MKF Blog

AO Universe Interview

2011-10-06T10:55:00.000+02:00

"Windguaerd" has posted an interview with yours truly as part of their "AO Universe Community Interview" series.

You can read the interview here!

Hubii Beta

2011-09-16T09:50:00.000+02:00

www.hubii.com has launched its Beta version . It has been three years of hard work, but... was worth it!

If you are someone who reads the news online and you're tired of jumping from one site to another you will most definitely like Hubii. Hubii offers a new user experience for searching and reading news online. With Hubii you can unify in a single place all your favorite online news. Hubii allows you to search the map, find out where the news is happening, select news by topic, comment on and rate news, see what the world is reading about, create your own newspaper which automatically update and contribute to the community by adding publishers to the map. Exciting times ahead… watch www.hubii.com evolve.

Please send us all comments and suggestions you have, and share it with your friends if you like it. Follow Hubii on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn.

Item Assistant v1.0

2011-09-10T19:55:00.000+02:00

I would like to thank everyone for all the feedback, encouragement and gentle nudges I have received over the last 18 months or so. It has been a long while since I released an update to Item Assistant, and I apologize for that, but now the wait is over.

v1.0 is here!

Major changes this release include the new Summary View and an installer to supplement the regular zip archive distribution.

The Summary View shows credits and levels of your characters, while the installer takes care of some of the most common problems people have installing the application.

In addition to new features, a lot of work have gone into trying to make the application more robust to handle the different usage scenarios.

From the change log:

Fixed bug 2947010. Generating the script with items for ingame display now use the correct linebreak tag.

Fixed bug 2802231 in the find panel and in the PB filter panel. Toon list is now reloaded as it is opened.

The window location is now recorded and restored to/from the conf file.

Opening an item using Xyphos.com will now also supply the QL of the item so the stats are shown correctly.

Improved ripping of items database so it supports newer version of AO.

New Summary View shows levels and amount of credits for all registered toons.

Created a basic installer.

Enjoy!

OpenVPN on Windows 7

2011-07-31T11:36:00.003+02:00

I have always had a problem with OpenVPN on my Windows 7 (64 bit, pro edition) laptop. Installing would go just fine, but it was never able to connect to the VPN server, even though I checked on several other computers (even a Windows 7 one) that the settings were correct and working.

VirtualBox
As it turns out, OpenVPN and Oracle VirtualBox on the same computer just doesn't work. Uninstalling VirtualBox would make it possible to connect to my VPN server.

However, I then encountered another issue...

TUN/TAP Driver
If the VPN connection dropped, like due to an unstable wifi link, I could never get it to work after it had reconnected.

After rebooting it would work fine though, so after a bit of fiddling I came up with a workaround. Before reconnecting to the VPN server I have to disable and then re-enable the TUN/TAP network driver. Go figure...

Software Used

Windows 7 64 bit professional edition
VirtualBox 4.0.10 and 4.1.0
OpenVPN 2.2.1

Project Firewall - Hardware

2011-06-28T19:37:00.001+02:00

NetGear WNDR3700

Yey!

My ISP upgraded my internet connection, and lowered the price at the same time. My initial tought was ofcourse "Fantastic! Woot!!1". And it looked quite good, except I didn't manage to get full download speed on my new connection with my current router, the NetGear WNDR3700.
Don't get me wrong, its a pretty decent piece of hardware, but as most appliances meant for the mass market, it isn't really designed to handle a 60 Mbps fiber connection. My peak download speed was about 5.85 MB/s or about 50 Mbps.

So, out with the old, and in with the new. This time I wanted to be sure my router/firewall would handle the load I put on it, and preferably handle a couple of OpenVPN connections as well. After a shopping spree I ended up with the following hardware purchases:

ZOTAC FUSION350-A-E

Main board: ZOTAC FUSION350-A-E
NIC: Intel Pro/1000CT PCIe
Memory: Kingston ValueR DDR3 SO-DIMM 1066MHz 2GB
SSD: KINGSTON SSDNOW V-SERIES 30GB
Cabinet: ANTEC ISK 300-150 EC Mini-ITX

All in all it set me back about 3000 NOK (including P&P), a bit expensive for a router, but with the load this should be able to handle I should hopefully not need to buy a new one for a few years!

