Microsoft did a fairly good job hiding the end user license agreement in the .NET Framework 3.5 installer dialog:

Since I had to fix it for more than hundred times before - here is once and for all the solution:

Add to the httpRuntime section of the web.config file of your ASP.NET application or webservice:

<httpRuntime maxRequestLength="100000" enable="true" />

and you're done.

If you ever asked yourself how many visualization methods are there und how do they look like you may want to take a look at this cool website:

Source: http://www.visual-literacy.org/periodic_table/periodic_table.html

"Mono 2.0 is a portable and open source implementation of the .NET framework for Unix, Windows, MacOS and other operating systems."

• Compiler
• C# 3.0 compiler implementation, with full support for LINQ.
• Visual Basic 8 compiler.
• IL assembler and disassembler and the development toolchain required to create libraries and applications.
• API
• ADO.NET 2.0 API for accessing databases.
• ASP.NET 2.0 API for developing Web-based applications.
• Windows.Forms 2.0 API to create desktop applications.
• System.XML 2.0: An API to manipulate XML documents.
• System.Core: Provides support for the Language Integrated Query (LINQ).
• System.Xml.Linq: Provides a LINQ provider for XML.
• System.Drawing 2.0 API: A portable graphics rendering API.

Someone built himself a (actually not working) modell of a V8 - infact if you click on the related videos in youTube you'll find working ones... I never knew that this would be possible with lego...

Source: http://hackedgadgets.com/2008/09/29/lego-v8-engine/
Source 2: http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=Z8ut5ND3agI

Hmm... maybe something in the current Menu Meters version is wrong:

I virtualization heaven! I am currently using VMWare Server on most of the machines I am doing virtualization on - but the fact that the Microsoft Hypervisor "Hyper-V" is available for free now is really cool:

"Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2008, a bare metal hypervisor-based server virtualization product, is now available as a no-cost Web download at http://www.microsoft.com/Hyper-VServer. Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2008 provides a simplified, reliable and optimized virtualization solution for customers to consolidate Windows or Linux workloads onto a single physical server or to run client operating systems and applications in server-based virtual machines in the data center. Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2008 allows customers to leverage their existing provisioning, updating, management and support tools, processes and skills."

Source: http://hypervoria.com/

Turns out that a new snapshot (unofficial) version of my favourite DVD to iPod Converter is available. With the new version came new features like the one that allows me now to convert almost anything to wonderful iPod compatible movie files.

"HandBrake is an open-source, GPL-licensed, multiplatform, multithreaded DVD to MPEG-4 converter, available for MacOS X, Linux and Windows."

I tried anything in my library, including some matroska movie files. Just everything worked - amazing!

Source: http://handbrake.fr/?article=snapshot

And another great  software release of last week was the new GIMP version. GIMP is a free open-source image manipulation program that offers 99% of the functionality you'll ever need.

P.S.: This is my wife's eye... :-))

Source: http://www.gimp.org

Today I received a mysterious box with a SONY HDR-SR12E camera  in it. I was expecting a camera but not one in HD (1080i) and with a humongous hard disk (120GB).

Since it's for several projects I am working on so stay tuned for HD stuff. Thank god there's soapbox and vimeo.

Almost every video game company emphasizes the realism in their racing games. In at least one case this marketing lead to strange consequences: Carl Edwards hits a wall with is NASCAR racing car on purpose.

"Carl Edwards did everything he could Sunday, including purposely bouncing off the concrete wall at Kansas Speedway, but it wasn't quite enough to beat two-time NASCAR Sprint Cup champion Jimmie Johnson."

"I planned on hitting the wall, but I didn't plan on the wall slowing me down that much," Edwards said. "In video games, you can just run into the wall and run it wide open. That's what I did, but it didn't quite work out the same as the video game."

Source: http://hamptonroads.com/2008/09/johnson-wins-edwards-hits-wall-purpose

"While we moan about the world turning to slow,

many people seem to moan about the world turning to fast."

