Feb 282016
 

The WordPress plugin Broken Links Detector reported over 900 links on my blog that have some sort of problem. Meaning an URL can’t be reached or even the linked server doesn’t exist anymore. I started blogging about 12 years ago. Websites come and go, domain names change, blogs are moved to different locations. The internet changes constantly.

Feb 262016
 

My server was dead. Not even a little blink from one of the many LEDs in the system or some other sign of life when putting the power on it. So I figured that replacing parts would be like a puzzle. Is it the power supply? The motherboard? The CPU? Or a combination of any of the parts? Replacing one of them would easily cost me about 100 euro. So I did some math, and figured that hosting was not only a relatively cheap solution, it also has many advantages (that all of you IT people can list better than me).

I went with DirectNIC, since I have been using their services for over 15 years now.

And as you can see, it just works. I had to do some work to restore the WordPress database, since the last backup I had on my NAS disks was from the end of 2015. But with some diskswapping, file copying, MySql-dumping+importing and WP-CONFIG changing it now works.

I’m happy!

Oct 292015
 

Yesterday my server, or to be exact: my domain, was unavailable. I completely missed the expiration emails I received, and did not renew the domain on time. That results in the domain being put in quarantine. But I choose DirectNIC for a reason: they are professional and they are quick. So after contacting them and explaining the situation, paying the neccessary fees and boom….within two hours (including the email exchange and lifting the quarantine status and paying for the whole shebang) my domain is back up again.

Thank you DirectNIC. I’ll be more careful next time (next year!).

In the meantime, when the stress levels were at a peak, I bought two other domains, so now you can reach me on switchbl8.com and switchbl8.rocks (!) as well.

May 162014
 

I created the dynamic webservice. So far so good. Solved some hard to find problems (at least, Microsoft doesn’t tell you that these problems will arise). Now for the big finale. WCF in all its wisdom caches WSDL requests. Let us repeat that all together now: WCF caches WSDL requests. And there is no way to tell WCF to not do that, or for that matter to empty the cache. The only way to do that, is to recycle the application pool the service is running in, or (of course) to recycle IIS. It’s that bad.

I tried several methods: messageinterceptors, creating extra instances of the service, etc etc but there’s no way to work around the cache. Once requested, the WSDL is written in stone.

We serve web services that have a customerbased configuration. A customer gives us a data file, which will be the source for their endpoint. In our application is defined which columns are served to the respective methods. But all clients have the same set of methods (web operations). So the wsdl generator looks at the user that is logged in (custom servicebehavior), fetches the relevant column names from the database, and modifies the wsdl accordingly. Every customer is served its own data with its own choice of columns. Works perfectly. Until you change the set of columns and don’t restart the service. No problem on my development laptop or on the test machine, but a big problem if we want this in live in production.

At a dead end with this now. Looking for an alternative. But so far, none of what I find actually works.

Nov 302013
 

As a sidetrack for a work related project, I recently looked at GeoDjango. GeoDjango is the geospatially enabled version of Django, the socalled webframework for perfectionists with deadlines.

Doing the GeoDjango tutorial for the umpth time, Python caught me again. The way the language works, it seems to flawlessly connect with the way I think when I’m programming.

I needed to do some manual upgrading, can’t remember what exactly, but that had to do with the Ubuntu registries not having the latest version or so. Nothing special.

Thinking about two projects to create now. One is an idea I already have for a long time, so maybe it will see daylight some time.

Apr 082013
 

Facebook is getting weirder every day. Apart from advertising, their biggest source of income is probably gaming. Gaming requires friends, or neighbors, or whatever the game calls is.
Now Facebook introduced paid messages to non-friends, and celebrities.
How can you expand your neighbors without harassing someone with a friend request first? And secondly, I think it’s ripping off celebrities, since they don’t see a penny of the revenues.

Maybe it’s time to turn our backs to Facebook. I just did by ranting here 😉

Apr 082013
 

Starting today, Microsoft will terminate the services for its messenger MSN or Messenger Live. We will all have to use Skype from now on. Almost the same you would say, although Skype doesn’t have personalized statuses, it doesn’t understand the typed smileys, and it’s a big program to start with. You loose the groups you created. And in a lot of countries Skype just doesn’t work. The MSN king is dead, long live the new king Skype.

BARF!

Jan 162013
 

Ubuntu 12.04 has the default firewall ufw enabled, but I rather use iptables. And everytime I reboot the system, I run a script to enable the firewall rules again. But I just found out I don’t need to, there’s a tool for that. Of course.


sudo apt-get install iptables-persistent

That asks you to save the current IPv4 and IPv6 rules and creates a service that is started at boot time so it reads the created files.

Voila.