ANTEC ISK 300-150

I must say I was very impressed by the Antec ISK 300-150 when it arrived. It is one heavy, solid piece of work weighing in at almost 5 kg!

It has room for two 2.5" HDD/SSD drives, as well as a slimline 5.25" CD/DVD ROM drive. Lots of open vents on the side and above the expansion slot and the 80mm fan has 3 adjustable speed settings though a small switch on the rear of the cabinet. Mine is running fine at the slowest setting, and is barely audible.

The mainboard comes with an Atheros based wireless mini-pc-express card for b/g/n networking in addition to the gigabit integrated NIC. Adding the Intel NIC completed my networking requirements with a total of three physical zones (wan, lan and wlan).

I will follow up this post with information about software and performance experiences later on.

.Net Clipboard and the OutOfMemoryException.

2011-05-10T17:04:00.001+02:00

I recently had a weird bug that manifested as a first-chance OutOfMemoryException inside Windows.Forms when using the clipboard. At first it doesn't appear to do any harm, except the clipboard did not return the expected data. Unfortunately it had a slight side effect: Any later call using OLE/COM would crash and burn. Bummer!

Some hours debugging later, and it was apparent that the crash was happening consistently by just letting the application idle after putting something on the clipboard. Apparently there was something wrong in the idle mechanism that updates the paste-command button... but what?

So I went surfing teh intarweb! And found this MSDN page from Microsoft explaining how to use the clipboard from a .Net application. Then I noticed this:

To access data from the Clipboard by using versions earlier than .NET Framework 2.0, use the GetDataObject method and call the methods of the returned IDataObject. To determine whether a particular format is available in the returned object, for example, call theGetDataPresent method.

That looked familiar, and indeed the code was using the old way of accessing the clipboard, by first using GetDataObject() and then using GetData() on the result.
Now the page didn't say anything about this way of doing things being deprecated, but I still got that nagging sensation that this was an important clue.

So I set down and create two simple test applications that did the same thing, only each using a different variation of the clipboard API. The applications were simple: put something on the clipboard, and repeatedly try and read it back in a loop.

The result was that using the new (and preferred?) way of clipboard access had no problems. I ran it through a loop of million clipboard accesses without a hiccup. On the other hand, the application using the old variation of the API had a very familiar problem. After some iterations it started throwing the familiar first-chance OutOfMemoryException. What more, the clipboard data stopped being available for the test application. Very similar indeed to the problem in the main application!

A few repeat runs, trying stuff like forced garbage collection (which did not help at all, except the performance went down the drain) a clear pattern emerged: My test application would stop working after 65525 invocations of GetData(). The 65526th time and onward it would just silently fail with the OutOfMemoryException in the debugger output.

65526 is pretty darn close to the magical 0xFFFF 16 bit limit, so allowing for some initialization and general overhead, it seems clear that the old variation of the clipboard API (pre v2.0) is leaking a handler, global resource or otherwise doesn't free up some counter internally.

If you are lucky enough to be able to use the newer version of the .Net API I suggest you do so, and remove any code using the old API, since its quite simply broken!

OpenVPN 2 Cookbook

2011-05-05T13:26:00.000+02:00

I just received a copy of the OpenVPN 2 Cookbook by Jan Just Keijser in my virtual mailbox. At first glance, the 350 pages appears to contain setup- and troubleshooting-guides for the most common usages of OpenVPN on both Linux and Windows platforms (and in some cases MacOS too).

It is available in regular printed form, and digitally in ePub and PDF formats, from Packt Publishing.

From the description of the book:

OpenVPN 2 Cookbook provides solutions to common OpenVPN problems. The book covers everything a system administrator needs to manage and run an OpenVPN network, from point to point networks to troubleshooting.

I will be back with a review once I have had a chance to read through it.

Free Tail GUI for Windows

2011-02-24T15:52:00.001+01:00

Need a tail replacement on your Windows box? Look no further than Log Expert.

It has lots of powerful features such as:

regular expression highlighting
"columnizer" for well-defined log file formats
opensource
unicode support
plugin support

...to name a few!

