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Here is an interesting error message IIS gave me when I tried to start the default website: Unexpected error 0×8ffe2740 occurred
Ofcourse, what it meant to say was: Port is already in use.
If it had said that directly I would’ve immediatly known what was wrong. Now I had to Google for the answer first.
I hate stupid error messages.
[Last played: Slayer - In the name of God]
Allright, so I have a cool new smartphone that runs Windows Mobile 5, but I haves some gripes about it.
First of all it doesn’t have any way for me to jot down some quick notes. No Word Mobile, no other notes application. I’m forced to use voice notes, or write the notes down in the Tasks application, which has a shortcoming of it’s own: Once a task has been added, it can’t be editted. Maybe it’s my telco’s choice, because it also offers a more PDA like phone, which is ofcourse more expensive, I don’t know. All I know, is that I don’t have any simple way of taking some quick notes.
Since I’m a programmer I’ve taken it upon myself to write a small application for my note taking needs. It’s a small application that I’m going to write using the .NET Compact Framework 2.0. Once I have it working, I’ll put it somewhere to download.
Then there is the ringtone issue. I can’t use MP3s as ringtones. That’s just stupid. I can only use midi files, wave files (our you frakking kinding me??) or WMA files. Then there is the issue that I must put the files in a special directory in the memory of my phone. I can’t put it on my storage card. So, I’m forced to use up the precious 20 or so megabytes of system RAM, instead of being able to use my 512 MB SD card. That’s just really stupid.
And here comes a good one. An issue that had me stumped for hours: When you place the song/sound on the phone, you’ll have to reboot for the contact manager to accept it!! How’s that for user convenience? I can’t just put the song on my phone, select it and use it. Not if I have recently used the Contacts manager. It must cache something, because I can select the file, but then it won’t find it and thus not use it. I reset the phone and I can select and use it. I then put on a new song and it’s the same problem again. That’s really frakked up!
Other then that, it’s a real cool phone. If I run into more problems and find some solutions, I’ll let the world know through this weblog.
In other news, I still owe you people an article on Outlook XP and Outlook 2003. It’s coming! Don’t worry, it’s gonna be here. I promise.
And in case you’re wondering what the frak all that “frakking” is about, I recently discovered the new adaptation of BattleStar Galactica and I’m loving it! I just watched the entire season one with the 2 part mini-series in 3 days, so I’m completely Galactized.
[Last played: Six Feet Under - TNT]
In this weblog post Miguel de Icaza mentions using HTTP for applications on the desktop to communicate with each other. Similair to what COM and its offspring do for your applications on Windows.
When I first read it I was a bit pessimistic. To me it seemed like the XML hype a few years ago, when every application had to do something with XML, even if it was easier and faster not to. The weirdest thing I’ve heard was some announcement of people trying to write a window manager for X on Unix, which would use XML as a communications tool for its components. Just think how much performance it would cost if you received your window messages as XML and you had to parse them everytime!
So the first thing I thought, with the so-called “Web 2.0″-hype in the back of my mind, was that this was a bad idea. Then came the follow-up post where Miguel went a little more in depth. And this time it made a lot more sense and I could see useful applications.
I don’t think you’ll want to use this idea to enable the embedding of functionality, like embedding an Excel table in your Word document. But I do think you can use it to enable desktop-based webservices. You could use it for information transfer. For example, if Outlook has this interface, you could use it to get access to your agenda, or maybe even add a new e-mail account to Outlook.
While the HTTP-IPC interface would be useful to developers, the other thing Miguel proposes is an HTML interface for users. I like that as well. It’s not new. My ADSL router has it, Xbox Media Center has it. But why shouldn’t Outlook have it? Right now Outlook Web Access is part of Exchange Server. Why not make it also part of Outlook? Then I can access my e-mail and agenda from anywhere in the world, right here on my own computer.
I like it. It goes very nice with my idea about what the internet should do for users in the future. It’s what Orb does for me right now.
[Last played: Annihilator - Too far gone]
So, yesterday I wrote about encoding videos for a Sony PSP and I really thought I had figured it out. But like I said at the end of the article, I never watched through an entire video. So when I got to that yesterday night I noticed something really annoying. The audio moved slower than the video. It’s not noticeable for the first 30 seconds or so, but after that it just gets worse and worse. After 5 minutes, the audio is trailing behind on the video for over 2 seconds! This makes it impossible to watch a video longer than 3 minutes. So, today it was back to the big bad internet and see if I could find a solution.
