HTTP PATCH Explained

A very concise article about how the PATCH verb should be used can be found here.

In essence it should be treated as a set of operations to apply a delta to the existing resource. It is NOT the same as a partial PUT.

Installing "Glances" system monitor on ubuntu 12.04

Glances is a curses based tool for monitoring your system - kind of like top on steroids. There is a small issue with using the version in the PPA on Ubuntu 12.04 (specifically the 12.04.2 minimal install); it crashes on startup with the following error:

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/usr/bin/glances", line 5, in
    from pkg_resources import load_entry_point
ImportError: No module named pkg_resources

To fix it I manually had to install the package python-pkg-resources.

AO Item Assistant v1.1.5

A new version of Item Assistant has just been released which should fix the major issues introduced with the "big AO server merge". It also cleans up and removes support for multiple dimensions and the player-shop monitor since these features are obsolete.

For those that play on both "live" and "test live" I recommend having two separate installs of AOIA, one for each dimension. Even with the old multi-dimensional support, it was never meant to support "test live" as one of the dimensions. (Due to, amongst other things, the difference in the AO Item database.)

I also want to give a big "THANK YOU!" to the AO community for all the feedback, testing and suggestions that just keep on coming in.

(For those that have been testing intermittent versions, this is essentially the same as v1.1.4.24.)


AOIA Homepage
v1.1.5 download

What I Am Reading

Its been a while since my last update, so here is what I have been keeping busy with lately.

I am pleased to present to you the latest update to the Hubii user interface. We have completely redone the presentation of articles, and I must say I am very satisfied with the result.

Have a look, this is how I am keeping up to date with whats happening around the world:

Looking at news from Norway

The new presentation of articles is also carried over to the "Mapazine".

To see for yourself head over to Hubii.com, and please use the "Feedback" button if you have some comments!

AO Universe Interview

"Windguaerd" has posted an interview with yours truly as part of their "AO Universe Community Interview" series.

You can read the interview here!

Hubii Beta

www.hubii.com has launched its Beta version . It has been three years of hard work, but... was worth it!

If you are someone who reads the news online and you're tired of jumping from one site to another you will most definitely like Hubii. Hubii offers a new user experience for searching and reading news online. With Hubii you can unify in a single place all your favorite online news. Hubii allows you to search the map, find out where the news is happening, select news by topic, comment on and rate news, see what the world is reading about, create your own newspaper which automatically update and contribute to the community by adding publishers to the map. Exciting times ahead… watch www.hubii.com evolve.

Please send us all comments and suggestions you have, and share it with your friends if you like it. Follow Hubii on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn.

Item Assistant v1.0

I would like to thank everyone for all the feedback, encouragement and gentle nudges I have received over the last 18 months or so. It has been a long while since I released an update to Item Assistant, and I apologize for that, but now the wait is over.

v1.0 is here!

Major changes this release include the new Summary View and an installer to supplement the regular zip archive distribution.

The Summary View shows credits and levels of your characters, while the installer takes care of some of the most common problems people have installing the application.

In addition to new features, a lot of work have gone into trying to make the application more robust to handle the different usage scenarios.

From the change log:

• Fixed bug 2947010. Generating the script with items for ingame display now use the correct linebreak tag.
• Fixed bug 2802231 in the find panel and in the PB filter panel. Toon list is now reloaded as it is opened. 
• The window location is now recorded and restored to/from the conf file. 
• Opening an item using Xyphos.com will now also supply the QL of the item so the stats are shown correctly. 
• Improved ripping of items database so it supports newer version of AO.
• New Summary View shows levels and amount of credits for all registered toons. 
• Created a basic installer.

Enjoy!

Project Firewall - Hardware

NetGear WNDR3700

Yey!

My ISP upgraded my internet connection, and lowered the price at the same time. My initial tought was ofcourse "Fantastic! Woot!!1". And it looked quite good, except I didn't manage to get full download speed on my new connection with my current router, the NetGear WNDR3700.
Don't get me wrong, its a pretty decent piece of hardware, but as most appliances meant for the mass market, it isn't really designed to handle a 60 Mbps fiber connection. My peak download speed was about 5.85 MB/s or about 50 Mbps.

So, out with the old, and in with the new. This time I wanted to be sure my router/firewall would handle the load I put on it, and preferably handle a couple of OpenVPN connections as well. After a shopping spree I ended up with the following hardware purchases:

ZOTAC FUSION350-A-E

• Main board: ZOTAC FUSION350-A-E
• NIC: Intel Pro/1000CT PCIe
• Memory: Kingston ValueR DDR3 SO-DIMM 1066MHz 2GB
• SSD: KINGSTON SSDNOW V-SERIES 30GB
• Cabinet: ANTEC ISK 300-150 EC Mini-ITX

All in all it set me back about 3000 NOK (including P&P), a bit expensive for a router, but with the load this should be able to handle I should hopefully not need to buy a new one for a few years!

