schrankmonster blog

Once again FeM is recording and live streaming a Chaos Computer Club event. The Chaos Communication Camp starts today and you can watch everything live: 

"The Chaos Communication Camp is an international, five-day open-air event for hackers and associated life-forms. The Camp features two conference tracks with interesting lectures, a workshop-track and over 30 villages providing workshops and gettogethers covering a specific topic."

Chaos Communication Camp 2007
The International Hacker Open Air Gathering
8|9|10|11|12th August 2007
Finowfurt near Berlin, Germany (Old Europe)

"You can participate! Bring your tent and join our villages. The Camp has everything you need: power, internet, food and fun. The 100.000 square meter areal features enough space to camp, cozy places to hang out and a nice pool and lake to swim and do nautic experiments."

There are two lecture halls called "foo" and "bar":

Live Stream (WMV) "foo"
Live Stream (WMV) "bar"

Of course like at every CCC event you can grab an up-to-date schedule called "Fahrplan" here. The only thing I did not mention yet is the FeM-Village Wiki page...oh well..done :-)

Source 1: http://www.fem.tu-ilmenau.de
Source 2: http://events.ccc.de/camp/2007/Streams
Source 3: http://events.ccc.de/camp/2007/Fahrplan/
Source 4: http://events.ccc.de/camp/2007/FeM_Village

There was this update. My 360 died right after it. Well: Coincidence?

The support / repair experience is quite good so far - besides the fact that I have to get a coffin by myself and that they won"t add the lost Xbox Live Subscription Time to my account....

Now this is my second 360 that craps out. If you want to know what happened in 2006 to my first 360 go here.

Source: http://www.schrankmonster.de/PermaLink,guid,944f2bb2-696b-48fb-b06a-d8734f5a6f44.aspx

I am currently involved in a very interesting project which utilizes a massive load of threads and in-memory data structures. The downside if this is of course: how on earth do I make that thread-safe?

Along the journey I stumbled upon Ralf Westphals thoughts and code on that matter. Ralf comprehensively writes about a technology called "Software Transactional Memory". "What"s that?" you may ask. And here"s the answer provided by the wikipedia:

"In computer science, software transactional memory (STM) is a concurrency control mechanism analogous to database transactions for controlling access to shared memory in concurrent computing. It functions as an alternative to lock-based synchronization, and is typically implemented in a lock-free way. A transaction in this context is a piece of code that executes a series of reads and writes to shared memory. These reads and writes logically occur at a single instant in time; intermediate states are not visible to other (successful) transactions. The idea of providing hardware support for transactions originated in a 1986 paper and patent by Tom Knight. The idea was popularized by Maurice Herlihy and J. Eliot B. Moss. In 1995 Nir Shavit and Dan Touitou extended this idea to software-only transactional memory (STM). STM has recently been the focus of intense research and support for practical implementations is growing."

It seems that this different approach to in-memory data management could a solution for most of the difficulties I and maybe you might have with thread safe programming. Even better: it make the code easier to read and is completely written in C#.

Since I am still in the evaluation phase if or if not to use the NSTM implementation, I will keep you posted on that matter in future updates.

Source 1: http://weblogs.asp.net/ralfw/archive/tags/Software+Transactional+Memory/default.aspx
Source 2: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_transactional_memory
Source 3: http://www.codeplex.com/NetSTM

So here"s the problem I had: There is an Exchange 2007 server I am forced to use for some of my daily work and that"s where the problems start: Due to the work of some evil geniuses there"s a load of user and security policies associated with that server. That"s not a problem per se: It"s just that things like "forward all mails to this account" don"t work. You have to use Outlook Web Access or the heavyweight Outlook to get to your mails... Till today I had an Outlook 2007 running on my private IMAP mailserver machine just for the purpose of downloading all the mail from the Exchange server to the local harddisk. I had setup a client-rule to copy all the mail to my IMAP server but despite the fact Outlook is running on the exact same machine as the IMAP server it just did not work for more than 1-20 messages... connections were lost and stuff screwed up. So I had to move all the messages manually (Select-All -> Drag-n-Drop onto the IMAP folder inside Outlook) which took me quite some time each month.

