New release of logview4net (9.19)
Yesterday I made a new release of logview4net my multi channel log monitor.
I got a request for a TCP listener in addition to the UDP listener that was already there.
It actually wasn’t much work; First I copied the UDP listener, then I copied some code from the MSDN documentation.
I haven’t done any real testing though so if you want a stable TCP listener please try it out and give me some feedback.
The documentation isn’t updated yet, but the TCP listener is configured just as the UDP listener.
I just realized that the documentation doesn’t mention that you can use “ANY” as the remote IP address if you want anyone to be able to send data to your machine.
Reporting and/or data mining
When do you really need a reporting engine like Microsoft Reporting Services or one of the Data Dynamics offerings?
I’m working with a customer to rewrite an old application that is used to collect and publish a lot of data.
Some of the data is easy to pull from the database, but needs complicated layout. Other data is hard to get out of the database, filtering is ad hoc and it is published without formatting in an Excel spreadsheet.
There is also the unspecified requirement that the end users should be able to create their own reports and/or modify the shipping ones.
As far as I’ve experienced it is usually the creator of the application that ends up making modified or new reports anyway so I think a steep learning curve is OK. It is a good thing to have the reporting engine separate from the main application tough. That way you are not locked to the main applications release cycle. You also have the option to merge your application data with the customers existing data from other applications.
I guess I’ll vote against the reporting tool for the ad hoc Excel report.
logview4net 9.15 released
Get your fresh copy from SourceForge.
I need some help designing part of the GUI for the next release.
The changes in this release are:
- Fixed: [2250820] The part “User Interactions” in the settings dialog doesn’t expand if one adds more patterns.
- Fixed: [2250843] Manage actions missing scrollbar
- Fixed: [2250810] FolderListener: logview4net crashes if an additional file …
- Fixed: Http authentication in the RSSListener
- Fixed: [2250834] Save dialog default folder
- Fixed: [2250823] The default font is “Courier new”. But when one opens the font dialog then”Microsoft Sans Serif” is selected.
pifts.exe
I just read about pifts.exe at a fellow Swedish blogger.
It does look a little suspicious, but I am not convinced it is a cover up.
All the threads I have seen mentioning pifts.exe at the Norton Forum site, before being deleted, has contained loads of junk.
I might be a social attack against Norton.
Windows Azure goes local
According to Computerworld the technology in Windows Azure will be part of Windows Server in the future. I really hope this will come with a service pack about the same time Azure is released for commercial use.
By keeping the entry level pricing low, or free, this is a perfect way to get students and start ups on the Microsoft train. It doesn’t come as a surprise since Microsoft makes its money from selling licenses, but it’s nice to get the information out.
No history to Subversion
I’ve been involved in a couple of projects where SourceSafe was kicked out.
In most cases there were long discussions on how to handle the history in SourceSafe.
Most developers seems to manage without migrating the history, but there has always been a vocal minority that desperately want to have the history migrated.
When dealing with this it has struck me that every project that was in favor of migrating the history also was missing decent release practices.
The loudest arguments are usually that they often need to check what changed between two old versions when bugs are triaged. There are usually two reasons for this. The first is that someone has to be blamed for the error. The other is that they don’t really know when the feature was released in the first place.
My recommendation usually is to set up a working release management structure before migrating the source code to a new repository. Especially if the SourceSafe repository hasn’t crashed yet.
As far as I know there is no tool that can recreate the SourceSafe history in Subversion or Team Foundation Server for all edge cases. Especially since the notion of sharing doesn’t exist in SVN or TFS.
If you know of a good tool to get the history out of a SourceSafe repository please let me know.
Wireless networking in Win7
I just read the release notes for the beta release of Win 7.
My problem is that I can not connect to my wireless network when the computer resumes after is has been in sleep mode.
Some googling later I found that it is a known problem as stated in the release notes.
Does any one read release notes before installing stuff?
Will Bush be sent to Hague now?
Since no country has the power to chase down an ex ruler of the USA but USA it self, now is probably the time to stand up for justice.
Wouldn’t it be a huge statement if Bush was sent to trial in Hague for his crimes against international law by the new administration.
It’s probably a pipe dream ant I wonder if that would lead to civil war in the USA.
An ex leader from almost any other country that had behaved like Bush would have been hunted for life.
I don’t mind bringing terrorists to to court, but keeping suspects in weak foreign countries to circumvent the domestic law and calling them illegal warriors to circumvent international law is straight up bullying to me.
Maybe all the countries that USA owe money could gather and put some collective preassure on them. That seems to be a weak point of the super power that is open to exploit right now.
Time Sharing
Cloud computing as it is presented by the big vendors right now looks a lot like time sharing of main frames. In the previous post I wanted Microsoft to offer Windows Azure for in house hosting. That would really shorten the time span to repeat the time sharing history of companies buying parts of the capacity of something expensive and then affording to have all the capacity for them selfs.
I think cloud computing is more beneficial to the organizations that has grown, or plans to grow, out of standard web hosting. They don’t already have the physical infrastructure needed to support their activities and probably not the competence and time needed to keep an operating system running online.
It would be nice if standard web hosting was more scalable. If you’re among 2000 other sites on a box there will be problems if your site gets popular and the hosting is not automatically scalable.
I don’t want to learn enough Linux and Apache to host my own server, be it virtual or not. What I need is some advice or even rules to follow that will make my web applications automatically scalable when needed. Of course I can still write crappy code but at least my success is not hindered from the beginning.
Hopefully both Google and Microsoft will put their offerings in production mode soon so that we can start building the next Facebook without concern of our web host.
Windows Azure
Windows Azure is Microsofts take on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud and Google App Engine.
All these services offer companies to host their web based applications in ‘the cloud’. For Amazon you upload a virtual machine that you can start as many instances you need of. Google chooses to only allow Python code that is then distributed over as many cores as is needed for the moment. Microsofts solution is in between. You can use any .Net language and it is up to you to configure how many cores to use. I use ‘core’ in the vaguest sense here, I don’t have a clue how virtualized the environments are.
In the usual Microsoft spirit, the tools for developers are outstanding. You can even emulate a cloud of your own in your development environment.
Sadly, Microsoft hasn’t published any pricing information yet. I think a lot of developers would have started on ‘real’ projects already if there was some indication of the pricing level. Both Amazon and Google charges for storage, traffic and CPU-usage in different way, but Google App Engine if free until it gets a lot of page views. To me, building simple services for the small Swedish speaking market Googles model is quite nice. It’s free until the site gets popular enough to support it self.
I hope that Microsoft will offer companies to host Windows Azure in their own data centers. That way one could scale out to Microsofts cloud when there is not enough capacity in house, but still keep the data that often has legal issues local.