I used Google to search for answers, but found no clear answer, save that one time someone blamed the sound encoding used in the source file. That person said that some encoders had a problem with the MP3 encoding used and that resulted in out of sync audio. Funny thing is, I used MP3 encoding as well. So since I could find no direct solution, I tried to go with that and see if I could change the encoding into something else.
First I tried PCM (basically raw WAV sound), but then the audio got out of sync after the conversion from WMV to AVI (after that it needs to be converted to MP4). Since the audio codecs installed on my system were few, I tried finding a few other codecs. One thing that made sense was an AAC codec. Since that’s the format the PSP wants it in, why not use that the first time (from WMV to AVI)? I searched for it and found some codec collections. I downloaded and installed the K-Lite codec pack.
Unfortunatly it didn’t give me the AAC encoding option in my conversion program. So I was back at square one.
Then I decided to try something different. Up until now I had only used Channel9 videos. I convert the WMV files into XVid AVIs and then convert them into MPEG4 videos. Looking around my download folder I found a couple of Pure pwnage videos I still had to watch. I converted one into MPEG4, put it on my PSP and it worked! The audio never went out of sync. So I started GSpot and looked at what was different between this AVI and the ones I created from the Channel9 videos.
At first glance only the video codec was different. The Pure pwnage videos used Divx 5, while I used Xvid 4. Then I noticed that the audio was 128 Kbps at 48000 KHz which, if you’ve read my previous article, should not work! I tried this many times and each time I got the message “Video cannot be played”. I was confused.
I took another good look and compared the Pure pwnage video characteristics with my Channel9 video and then I saw it! Pure pwnage used MPEG-1 layer 3 encoding and my Channel9 video used MPEG-2 layer 3. A subtle difference, but apparently a major problem for the MPEG4 encoder.
The codec pack I had installed earlier also contained two MP3 encoders. The Fraunhofer IIS encoder and the LAME encoder. So I tried them out and found that the Fraunhofer IIS encoder did the trick. So now I can encode my sound at 128 Kbps at 48000 KHz and it works! With no out of sync audio!
Okay, so I still haven’t watched an entire video, but I fast forwarded a couple of videos and while the erronous ones got out of sync audio after fast forwarding, the new “MPEG-1 layer 3″ ones did not!
Now I also understand the remark at the PSP wiki about the audio encoding at 48000 KHz, it’s not the encoding for the video to be converted to MPEG4, but it’s the frequency of the AAC audio encoded in the MPEG4 itself.
Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to watch some Pure pwnage on my PSP.
[Last played: Slayer - Dead skin mask]
I got me a Sony PSP a few weeks back and so far I only used it for games. It is a handheld gaming device after all! But the device can do more. It can show photo’s, it can play music and it can show movies! Not only the insultingly expensive UMD movies, but you can also store MPEG-4 encoded movies on the memory stick and play them! Since I have a load of Channel9 videos I still want to watch, I though it would be a great idea to encode them for on my PSP, so I can watch them in the train. So I found an article on how to encode the videos. I downloaded a free program to convert the Channel9 WMVs to AVIs. Downloaded the program used in the article for encoding the AVIs into an MPEG-4 format the PSP likes and tried a small video. It worked! Great! But it was late, so I went to bed.
Next day, at work, I decide to download the programs to my workstation there (faster machine than I have at home) and do some encoding while I work on other stuff. I get some of the WMVs, convert them to AVIs, convert them to MPEG-4s and at the end of the day, store them on my PSP and go home.
Then I try to play a video, but all I get is an error saying: “This video cannot be played”. WTF!!!!
Then I spend most of the evening at my girlfriend, with my laptop trying to get a video encoded and working on my PSP. All to no avail. I google a lot, even find a Wiki on the subject. I use the encoding specifications from the Wiki, but still no go.
I go home for the night and decide to try some more before I go to sleep. Lot’s of trial-and-error later and I have it working, perfectly.
Here’s the deal:
Your input video (the video you will convert to MPEG-4) MUST have sound at 22050 Hz. It cannot have no sound and it cannot have sound at another frequency. The PSP wiki claims that only 24000 is supported, maybe in an older firmware, but on my PSP it’s 22050 ONLY! Bitrate of the sound doesn’t seem to matter much. I tried at 40 Kbps, 48 Kbps and 56 Kbps, all worked perfectly.