The homepage for the source-code: http://logexpert.codeplex.com/

Ubuntu and OpenVPN FQDN Problems.

2011-01-11T13:54:00.000+01:00

I have been having some weird problems with OpenVPN on my clean Ubuntu 10.10 (desktop) install whenever I connect to a remote LAN using OpenVPN. The remote LAN hosts a number of servers, all located under the domain company.local (example). Even if it connects and I can ping the remote machine that is called testserver, I can NOT ping the same server through its fully qualified domain name (FQDN) testserver.company.local. Ping would fail with the following error:

ping: unknown host testserver.company.local

Trying to lookup the FQDN with nslookup works just fine! Strange!

Now it appears that the reason is something called a MDNS (Multicast DNS) which kicks in and handles (by default) all .local domains. Looking at the file /etc/nsswitch.conf I found a line that looks like this:

hosts: files mdns4_minimal [NOTFOUND=return] dns mdns4

Apparently the '.local' extension is not sent to the DNS server for resolution if the MDNS system cant resolve it. So I went ahead and changed the line to:

hosts: files mdns4_minimal dns mdns4

I went back to the shell and ran ping testserver.company.local again, and lo-and-behold it works!

Software used:

NetworkManager
NetworkManager-OpenVPN
OpenVPN
Ubuntu 10.10 Desktop

Ubuntu PHP, PDO and MySQL

2010-10-19T10:49:00.000+02:00

Note to self:
In order for the PDO MySQL driver to get installed, you need to install the php5-mysql package.

sudo aptitude install php5-mysql

SVN Trouble

2010-08-30T20:36:00.000+02:00

After upgrading to the latest TortoiseSVN I started getting trouble committing changes back to the server with the following error:

'\' is not a working copy.

Downloading and testing the latest SVN command-line client yielded much the same results, only with some different messages.

After much googling I got a sneaky suspicion that there was an issue with my working-copy actually being on the root of a drive; in my case U:.

Checking everything out again, but this time at U:\wc worked perfectly.

Versions used:

TortoiseSVN 1.6.10, Build 19898 - 64 Bit
Subversion 1.6.12

To sum it up: Don't upgrade if you have your working copy at the root of a drive and it is currently working!

Item Assistant v0.9.7

2010-01-26T18:34:00.000+01:00

Item Assistant version 0.9.7 has just been released to the public. This is a pure bugfix release that hopefully fixes some compatibility problems on Windows Vista and Windows 7.

Also included is a bugfix from Darkbane relating to the recording of org contracts.

From the changelog:

Fixed org city output for CharacterParser integration. Does not dump contract message on zone since it doesn't contain anything useful anyway.
Includes UAC manifest in EXE file. Hopefully this should make some compatibility problems with Vista and 7 go away.

AO Item Assistant v0.9.6

2010-01-16T18:30:00.001+01:00

I have just released v0.9.6 of AO Item Assistant. This release is mainly a bugfix release and fixes some critical stability and compatibility issues.

Also included are patches from Darkbane to make the application output files that can be used by his tools.

Output of the files can be controlled by the Record Stats button on the toolbar.

Here is the official changelog:

Changed link to AO Mainframe.

Updated SQLite to version 3.6.22 to resolve some issues.

Fixed database parser bugs. The symptom was that the application was unable to track certain items.

Application now outputs files that can be opened with the CharacterParser application.

SWAT Without Root User

2009-11-20T11:40:00.000+01:00

Ubuntu and other debian based distros typically haven't got a root user on the system, since its expected that system administrator tasks happen through the sudo command.

SWAT however, by default, expects you to log in with the root user to make it possible to change any settings. A very nice discovery i found by googling a while, is that the actual user doesn't matter, as long as the user you log in as have write access to the samba configuration file.

Adding my own normal user to a new "admin" group, and giving that group write access to /etc/samba/smb.conf made everything work without creating a root user for the entire system.

The Problem Child

2009-07-03T19:36:00.001+02:00

Getting the latest release of Item Assistant out the door has been problematic to say the least. The first published binary labeled v0.9.4 proved to be flawed in more ways than one.