ANTEC ISK 300-150

I must say I was very impressed by the Antec ISK 300-150 when it arrived. It is one heavy, solid piece of work weighing in at almost 5 kg!

It has room for two 2.5" HDD/SSD drives, as well as a slimline 5.25" CD/DVD ROM drive. Lots of open vents on the side and above the expansion slot and the 80mm fan has 3 adjustable speed settings though a small switch on the rear of the cabinet. Mine is running fine at the slowest setting, and is barely audible.

The mainboard comes with an Atheros based wireless mini-pc-express card for b/g/n networking in addition to the gigabit integrated NIC. Adding the Intel NIC completed my networking requirements with a total of three physical zones (wan, lan and wlan).

I will follow up this post with information about software and performance experiences later on. 

.Net Clipboard and the OutOfMemoryException.

I recently had a weird bug that manifested as a first-chance OutOfMemoryException inside Windows.Forms when using the clipboard. At first it doesn't appear to do any harm, except the clipboard did not return the expected data. Unfortunately it had a slight side effect: Any later call using OLE/COM would crash and burn. Bummer!

Some hours debugging later, and it was apparent that the crash was happening consistently by just letting the application idle after putting something on the clipboard. Apparently there was something wrong in the idle mechanism that updates the paste-command button... but what?

So I went surfing teh intarweb! And found this MSDN page from Microsoft explaining how to use the clipboard from a .Net application. Then I noticed this:

To access data from the Clipboard by using versions earlier than .NET Framework 2.0, use the GetDataObject method and call the methods of the returned IDataObject. To determine whether a particular format is available in the returned object, for example, call theGetDataPresent method.

That looked familiar, and indeed the code was using the old way of accessing the clipboard, by first using GetDataObject() and then using GetData() on the result.
Now the page didn't say anything about this way of doing things being deprecated, but I still got that nagging sensation that this was an important clue.

So I set down and create two simple test applications that did the same thing, only each using a different variation of the clipboard API. The applications were simple: put something on the clipboard, and repeatedly try and read it back in a loop.

The result was that using the new (and preferred?) way of clipboard access had no problems. I ran it through a loop of million clipboard accesses without a hiccup. On the other hand, the application using the old variation of the API had a very familiar problem. After some iterations it started throwing the familiar first-chance OutOfMemoryException. What more, the clipboard data stopped being available for the test application. Very similar indeed to the problem in the main application!

A few repeat runs, trying stuff like forced garbage collection (which did not help at all, except the performance went down the drain) a clear pattern emerged: My test application would stop working after 65525 invocations of GetData(). The 65526th time and onward it would just silently fail with the OutOfMemoryException in the debugger output.

65526 is pretty darn close to the magical 0xFFFF 16 bit limit, so allowing for some initialization and general overhead, it seems clear that the old variation of the clipboard API (pre v2.0) is leaking a handler, global resource or otherwise doesn't free up some counter internally.

If you are lucky enough to be able to use the newer version of the .Net API I suggest you do so, and remove any code using the old API, since its quite simply broken!

Free Tail GUI for Windows

Need a tail replacement on your Windows box? Look no further than Log Expert.

It has lots of powerful features such as:

• regular expression highlighting
• "columnizer" for well-defined log file formats
• opensource
• unicode support
• plugin support

...to name a few!

The homepage for the source-code: http://logexpert.codeplex.com/

TeamCity, Ant & DITA

Over the last few days I have been trying to get a CI server (aka build server) up and running. After trying out both CruiseControl and CruiseControl.NET I landed on TeamCity since it is a bit simpler with a decent web GUI as well as being somewhat familiar from my work.

You can download TeamCity and try it out for yourself since they offer a free edition that supports up to 20 build configurations and 3 build agents.

One of the tasks I wished to accomplish in by CI server was to build the online help files (HTML) as well as the user manual (PDF). Having all the source material in DITA formatted XML files makes that pretty easy from the command line using the DITA Open Toolkit full easy install distribution. Getting it to run automatically from TeamCity proved to cost me some gray hairs though.

