came an attempt by the secuirty guard to throw me out. He tried to tell me that my ID issued by the vendors was not good enough. It took a microsofty to fix that.

Like a dope I forgot to check the itinery of things online. It is online if you know where to look - mostly. Mostly.

Powerless

OK. There are tables and hairs everywhere, and wireless. But there are no power points. Correction. there is one, in a corner of the foyer - but given the rent-a-cops I would not be quite sure about that one.

Wireless

Wireless is good, but slow at times. I have not been prepared to try sending mail. Will have a look at that in a minute. I wonder if it works. Still waiting for an email I sent to myself to arrive. If it does there are issues. If it does not there are issues too.

Overall

All in all. Good in Theory. Could be better.

TAPR Lifetime Achievement Award - Roger Barker, G4IDE

Many hams will know about the UI-View software written by Roger Barker, G4IDE. TAPR have decided to award Roger an award.

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TAPR Lifetime Achievement Award

TAPR is pleased to award a Lifetime Achievement Award to Roger Barker G4IDE, of Lincolnshire, UK.

Roger has worked tirelessly for many years to provide quality software for Amateur Radio operators, allowing them to operate advanced digital modes without the difficulties once associated with these operations.

The UI-View software is the benchmark by which all other APRS Raster Mapping software is compared to.

Whilst writing excellent software, Roger has also ensured that users are able to experiment with his software by allowing access to the internal features of his software through an extensive API. Once the software was written, he ensured that the software was extensively supported, starting mailing lists to support his software. To date one of these lists has had 35,000 messages, with Roger reading each one and replying to a significant number of them.

These are just some of the reasons that TAPR is proud to present a Lifetime Achievement Award to Roger Barker, G4IDE, for his services to Digital Communications"

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About TAPR:
TAPR was founded in 1982 as a international organization with interests in the areas of packet and digital communications. Today, TAPR continues as a membership supported non-profit amateur research and development organization. TAPR currently has more than 2000 members, worldwide and continues to develop kits for the amateur community and is working actively on publications and communications standards.

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Quick Blog... Late night last night. A WWW site to tell you all about the features of your phone
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