Your input video also MUST have one of the following resolutions:
I haven’t tried resolutions higher then the last one. It’s no use, the resolution of the PSP display is 480×272, so it’s not really useful.
All these tests were with videos running at 29.97 fps. I have not tried other framerates, although the first test video I encoded was at 15 fps, so I think others will work as well.
Then for the output video. I got it working succesfully with the QVGA profile at the following video-/sound-rates:
And with the 368×208 profile at the following video-/sound-rates:
Videos encoded this way work without a problem on my PSP, although I must admit I haven’t watched a full hour of video yet. I read stories about videos giving errors halfway through, but so far, so good!
Update:
I ran into another problem converning out of sync audio. Read the solution in this article.
[Now playing: Testament - Reign Of Terror]
This is an idea I had myself for quite some time now and, frankly, it’s not even my original idea. The people working on XMPP (Jabber) are way ahead of the curve here with their PubSub extension for XMPP. But this week I read about a dutch newspaper which launched a new service where you can add a specific MSN account to your MSN contacts list and when you sign into MSN that account will send you the latest headlines per MSN messenger within 10 minutes after you signed in. And if you send a message to that account it will interpet it as a search request, searching the news with the words you specified.
I like this and I’m really excited that companies are starting to see the power of this. As Peter Saint-Andre already stated: E-mail must be destroyed! Yes, I still use e-mail a lot, but the young kids these days use IM (MSN, or Yahoo, or whatever) and hardly touch e-mail. With the ability to block people and block messages from people not on your contactlist spam or other unwanted messages are not an issue. Instant Messaging and Peer-to-Peer communication is the future. You better be ready for it!
[Now playing: Fear Factory - Crash test]
This morning I tried installing Microsoft Virtual Server 2005 Standard Edition for some testing and development work. But at some point the installer told me: “Error 1402: Could not open key: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Classes\Msxml2.DOMDocument.4.0\CLSID. Verify that you have sufficient access to that key, or contact your support personnel.”. A little Google told me more people had the same problem, but I couldn’t find a solution (at least not on the first 2 result pages).
So I had a look at the registry. Everything seemed fine.
Since the error complains about Msxml2.DOMDocument.4.0 I figured this had something to do with MSXML 4.0, so I downloaded the installer and tried installing it. An lo’ and behold: The same error message. Then I decided it was time for drastic measures. I went into the registry to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Classes and deleted every MSXML entry that ended with 4.0. Then I tried installing MSXML 4.0 again and it worked! Then I tried installing Virtual Server 2005 again and it worked!
Yet another weird problem solved…
[Last played: Machine Head - Desire to fire]
My Windows XP machine started to behave weird. It would not recognize my DVD writer 9 times out of 10. It had lost it’s MIME handler for HTTP:// (so when I clicked an internet link from inside a program or an internet shortcut on my desktop, nothing would happen, or an error message would popup). And various other things made the whole Windows experience less enjoyable. So I decided it was time for a reinstall. Only this time, I would not install Windows XP, but Windows Server 2003.
I had heard it makes a kick-ass workstation OS if you just disable a few server thingies and tweak a few settings. I found a great guide to help me out and I’m very happy with the result so far. There are a few annoyances though….
The first thing is drivers. Most of the drivers I found are for Windows XP, not Window 2003 Server. While this is understandable for things like an MP3 player, I was surprised Logitech doesn’t have a Windows 2003 Server driver. Even worse, their setup detects it and refuses to install. I had to start it under “Compatibility mode” to get it to install. After that it works perfect, at least, I think it does. I do have a little trouble with the middle mouse button in FireFox and I’m not sure if this is because of the driver, or of FireFox.
As for games, I installed World of Warcraft and it works like a charm. Half-Life 2 installed perfectly as well (although I haven’t actually played it on Windows 2003 Server yet). Norton Systemworks also won’t install, but because of the nature of that program (some low-level OS thingies going on in there) I didn’t wat to risk installing it using compatibility mode.
I do miss UPnP support. I read it was removed because of security issues, so that’s a shame. But so far, so good. I really like this version of Windows. It actually boots faster then Windows XP!
I think more companies need to start supporting Windows Server 2003 as a workstation OS. It’s Windows 5.2 for crying out loud! The only difference between Server and Workstation versions of Windows have always just been settings and services that are installed during setup. Internally they’re practically the same!
