f-log

For reasons only know to myself I needed to create a c# ASP.net web service.
Should have been really easy, just create a new ASP.NET project with the webs service template. OK did that without any issue now to create the application that would use the webs service.
Again, just create a new ASP.NET project with web application template and then add in a web reference to the previously created web service.
this is where things got interesting;

http://localhost/service.asmx

A name was started with an invalid character. Error
processing
resource 'http://localhost/servi...
<%@ WebService Language="C#"
CodeBehind="~/App_Code/service.cs"
Class="Service" %>

Solution was to enable .NET in IIS, either by going into the settings or running
aspnet_regiis.exe -i
In the Visual Studio shell.
But then I got "404 page not found" trying to add the reference, doh!
Turns out the in windows server 2003 (all dev machines in our office) has ASP.NET and .NET version 2 disabled by default.
So all I had to do was enable them, but after searching all through every settings page I was no closer to the "Web Service Extensions" tab(last post).
In the end it was another folder in the IIS manager at the top level, where you might see FTP or smtp, very odd place to put it.

I had been playing "Time Splitters 3 - future perfect" but I have completed it now. It was a odd mixture of good and bad, the first third of the game was pretty bad the middle was better and the end was mostly OK. From ghost that could only be killed by a flame thrower and zombies that were unharmed by the same to bad puns dodgy characters and very limiting environments to something that was actually quite fun.
Over all not recommended.
So what am I playing now? "Farcy Instincts - Evolution". Not having seen previous installations I do feel I am missing something but damn this game is good.
You can run around guns blazing or sneak through the bright sun lit jungle literally under the noses of your enemies. The play areas are SOOO BIG! massive in fact and highly detailed.
With the shadows of the trees and birds to the oceans and rivers you feel like you are really there and you can do what you want from blow up bad guys to burning dope fields to racing around of jet skis.
Brilliant !

Finished the second ufo maps mashup this time you must help find a missing item.
Drop beacons that tell you how many miles you are from your target but nothing else, oh and you only have 20 beacons. Good luck !

My face is going to Naples !
http://facebooked.org.uk/photos/img_501299_530145040.jpg
Slightly worrying that they decided my face should have pride of place on the front.

I got a 8gig USB pen drive to ferry large files around as they are so cheap.
Tried to copy a 6gig file onto it from windows and got a strand "Incorrect parameter" error, same using xcopy. Eventually traced it down to Fat32 not supporting single files larger than 4gig. 7zip allowed me to split the file and cat in bash rebuilt it.
The question is, what format should the drive be to take large files and be cross platform compatible ?

LUG meeting went well, really good turn out and Steve did a really good refresher on openstreetmap.
I forgot my notes about "using windows USB devices in Linux" but I winged it anyway and people seemed interested. But I did not realise how underwhelmed they would be when I reported I could get the number of images off the device and run the "delete all" functionality.

I have tried so many video conversion progies on windows to simply get a DVD converted into a format the ZUNE would like and work smoothly with, none which worked 100%.
So I tried DVD::rip which in turn uses transcode. the following is for my records YMMV.
dvd::rip
Resize to 320x180 (wide screen)
:AVI
:-FFMPEG
:-MPEG4
:--1500kb/s (very important!)
:MP3
:-128kb/s
:-48hz
Then use Windows media encoder and accept all the defaults setting NO RESIZE!.
2hr Film
DVD::rip 15mins
transcode 2:15
media encoder (forgot to note end time but recon it was about 2hrs)
Zune transfer of the 977mb WMV file 5hrs (damn USB 1.1 slow ports!)

OK so the delay thing is not right cos the real app deletes all in an instant.
the missing data was due to running krum against the device while it was in its confused state. Unplugged it and recaptured a new log and compares EXACTLY to the orignal snoopy log.
Only thing that could be wrong is the ABORT / RESET URBS I noted ipreviously.
So if I add an image in windows then DELETE-ALL then run krum with device plugged in it recovers the first image and leaves the device in an odd state, cool ? or bad ?

Added a 8 second and 3 second delay where they show up in the log but same result.
After replugging the device and rerunning krum the original image REAPPEARS! then get same odd behavior.
I wrote a couple of scripts to reformat my krum logs and the original captures (in text) and they are all identical in codes sent, some of the received stuff does not match but I will check up on that tomorrow.
Maybe it is time to move on to the image uploading stage ...

Quick krum update, I found I had left my 0x0b 0x0e 0x0e 0x0f test data in and that was not ideal but after fixing that a couple of other minor things the delete all operation still does not complete smoothly. The device is left in a strange limbo where the images are not there but the image count says they are.
Might be a timing issue, I will investigate.

I was asked to 'play' around with Virtual Earth SDK as it maybe used in future projects.
I came up with this UFO adventure.
The content is in an IFRAME that is much larger than the displayed area and then recentered. This automatically downloads extra map tiles so you should never see them loading, this has the downside of using much more bandwidth.
The UFO will happily wonder around blowing things up unless you take control with the arrow keys.
SPACE to nuke a site and 'r' will restart the auto-pilot.
This is version 1 and I am considering a more playable 'game' for version 2, stay tuned!