Two days ago I read an article where namenlos wrote about his journey with his employers Exchange server. He wrote a Python script that did the job for Exchange 2003 by using the WebDAV features. These features unfortunatly are deprecated in the current 2007 release of Exchange. So I decided to write a tool in C# that does the trick and uses the brand-spanking new Exchange 2007 Web Service.

The Exchange 2007 SDK is a wasteland to say the least when it comes to documentation. It took me some time and a good search engine to get to something useful out of it. But I think it"s worth the pain: When you got over the first annoying steps you"ll just like me will start to love the possibilities this Web Services give you.

In my case I am using the webservices to do these things:

1. allocate my inbox and obtain a listing of messageIDs
2. get the complete messages out of my inbox
3. reformat the messages and send them via smtp to my own mail server

What I"ve written is not feature complete (as in: no attachements, ...) but it"s a great and working start and does the 3 point-trick from above quite well. I will refine the code and add the missing features (e.g. attachements and stuff) in the future... or maybe you are faster than me. In that case it would be well appreciated if you send me your code/a link to the code (find my email in the sourcefile...)

get the code here. (90 kbytes)

Source 1: http://blog.slash-me.net/archives/235-fetchmail-fuer-MS-Exchange.html
Source 2: http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa562613.aspx
Source 3: http://www.schrankmonster.de/content/binary/Exchange2IMAP.zip

There"s an interesting Windows PowerShell e-book available for free download. You can grab the e-book and the associated demos at Microsoft Switzerland.

Source 1: e-book
Source 2: demos

Maybe he"s just stupid...

Source: http://modblog.bmezine.com/2007/07/26/best-windows-tattoo-ever/

I had a Skype call today with a colleague and we came across the remaining 1,40 Euros on his SkypeOut balance... As many of you will know this SkypeOut balance is limited to 180 days. So when you"re not using it for 180 days it"ll be deactivated. We didn"t know this at that very moment we just talked about it what would happen.

And minutes later this happens:

I did not do anything with skype. I did not search on skype.com nor did I do anything else except talking about the subject with my colleague over skype. And there it is: The information we just talked about... you have to do a call once every 180 days to keep your SkypeOut activated...

Am I a bit to paranoid on that matter? It just matches a bit too well ... and that would explain why Skype is using that much CPU cycles while calls are made...

Oh well. Just after the 43 thousand Euro pile-of-metal arrived some of our office-technicians just thought: It"s tea time, we got a new toy, would that blend?

So they got the tea set and the digital camera out:

We don"t just think of our new hardware as the core equipment of a enormous network. We think of it... well... in a different way.

Source: http://www.fem.tu-ilmenau.de

Hmmm... yummy.

"Orcas" represents a major evolution for Visual Studio and our suite of .NET languages. Who better to talk about what"s new in "Orcas" than our friends S. Somasegar (Everybody calls him Soma), VP of the Developer Division (the group that makes all of our development technologies), and Scott Guthrie, General Manager and one of Microsoft"s most prolific employees (now a senior manager, but he keeps his hands in the technologies he and team build and innovate)."

Get the video and all here.

Source 1: http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/vstudio/aa700831.aspx
Source 2: http://channel9.msdn.com/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=329443#329443

"OLE Coordinate System is trompe-l"oeil interactive software that enables characters to wander along blocks and staircases in impossible ways. While M.C. Escher is famous for his "trick of the eye" works, this piece enables users to create and experience their own Escher-esque worlds. Examples of such animation expressions are: character movements based on a 2D interpretation of attached blocks which are not contiguous in three-dimensional space; falling motions on a single plane, etc. You don"t have to do anything special to create "trick of the eye" images like these. The user just clicks to position the block, staircase or character and change the angle."

For a better understanding, look at the pictures and the video:

Source: OLE Coordinate System