Status report - pre-xmas

So, long time not posting, blogging is out of focus these month. Moved to our new flat, doing reconstruction but if you do everything on your own, it takes just too long now. Still not finished in one room. And if it will be, i can start again with small changes. Bathroom maybe next year. Oh, and this morning our 4 year old nephew puked on the beautiful white wall :S

Quit my job, from january starting at a new place, keep fingers that it will be a good one and that i will perform well.

X-mas is coming, great, the holiday of BUY-BUY-BUY, the fiest of capitalism.

Probably will not post many news, maybe a review of my plans for this year, but I did not progressed as planned, things have changed.

Have fun, bye :)

Status report

Hi! Seems 2011 will be the least productive year of my blogging. There have been many factors affecting this: moving out from a flat, staying at a friends for a month, moving into another flat in another city, half dead notebook.

I participated in a public photo exhibition, anybody could present their work. Mine got not much attention but I expected it. The most admired photos by public were sunsets, HDR and nudes; or the best, all in one! Cliches, what to say. And the most admired photos by the organizators were artistic photoshopped multiexposures. I have to admit they were interesting and enjoyable, ...

In this era of economical collapse, we decided to take a loan and by a flat :S Hope everything will go right. I have a new PC so soon will start posting new pictures.

Have a nice day.

c# .NET HttpWebRequest slow - Expect 100 continue!

Another tech stuff, at least as I am not posting lately. So, we were sending HTTP requestso the server and against a previous (3rd party) version it was extremely slow. Any browsing would suggest to change buffering, async mode or turning off proxy, but none helped.

When we changed POST to GET, this problem dismissed!
When we rewrote using sockets, the problem dismissed, but could not take the risk of an own implementation on a production system.

Profiling showed the bottleneck is this line:

HttpWebResponse r = (HttpWebResponse)request.GetResponse();

the poll method. Finally the solution was

Expect 100 Continue

Never heard of? :) What a surprise, turn itt off and give it a try. For further explanation search the web for it.

System.Net.ServicePointManager.Expect100Continue = false;
or
request.ServicePoint.Expect100Continue = false;

Good luck.

Lonely red piano story

Pics from ph-art

Sorry, pics are not displayed, need to figure out how to embed. but if you click, you will be redirected.

Update: Pics should be visible by now, i got it :)

VS Express Edition - Start external program solution

"As you've noticed, this functionality is not available in Express. This is one of the many places where the IDE has been simplified..." words of Luke Hoban on social.msdn.microsoft.com.

It's not simplyfication, it is just taking away basic functionality and getting money from users. The postbuild event idea is not bad, but will start the application every time and I am not sure about debugging, if you need to attach to a process or it is done automatically. Here comes a solution, you need to edit the .user file of your project: .vcproj.user for C++ or .csproj.user for C#, probably similar for VB.

For C++ find a Configuration and edit|add DebugSettings:

    <debugsettings
        Command="C:\Program Files\Adobe\FrameMaker7.1\FrameMaker.exe"
        WorkingDirectory=""
        CommandArguments=""
        Attach="false"
        DebuggerType="3"
        Remote="1"
        RemoteMachine=""
        RemoteCommand=""
        HttpUrl=""
        PDBPath=""
        SQLDebugging=""
        Environment=""
        EnvironmentMerge="true"
        DebuggerFlavor="0"
        MPIRunCommand=""
        MPIRunArguments=""
        MPIRunWorkingDirectory=""
        ApplicationCommand=""
        ApplicationArguments=""
        ShimCommand=""
        MPIAcceptMode=""
        MPIAcceptFilter=""
    />

C#:

<project xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/developer/msbuild/2003">
  <propertygroup condition=" '$(Configuration)|$(Platform)' == 'Debug|AnyCPU' ">
    <startaction>Program</startaction>
    <startprogram>C:\Program Files\Adobe\FrameMaker7.1\FrameMaker.exe</startprogram>
    <startarguments/>
    <startworkingdirectory/>
  </propertygroup>
</project>

Good luck debugging your libraries with Express edition.

Instantchess reset free game limit

Ever wondered how they are doing (instantchess dot com)? Changing the nick soes not help. It works from the same network but different computers. So it is not filtered on IP. Cookies? Good one, but no! And that didn't let me sleep. Flash cookies!!! Very smart. Will not tell you how to clear those beauties but Google will show you the proper Macromedia page.