After FunCom released the 18.1 patch to Anarchy Online, I had to completely re-implement the database extraction code. Before it was using an existing DLL by Faircom called CTreeStd.dll. Unfortunately the age of that DLL was showing and FunCom decided (wisely IMHO) it was time to move to something that supported a database size larger than 2 GB.

Re-implementing it wasn't really that hard, as I originally based it on mapped_file_source from the boost iostreams library, to map each of the data-files into memory at a turn, and extracting all relevant information. This turned out to be a shortlived solution, as bug reports started flooding in from Windows XP users. Apparently there are limitations in the older Windows kernel that prevent me from mapping a 1 GB file into memory at one go. So I went back to the drawing board, and implemented it all again, this time using the more classic approach of the std::ifstream. Since the "random" access I cause isn't really that random (I read all items in the sequence they are stored in the file) there was no noticable performance difference between the two solutions on my PC.

So just to sum up, here is the list of what has changed between v0.9.3 and the current v0.9.5:

Added support for the new database in v18.1.
The application is no longer using the registry to store its settings. Settings are stored in the ItemAssistant.conf file.
Enhanced item listing so the container column shows if an item is equipped, and at which tab-panel it is.
Added baloon warning popup when application is started after the AO client was started since this may lead to the database being out of sync.
Improved statusbar for the Inventory view.
The application will now remember which dimension you chose last time you changed dimension in either the find panel or the pattern matcher.
Added "Copy Item Name(s)" to the item context menu.
Bug Fix: Fixed weird encoding of ampersands in backpack names.
Bug Fix: Exporting all items from a toon should not put multiple quotes around the backpack names any more.
Bug Fix: Fixed buffer overflow with long backpack names.

TeamCity Build Agent on Vista

2009-06-17T09:45:00.000+02:00

I had some problems getting my Windows Vista PC to run as a build agent for TeamCity. According to the documentation it should be a pretty straight forward installation procedure. However, after I had installed my new agent never showed up on the server waiting to be authorized as expected.

Examining the logs in the build agents directory, I found an error message:

Unable to ping agent Andromeda. Please check firewall on agent machine

(Andromeda is the name of the Vista PC)

Well, I tried turning off the firewall altogether without any effect.
As it turns out this is a problem due to the fact that the PC has multiple IP addresses and the agent starts listening to the "wrong" one by default. You can override the IP address by specifying it during the install procedure, or later by changing the config file.
Adding this line to the config file solved my problems:

ownAddress=192.168.90.79

After a short while the build agent showed up on the server, and after authorizing it, everything worked as expected. Hujja for TeamCity!

Creative Translations

2009-05-14T22:14:00.000+02:00

In the never ending stream of photos of bad/funny/inventive translations on the internet, I bring you all an example from my latest trip to Russia.

Although my Russian sucks, I think they are telling you to please not throw rubbish in the sink. Anyone know what a "bowlhole" is? I have never seen that word before (or since for that matter).

TeamCity, Ant & DITA

2009-05-11T19:01:00.000+02:00

Over the last few days I have been trying to get a CI server (aka build server) up and running. After trying out both CruiseControl and CruiseControl.NET I landed on TeamCity since it is a bit simpler with a decent web GUI as well as being somewhat familiar from my work.

You can download TeamCity and try it out for yourself since they offer a free edition that supports up to 20 build configurations and 3 build agents.

One of the tasks I wished to accomplish in by CI server was to build the online help files (HTML) as well as the user manual (PDF). Having all the source material in DITA formatted XML files makes that pretty easy from the command line using the DITA Open Toolkit full easy install distribution. Getting it to run automatically from TeamCity proved to cost me some gray hairs though.

So as a note-to-self here is a short checklist of what to do after TeamCity has been installed:

Download DITA and unzip it. (Ex in: C:\DITA-OT1.4.3)
Create a new build configuration for you project, and set "Ant" as the "Build runner".
"Ant Home" should be the ant folder in your DITA installation. (Ex: c:\DITA-OT1.4.3\tools\ant\)
In "Additional Ant Command Line Options" input the classpath and any options for Ant or the DITA toolchain it spawns.
Add DITA_DIR environment variable to the build configuration and set it to the folder you unzipped DITA to in step 1.
Create a build.xml file for your targets and point TeamCity at it.