(ahzf :-)))

On September 28th the Falcon 1 rocketship reached orbit:

"In an era when most technology based products follow a path of ever-increasing capability and
reliability while simultaneously reducing costs, launch vehicles today are little changed from those of
40 years ago. SpaceX aims to change this paradigm by developing a family of launch vehicles and
spacecraft which will ultimately increase the reliability and reduce the cost of space access by a factor
of ten. Coupled with the emerging market for private and commercial space transport, this new model
will re-ignite humanity's efforts to explore and develop space."

Source: http://www.spacex.com/webcast.php

Oh that is just a fantastic idea. One of the hobbies of my wife is photography and this cup would be just great as a christmas present:

Unfortunatly it's not in production...just a concept.

Source: zedomax

"This is a road in Lancaster Ca. that makes music when you drive over it. It was created for a commercial and they designed harmonics in the asphalt to create the music when driven over. Apparently other countries have been doing it for awhile."

Source: makezine

Diesmal ist 3sat eine zeitweilige Heimat für Charlotte Roche. In der dort ab 1. Oktober startenden Reihe "Charlotte Roche unter..." wird sie Müllmänner, Bestatter, Altenpfleger in ihrem Alltag besuchen:

"Dabei probt Charlotte Roche nach eigenen Angaben den "charmanten Aufeinanderprall“. Ohne Drehbuch, ohne Absprachen, ganz spontan lässt sie sich auf Berufswelten und Menschen ein. "Ich versuche nicht, irgendeine verborgene Wahrheit ans Licht zu zerren. Es geht darum, was wir gemeinsam erleben.“ Und der Zuschauer lernt mit."

Dankenswerterweise gibt es die kompletter Serie schon im Internet zu schauen - hochinteressante Sache das und meiner Meinung nach seit langem das beste Projekt von Charlotte.

P.S.: vielen Dank an Martin von Zwobotgeist für den Hinweis.

Source: 3sat

After the last update and the fact that I am locked into iTunes (using it for more than 5 years...having rated almost 70% of my huge library...) I decided to buy an iPod at the beginning of this year. Sadly there was only the big and heavy iPod classic that looked promising since the touch was way to expensive.

I thought about things like: Would I need my whole library or would it suffice to have 8/16/32 GB of it? Do I want to have additional applications or just a music player?

After the last update several things came together to a conclusion:

• There's not a 160 GB iPod anymore. Since my library is almost that I wouldn't be able to put my library on a 120 GB classic.
• The touch is cheaper now
• mostly I am listening to podcasts, which I do need to by in sync all the time, that means: remaining playtime sync and syncing without manual work

Since my wife doesn't like the look of the new nano we decided to get the 16 GB Touch.

It was delivered today and I am hugely impressed with it so far. It's what I wanted and the way I wanted it. The feature of having my podcasts and audiobooks start/stop positions synced is just fantastic (listening to the first 20 minutes on the go and the rest at home is now possible because the position where I stopped listening on the iPod is synced to the iTunes).

Did I mention that we took the engraving option?

Yo Ho!

For the real windows geek - use them when you need a soft-reboot or a force-quit from work.

Source: electricpig

Some weeks ago I came across those cool color changing LED lamps made by Philips in a hardware store. It's a mood light with a remote control - you can even control up to 6 lamps with one remote... Oh I really do think that several of these would be great in the new office or at home.

Source: http://www.lighting.philips.com/microsite/living_colors/

In unserer kleinen Firma sind wir zur Zeit auch auf der Suche nach einem brauchbaren Content Management System und da kommt natürlich so ein Artikel wie gerufen: Eine Übersicht über einige der großen CMSe. Im moment favorisiert der Verantwortliche für die Webseite das Typo3 -  das hab ich dann auch mal per VM zur Verfügung gestellt - aber wirklich überzeugt hat es zumindest mich nicht - nungut, ich muss damit ja auch nicht klar kommen.