Oh, on the other hand any person familiar with web and flash, or just a well informed person knows things like this. Companies like to hide things in flash/cookies and many times they are also harnessing this feature. So just spreading common knowledge, think people, smart things make you stupid!

Workplace: they started to monitor internet browsing - solution

Hi, my employer or rather those beautiful administrators decided to monitor internet browsing, to reduce the network traffic. They were monitoring it even before, but not officially and were doing it only to add pages to blacklist. I'm so happy, now the 2Mb connection will be like Pegasus, flying when needed. Of course not.

But what to do when you are bored or asking for tasks is not the way to getting promoted :)
Fortunately we are intensively using virtual machines for different purposes, VMware. Set the network to bridged, that way you access your network directly and they will have no way to get to you, they will see only the ip and the name of the virtual machine (change it) :) Happy browsing anonymously and till admins will find a way (if exists, probably yes) to associate virtual machines to real ones :)

You know this is not ethical ;)

Uploading large files using HTTP PUT in .NET

Hi,

another tech blog to share my struggle with HTTP PUT. C# offers many ways to upload files, the simplest is using WebClient, however it failed with out of memory on large files.

During the testing I received many different problems

• System.NotSupportedException: The stream does not support concurrent IO read or write operations.
• System.OutOfMemoryException
• The server committed a protocol violation. Section=ResponseStatusLine
• And few more I forgot but will add later, maybe...

Out of memory:
HttpWebRequest request = new ...
request.SendChunked = true;

Concurrent IO operations:
HttpWebRequest request = new ...
request.AllowWriteStreamBuffering = false;

Protocol violation:
Create a web.config file near your exe with useUnsafeHeaderParsing=“true“, search web how to do that properly. But that was not acceptable in our case as we had both source codes, client and server. The server was not sending response or not a standard response with proper headers. So after uopload we removed the wait for a response:

HttpWebResponse response = (HttpWebResponse)request.GetResponse()

Hope I helped, good luck.

ph-art

Making traffic and links for a friend, have a look at it: ph-art :)

Promised pictures

Hi, here you have the promised pictures from the first film I developed myself. Need to solve the problem with water.

Ilford HP5+ developed in Ilfosol 3, 6.5 min.

First analog film and print developed

Finally I managed to develop my own film and also to make prints. I need to thank to a friend who had found time on me. The theoretical part was longer mastered through texts and youtube but it is still better to be there with somebody with practice.

Despite the negative is not perfect and the prints were just exercises, it was a great experience. The darkroom was not completely dark, there were light leaks I was afraid of. The developer tank was also leaking when turning. We had only tap water to work with. The enlarger timer just short circuited :) First we tried to enlarge on the wrong side of the paper, without success. :) Quite a thrill. I dropped the negative into the positive developer while enlarging :( Ah.

The only thing that bothers me are the water marks on the negative because of tap water. That needs to be made better next time. As I have everything to develop my own negatives plus some real experience, next time I'm going to do it myself. No more waiting 10 days to be developed by whoever for lot of money. That money will be spent on more negative :)

Today will scan the film and post some pics on my vivo page and probably few even here. Keep watching, bye. :)

Annoying password policy - solution

Hi, for sure you have faced the welcome message of expired password. Then you thought you will change it quickly and continue. But, it needs uppercase, lowercase, numbers, signs, squirrel sounds as Dilbert said, zero is not allowed not to be missed by o and other specialties...

This happened to me last time and it made me quite angry. Finally when you have a new password, safety is still worthless because you are unable to remember your password and you write it down on your desk. Oups.

Keeping the same password is not allowed, you need to find out how many last passwords are remembered, change your password as many times and finally use your last one. It will take more time, but you can keep your old password. Is it right to do this? Hm, maybe not, but is it right to writing it down?

First post in 2011

Hi, happy new year or like that. Just a pic to keep posting. I had to work between holidays and also this week. Days are short, hard to find time for shooting. I pass everyday by a frozen lake, where kids are playing hockey or just skating, the days are foggy, the view is beautiful, the possibilities are endless and i need to go to work :(
Tomorrow or who knows when next, cause after then school holidays are over, weather could warm up, I need to be there.

The picture I made walking to the lake at my parent's home, did some postprocess. Enjoy.