[Last played: - ]
So, it’s been almost two days now since the news and so far I have not seen anything official by Microsoft. Just a lot of speculation and flaming. I did find this link which has a nice summary of features that are supposed to be in Vista. If you look at that list you’ll probably notice “Update 5″, which states that “When you start a game, the Vista graphics interface immediately unloads everything out of the memory that isn’t needed by your ‘game hardware’ (video, sound and physics card) such as the 3D Windows Desktop.” So, if I understand this correctly and if this information is true, then when I start a game, the Aero desktop is unloaded, meaning the whole reason why I can’t use OpenGL natively goes away. So, if I then want to play an OpenGL game, fullscreen (windowed will require Aero to remain loaded and will then probably use the D3D-OpenGL), it should work. This means that it would only pose a problem to people using CAD programs or those medical programs that use OpenGL in a windowed mode. In which case there still isn’t a big problem, because you can just turn off Aero and OpenGL will work natively.
Seems like this guy has about the same idea as me.
Still nothing from any Microsoftee on the subject though….
[Now playing: Korn - Got the life]
According to this Slashdot article, Microft Vista will change the way OpenGL is implemented. In previous versions of Windows they had a full-fledged OpenGL implementation, but for Vista, they will merely make it a wrapper around DirectX. This could cause a slowdown of 50% according to the article.
Ofcourse all the regular Slashdot readers scream hell and brimstone to Microsoft. I just don’t get it. Why would they care about a new version of Windows, aren’t they all running Linux or some BSD variant anyways?
One of the comments really pissed me off. It stated that no serious gamer would want to use Vista now. I’m a gamer, a passionate gamer and I couldn’t care less if the game ran on OpenGL or DirectX. I just want my game to look good and work. This comment really reminds me of the whole Acid2 thing with Internet Explorer 7 that started with this article by Paul Thurrott and sprawled a lot of commentary by a lot of people. My favorite was this one by Robert McLaws. Read it, because it also applies to the OpenGL debate on Slashdot. Most important quote: “Too many times, I think people forget about the reason “standards” exist in the firstplace. They are there to make life easier for computer users. NOT GEEKS.”
I’ll keep trying to read the page the Slashdot article referred to, but it has been slashdotted, so I can’t get to the source of this ‘controversy’ and really read what’s up. I tend to think this OpenGL implementation only applies to the desktop graphics and not to games. The reason: Microsoft need to be a 100% sure certain things are working and implemented correctly for their cool new desktop graphics engine to work. So they want to make sure it uses the API they have direct control over. When I got a change to read the article, I’ll post something new.
[Last played: Sick Of It All - Step down]
We have a bigger development team now at work. Because of one of the many, many reorganizations at my employer, I now find myself being part of a group of developers, most of them specializing in Windows platform development. I like this better than before the last reorganization, because then I was one of two Windows developers amongs a host of *nix fanatics. All of who think Java and C are the way to go.
Anyways, with this team we’re trying to get some standard tools that everyone can and will work with. The only standard tool I used before that was CVS to store the source code of the applications I made. But in this team we’re trying to use more tools. One of the things we looked at was Microsoft Visual Studio Team System. Seeing as we’re still dealing with a lot of non-Windows projects, it wasn’t really useful for us. For as far as I could see, the only way to store the source code in the source control system of VSTS, was when it was part of a Visual Studio solution. Not really useful for Perl, PHP and Java applications. So we decided to go with Subversion.
VSTS also provides bugtracking. For that we are still looking. Currently on the examination table is BugZilla.
VSTS provides many more things, like task lists and project management, all for which we have no solution yet, but hey! It’s a start!
So, VSTS is a great product, but only if you’re working on Microsoft platform-only applications. Although I did read you should be able to extend VSTS and you should be able to plug in your own stuff, like another source control system. Maybe I’ll have a look at VSTS again when it’s new beta is released. I never liked the fact you need to install it on a Active Directory Primary Domain Controller and need to be part of that domain to be able to access it from the client side.
[Last played: Billy Idol - Romeo\’s Waiting]
As you’ve read by now, or will read over the course of the next few weeks, Microsoft announced it toned-down it’s feature list for Longhorn in order to make a 2006 shipping date. Most of this stuff was already publicly know even though it had never been confirmed by Microsoft. And now it’s official. However, you should read Robert McLaws blog to see what’s really going on in stead of reading the hype on biased news sites.