"Wenigstens bin ich nicht der einzige! Und neu ist meine Problematik auch nicht: Bereits Anfang 2004 war der große Dave Shea auf der Suche nach einem geeigneten CMS, das seine (wirklich nicht besonders exotischen) Forderungen erfüllt. So ähnlich fühle ich mich auch gerade, jedoch fast 5 Jahre später. Und wie es scheint, hat sich gar nicht soviel verändert :-))"

Source: http://praegnanz.de/weblog/subjektiver-cms-einkaufsfuehrer

It seems that today it's the freebie day (well... for some of us). Because today the next Windows Vista Ultimate Extra is available: Tinker.

Tinker - to shorten up things - is a Sokoban interpretation with some interesting twists.

"Being a small robot isn't always easy. Being a small robot marooned in a surreal world of clockwork, obscure mechanisms and infuriating puzzles, even less so. In Tinker, a puzzle game that pushes the boundaries of robot frustration, you'll guide your robot through switches, lasers, teleporters, and a host of other contraptions to reach the exit. He'll only do what you command. He'll only go where you tell him to. Will you lead him home, or will you doom him to eternal confusion?

Featuring captivating visuals, an original music score, and 60 levels that range from the facile to the infuriating, Tinker is an isometric, two-dimensional puzzler published exclusively as an Ultimate Extra for Windows Vista Ultimate Users. Tinker features tutorial level, and will include regularly released level packs to expand the experience. Want even more? Download the level builder, and create masterworks of ingenuity to keep your friends scratching their heads. What are you waiting for? Start Tinkering."

It's good looking, fun, the music is great and it's free...

And it's got it's own Level Editor:

Source: http://www.fuelgames.com/

There was the Digital Image Suite and several other tools like Hugin and Cool360 which I used over the last years to create panoramic images. Now there's a new tool available in 32 and 64 bit (for really really huge images!) from Microsoft Research. It's free at this point and if you're on Windows it's definitely worth the try.

"Microsoft Image Composite Editor is an advanced panoramic image stitcher. You shoot a set of overlapping photographs of a scene from a single location, and Image Composite Editor creates a high-resolution panorama incorporating all your images at full resolution. Then save your stitched panorama in a wide variety of formats, from common formats like JPEG and TIFF to multi-resolution tiled formats like HD View and Silverlight Deep Zoom."

Source: http://research.microsoft.com/ivm/ice.html

Uhh... I ususally don't do that stuff but in this case I just was curious how it would work for me. Quite well I think:

Source: http://www.xrite.com/custom_page.aspx?PageID=77

Once upon a time I was told about that cool technology that lets you take several hard drives and glue them "together" to a single big volume. This technology was called RAID - Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks - and that it was. It brought us greater levels of reliability and performance - and it was inexpensive compared with other technologies and since hard drive prices are falling for years and storage space is growing along with that it's getting even cheaper than anything else you could use to store data securely. Some of us even backup to a independent RAID system.

In the beginning of this all there were several hard drive interface technologies used - mainly it was Parallel ATA and SCSI. It was widely accepted that the SCSI drives are specified for 24/7 server usage and were almost everytime faster than their consumer PATA relatives. It was accepted that if you want to build a reliable industry grade RAID you would want to use SCSI drives - the SCSI bus system even had advantages like up to 7 drives per bus compared to just 2 drives with PATA or hot-swap capabilities.

Over the last years it turned out that SATA is the new interface technology that replaces the old SCSI and PATA. There are several server grade SATA drives available now - these drives are getting cheaper, faster and bigger by the minute. So there's not a real purpose for anything "more server than server-SATA" you might think. Again if you want to build inexpensive and redundant storage arrays there is nothing cheaper than standard or even server SATA drives. They are fast, reliable and huge.