Note!
Setting the CLASSPATH environment variable had NO effect, neither had adding -classpath to the JVM command line options. Only adding it as a -cp option to the Ant command line did the trick. I did not find any mention of this in either DITA documentation or TeamCity documentation.
It might be obvious for someone more familiar with Ant, but for me it was a big hurdle I only discovered while (desperately) searching trought the Ant plugin configuration on my TeamCity server.

Item Assistant v0.9.3

2009-05-04T20:34:00.000+02:00

I have just released a new version of Item Assistant. This version fixes bugs, improves performance and cleans up/improves the GUI a bit.

From the changelog:

Added support for NPC trade-in quest rewards in the item tracking.
Now parsing the 18.0.1 database correctly.
Find panel now filters on dimension as well.
Added support for Xyphos.com for item stats/links.
The report in the Pattern Matcher now links to the loot table for the boss.
It is now possible to export all items (excluding backpacks) from a toon by right-clicking the toon name in the tree-view.
Improved performance when ripping the AODB.
Bug Fix: Identify view will now sort (right hand side list).
Bug Fix: Toonlist in the find-panel and pattern-matcher should now be sorted.

Check out the downloads page at sourceforge to grab a copy. This distribution also includes some DLLs that were missing from the previous version and should hopefully fix the problem some people have with it not starting up.

Item Assistant Speedup

2009-04-25T17:56:00.000+02:00

Ripping the AODB in Item Assistant have been greatly sped up in a recent subversion commit (#310) bringing the time it takes to rip the AODB down from 2:42 to about 1:25 (on my setup). Users with SSD drives are probably not getting a big boost, but you are all spoiled anyway :P

The code change simply tell SQLite to use a memory based journal while ripping, instead of the default file based journal by running the following command on the database:

PRAGMA journal_mode=MEMORY

The program is now probably using more memory while ripping, but since most people can spare 50-100 MB I don't think it will be a problem.

ERA Visual on CNN

2009-04-20T14:22:00.000+02:00

For the last 4+ years I have been working at Epsis AS, a technology company focused on Integrated Operations in the Oil and Gas business. For much of that time I have been working on an application that is now in use by Chevron SJV.

CNN has posted an video about the application here and the effect it has had.

New Anarchy Online Item Database

2009-03-31T12:03:00.000+02:00

A new item database for Anarchy Online has made it to the public. Still being developed, but is is already working quite nicely.

URL: http://www.xyphos.com

It is still missing things like item interpolation, but I'm guessing its not too far off into the future before its in there as well. Until then I will have to settle for Auno's site for that piece of functionality.

AO Item Assistant has been updated with support for the new site. I haven't removed the references to AOMainframe yet, but that project looks too dead to be resurrected. :(

Certified ScrumMaster

2009-03-04T09:10:00.000+01:00

I have just completed a 2 day training to become a Certified Scrum Master. I attended Mike Cohn's course in Oslo and it was a very interesting experience. Although we have been using Scrum in our organization for some time now, it was very educational! Mike really knows what he is talking about!

Mike Cohn's blog.

The course I attended was organized by programutvikling.no.

Update: And now I even have a nice certificate on my office wall. :)

Item Assistant - Startup Issue

2009-02-23T08:28:00.000+01:00

Some people are experiencing problems starting version 0.9.2 (and possibly earlier version of the 0.9 branch). It shows up as a Windows error message telling you the application failed to start because the configuration is wrong. Well.. what configuration? AOIA doesn't have a configuration!!

So after a bit of googling and reading up on side-by-side assemblies, it turns out the solution is pretty simple. To run it you need the Visual Studio 9.0 CRT DLLs installed on your system. If you don't have Visual Studio you can just grab the redist package from Microsoft and install that.

Future snapshots of the application will probably have the missing DLLs bundled in the ZIP file as a "private" assembly, like in this CodeProject article about Visual Studio 2005.

Item Assistant v0.9.2

2009-02-20T14:02:00.000+01:00

I just uploaded a new snapshot of Item Assistant to the sourceforge page. This is the official v0.9.2 release.

You can see the forum for the official release notes.

This version has been tested with the recently released patch of Anarchy Online (v18.0.0) also know as "The Legacy of the Xan" booster pack.

For downloading go here.