How could I have missed this? Sure, I haven’t been following Jabber closely for a while now, but this is really interesting. Jabber has a Publisher/Subscriber (PubSub) JEP (Jabber Extension Protocol) and there is already a site using that JEP to give you RSS/ATOM-feeds and Newsgroups in your Jabber client. How cool is that? You basically get an IM when a weblog has been updated and you can then view it inside your IM client.
In this document they even describe how they do it. Very interesting.
A little hand-on experience. You see, last week I decided to give Subversion a little whirl and see how it works. For those that don’t know, Subversion is a free, open-source relacement for CVS that is supposed to be much better then the old CVS.
So I decided to install it on a Linux machine at the office. I went to the Subversion website and saw they had RPM installers for the Linux distribution installed on that machine (RedHat 7.3), so I downloaded them and tried installing them. Not possible, it needed about 4 or 5 other RPMs installed first. So I had to use Google to find RPMs for my distribution. After a while I had them all and installed them without (much) fuzz, I then tried installing Subversion again. Not possible, Subversion was made against a very specific version of a library, the version I installed was too new (can you imagine that? Too new?). That’s when I decided to stop trying on Linux and get the Windows version. I downloaded one (1) installer, started it, clicked next a few times and it was done.
Why is Linux supposed to be ready for the desktop again?
I work for a telecommunications company. We try to determine the future of the internet and make a nice business out of it. For a few years now broadband has gotten really big, especially ADSL. The ADSL customers now outnumber the cable users in the Netherlands, and since my company is the biggest ADSL provider we have a lot of customers. So now it’s time to go beyond delivering just broadband access. Now it’s time to take advantage of the broadband and start delivering broadband services. So the first service that comes to mind is Video-On-Demand. This is a service that we (and other companies) have tried to launch for years now. And maybe now it’s going to catch on. And Video-On-Demand is a typical example of what most people think of when thinking about the future of the internet. Most people who try to determine the future of internet-related services tend to think in broadband-terms. Meaning fast internet-speed. When I think of the future of internet, I tend to think of connectivity. There is internet everywhere and I want to take advantage of that. I have internet on my mobile, I have it at home, at work and at my girlfriends house. My computer is hooked to the internet 24 hours a day. I can reach my desktop at work through the internet and I can take care of my bank-account through the internet. But it’s not enough. I want all of my data to be available to me, all the time. Secure and fast. And that’s where I see the future of internet.I want my agenda online, I want my contacts online, available 24-hours a day and 100% secure. I hate it when I’m somewhere and they ask me some information that I know is on my computer, but I know I can’t reach it, although my computer is connected to the internet.
I also want my programs to be smart using the internet. For example. I frequent a handful of newsgroups. But when I view the groups at the office and read a few articles, those article remain unread when I open the same newsgroup when I get home. I want my newsreader at work, to tell my newsreader at home which articles I read. Same goes for my RSS feeds. I want the articles I read already to be marked as such, even when I try to read them from another computer. I want my bookmarks/favourites to be synced, etc.
Now I know this isn’t that easy. It’ll require the programs to take action and exchange some info through a shared resource like and FTP server, but it’s never really been done (that I know of). Sure, my RSS reader can export an OPML file to a webserver, so my installation at home can download it, but it requires an action from me (upload the file and when at home download the file) and it doesn’t mark the articles I read at work as read when I get home (or maybe it just doesn’t do it right). I want to use the internet to exchange information, because that’s what it is all about in my book. I want the internet to be useful and not just handy for some quick porn.
I must admit that some services I’d like are already availabe in some form. Take, for instance, a photo-album. I know there are a few websites that provide this service. If I recall correctly ACDSee has it built-in. That’s making progress, but I want it bigger, better, more! Give me a folder on my computer that updates my online album when I drag a photo in it. Have it ask me for a description, place and time, or even people that are on it. Make the album searchable by keywords, so I won’t have to browse thumbnails (unles I’d want to).
Another example: My MP3-collection. I make MP3s of every CD I own. I hardly use CDs, I just have WinAMP when at home or my portable MP3 player when on the move. But sometimes I can’t recall all the CDs I own. I’d like some way of accessing my MP3 collection through the internet. Not just for listening to them (I have Icecast for that), but for browsing them and looking at their ID3-tags. Same goes for my DVDs.
So, there is a lot of work to be done and not all of it should be done by big corporations. If you’re a programmer yourself you can do great things. All you need to do is make a prototype of a cool idea and when the right people see it, it will take of. You just need to get your point across.