So some years ago the industry presents: the SAS interface. It's called "Serial Attached SCSI" and is the "new cool thing in hard disk storage". There are some niche features that may or may not justify the existence of SAS. A fact is that SAS hard drives of the same size and speed are more expensive.

"SATA is marketed as a general-purpose successor to Parallel ATA and is now common in the consumer market, while the more expensive SAS is marketed for critical server applications.(Wikipedia)

It's getting worse: The industry started to offer fast hard drives (15000 rpm) only for the more expensive SAS interface. The few 15k rpm SATA drives are not slower in any way than their SAS versions - but they are not widely available and all of a sudden the same price like the SAS version.

But back to the definition of RAID:

So over the years the technology made a giant leap forward and all of a sudden you find yourself using very expensive hard drives while glueing them together to giant volumes (it's now terabytes...petabytes...). While consumer hard drives are available for about a third (at least) the price of the server version of the same drive. It seems that the widely accepted definition of inexpensive is replaced by independence. I do know that there are use cases when you want to use the fastest spinning drive available regardless of the price - but I also think that there could be affordable fast spinning drives if we shouldn't be bothered to pay the marketing-fee that SAS brings. It's plain marketing to make new 15k rpm drives only available for SAS and not for SATA. Marketing and nothing more.

As it turns out many industry (marketing) brains (hey, even wikipedia) are switching to a new definition of RAID. It's now a Redundant Array of Independent Disks - which I think is a definition that could not be worse. It's not independence we gain with the new definition.

Source 1: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAID#cite_note-1
Source 2: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serial_Attached_SCSI

Das Switchertool des Freien Funknetzes nähert sich der ersten finalen Version und dementsprechend entwickelt sich auch gerade die letzte wichtige Funktion: die Updatefunktion:

Seit der aktuellen Version 1.0.0.100 ist eine Updatefunktion eingebaut welche immerhin schon prüft ob eine neue Version verfügbar ist und auch erlaubt diese neue Version zu downloaden.

Source: http://dropbox.schrankmonster.de/dropped/FFN-Switcher-100.zip

It just looks cool :-)) Gears that aren't exactly circular and still work.

Source: http://zedomax.com/blog/2008/09/10/non-circular-gears/

Nach ein paar Wochen ist es nun Zeit für eine weitere Version des FFN Switchers. Dank der mühevollen Tests vieler fleissiger Helfer des Freien Funknetzes gibt es eine bugfreiere Version inklusive neuer GUI.

Den Sourcecode und alles zugehörige gibt es wie immer auf dem Subversion Server.

Download: FFN Switcher Release 3

Source: FFN Switcher Release 3

Steffi and I made our own version of earth some years ago using 3D Studio and NASA Images - we even made an animation. But this guy does a way better job - creating a photorealistic earth:

"For some time now, I've been studying how to build Earth in Blender. I've read quite a few tutorials, studied NASA's Blue Marble images, and received critique from other Blender enthusiasts. I now have some satisfactory results, which I'd be happy to share.

I've put together a 21-page tutorial which explains how I achieved my Earth renders. I know there are already a lot of Earth tutorials out there - but none that I found helped me get quite the effect that I wanted. My tutorial combines what I gleaned from all the other tutorials, with what I learned on my own through hours of experimenting. I'm sure it's not perfect - but I think it will be helpful for anyone interested in the subject.

The tutorial focuses on three different models of Earth - a photographic-style Earth, a Blue-Marble-style Earth, and a night Earth. It demonstrates how to render details such as proper specular shading and ray-traced cloud shadows."

There's a free pdf tutorial available that shows how to create these 3D renderings with blender.

Source 1: http://chamberlinproductions.110mb.com/mappedearth.html
Source 2: "what's the size of the earth compared to"
Source 3: http://web.olp.net/wildernesslodge/Earth%20Tutorial.pdf

A new version of the great XAMLpadX is available. It's an editor with many features you want to have in Visual Studio and Blend but you don't get them.

Source: XamlPadX 4.0