So as a note-to-self here is a short checklist of what to do after TeamCity has been installed:

1. Download DITA and unzip it. (Ex in: C:\DITA-OT1.4.3)
   
2. Create a new build configuration for you project, and set "Ant" as the "Build runner".
3. "Ant Home" should be the ant folder in your DITA installation. (Ex: c:\DITA-OT1.4.3\tools\ant\)
4. In "Additional Ant Command Line Options" input the classpath and any options for Ant or the DITA toolchain it spawns.
5. Add DITA_DIR environment variable to the build configuration and set it to the folder you unzipped DITA to in step 1.
6. Create a build.xml file for your targets and point TeamCity at it.
   

Note!
Setting the CLASSPATH environment variable had NO effect, neither had adding -classpath to the JVM command line options. Only adding it as a -cp option to the Ant command line did the trick. I did not find any mention of this in either DITA documentation or TeamCity documentation.
It might be obvious for someone more familiar with Ant, but for me it was a big hurdle I only discovered while (desperately) searching trought the Ant plugin configuration on my TeamCity server.

ERA Visual on CNN

For the last 4+ years I have been working at Epsis AS, a technology company focused on Integrated Operations in the Oil and Gas business. For much of that time I have been working on an application that is now in use by Chevron SJV.

CNN has posted an video about the application here and the effect it has had.

New Anarchy Online Item Database

A new item database for Anarchy Online has made it to the public. Still being developed, but is is already working quite nicely.

URL: http://www.xyphos.com

It is still missing things like item interpolation, but I'm guessing its not too far off into the future before its in there as well. Until then I will have to settle for Auno's site for that piece of functionality.

AO Item Assistant has been updated with support for the new site. I haven't removed the references to AOMainframe yet, but that project looks too dead to be resurrected. :(

Certified ScrumMaster

I have just completed a 2 day training to become a Certified Scrum Master. I attended Mike Cohn's course in Oslo and it was a very interesting experience. Although we have been using Scrum in our organization for some time now, it was very educational! Mike really knows what he is talking about!

Mike Cohn's blog.

The course I attended was organized by programutvikling.no.

Update: And now I even have a nice certificate on my office wall. :)

Item Assistant - Startup Issue

Some people are experiencing problems starting version 0.9.2 (and possibly earlier version of the 0.9 branch). It shows up as a Windows error message telling you the application failed to start because the configuration is wrong. Well.. what configuration? AOIA doesn't have a configuration!!

So after a bit of googling and reading up on side-by-side assemblies, it turns out the solution is pretty simple. To run it you need the Visual Studio 9.0 CRT DLLs installed on your system. If you don't have Visual Studio you can just grab the redist package from Microsoft and install that.

Future snapshots of the application will probably have the missing DLLs bundled in the ZIP file as a "private" assembly, like in this CodeProject article about Visual Studio 2005.

Item Assistant v0.9.2

I just uploaded a new snapshot of Item Assistant to the sourceforge page. This is the official v0.9.2 release.

You can see the forum for the official release notes.

This version has been tested with the recently released patch of Anarchy Online (v18.0.0) also know as "The Legacy of the Xan" booster pack.

For downloading go here.

Cool Open Source Site

I stumbled over a cool site for open-source software development today. It has the wierd url ohloh.net and appears to be a social networking site based on open-source development.

Anyway, somebody had already registered my pet project, Item Assistant, and I diligently grabbed it and started to fill in details like SVN repository URLs etc. It then started generating some useful and interesting statistics about the project.

Anyway, its cool and you can check it out right here!

Importing DLLs

Well, it was that time of the year again... to update the external dependencies for Item Assistant. Downloading and updaing SQLite always baffels me until I remember the hoops I went through (read: googling around for hours) last time I wanted to generate an import lib for use with the DLL.

So here is a link to the MS KB article: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/131313
And a good article about more advanced DLL handling: http://qualapps.blogspot.com/2007/08/how-to-create-32-bit-import-libraries.html

Update:
This is the gist of it:

Open Visual Stuidio command prompt and run:
lib /DEF:sqlite3.def

This will genereate the appropriate .lib and .exp file.

Find in Files

More Visual Studio 2005 oddities.

Today my Find in Files command suddenly stopped working. For some unknown reason. A very helpful error message showed up in the results window:

No files were found to look in. Find was stopped in progress.

After a bit of searching on the internet I came over this blog that explained how to fix it: http://bloggingabout.net/blogs/edward/archive/2005/01/31/2136.aspx

Basically you have to press CTRL + Scoll Lock to fix it... why? I have no idea.

Disappearing GUI Elements in Visual Studio 2005

For some reason after updating to Visual Studio 2005, the Exception Window no longer had the "Break on Unhandled Exception" column (or whatever it's called).

Here is a link explaining how to get it back.