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.
Sansa Clip friendly version of jsiPodFetch
I just released version 8.52 of jsiPodFetch
The only change is that I reset some ID3-tags as I mentioned in this post.
Podcasts on the Sansa Clip
I bought a Sansa Clip
A ‘feature’ of the Clip became a major pain for my podcast listening though. It will take all MP3:s that has ‘podcast’ as category and treat them in a special way. It will do that even if they are referenced in a playlist. It is realy annoying to find the playlist created by jsiPodFetch empty on the player.
I ended up adding some code to jsiPodFetch that resets the ID3-tags on all MP3:s as they are copied to the plyer. Now the category is ‘other’, album is ‘jsiPodFetch’, artist is the feed name and title is the title taken from the feed instead of the original title in the MP3.
It fixed my Sansa Clip problem and it also makes the display on the player show the same episode titels as jsiPodFetch.
I will make a release with the tag resetting and a lot of other bug fixes as soon as I can set up a decent testing environment.
Disapearing session data in ASP.NET
A couple of days ago a colleague called me because the session state kept disapearing in his ASP.NET application.
He was running the application in a virtual machine and had a nagging feeling that this was the cause of the problem.
A few basic questions later it struck me that he probably had not changed the memory settings of his virtual machine.
It was still running on the default 128 MB so every time he reloaded the offending page the ASP.NET application pool was restarted because of memory constraints.
So if you are running server software in a virtual environment; remember to allocate enough memory to keep it going.
logview4net goes WPF
(Edit Dec. 2010) I didn’t coem arount to recreate the GUI in WPF, I find it more valuable to make it run on top of Mono instead. (end edit)
I am rewriting the GUI and recompiling everything for .Net 3.5
This will remove a couple of the existing bugs and hopefully not introduce to many new ones.
If there are things in the GUI you would like to change now is the time to tell me.
The first time I looked at WPF, when it was still called Avalon, I really disliked the flowing layout model. This time I kind of like it.
logview4net passes 10k downloads
Tonight logview4net passed 10 000 downloads on Sourceforge.
There are some open bugs so there will be at least one more release this year.
Next year it will probably be moved to .NET 3.5 and made able to route messages.
jsiServiceManager on SourceForge
I started a project on SourceForge for jsiServiceManager yesterday.
You can find it here.
The currently released version is the same one as on jsiSoft. When I do the next release I will link to SourceForge.
Speaking of the next release…
I have added the functionality I wrote about in an earlier post but I haven’t tested it very well with services. It works as a charm with all my auto starting applications though.
Installing Team Explorer
… and it takes forever to merge the Help Index.
I just want to install the Team Explorer and do my stuff. Why do I have to wait an hour to merge the help index? In my opinion that should be done on a low priority thread after the install is done.
New feature in jsiServiceManager
I used to run a small hack I made in Delphi that delayed the start of auto starting programs in windows. It really shortens the time from power on to a workable browser.
My current install takes forever to boot so I am working on adding that functionality to jsiServiceManager.
It is a very simple scheduler that allows you to delay the start of both plain applications and services. Initially i was about to add the option to repeatedly start an application but that is best left to the scheduler in Windows.
It will shorten my boot till considerably but your mileage might vary.
Irrational
I have way to much to do and all of it is by my own choice. I have some school work that should have been done two weeks ago and I am already behind with the math studies that I started this semester.
I haven’t done any academic math for about twenty years and it looks like I wasn’t taught the same amount of math that students today read at the same level.
On top of that there are loads of things I want to do with logview4net, jsiPodFetch, jsiServiceManager and two Swedish sites I am working on. (For you Swedish readers one of them is komdit.nu and the other one is still in the design phase.
If this was all work related stuff I would make a list and tick them of off one at a time, but now I am totally irrational. I sit down to work but I get nothing done. There is just one more blog post to read and one more WoW quest to do.
I recently added the UserVoice widget to jsisoft.com so please make sugestions and vote for them. At least that will help me prioritize work on the jsisoft side of things.
