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  • Adam’s Quadcopter

    Well, after starting to put together my own quadcopter, Adam decided he wanted to get on the bandwagon too.  However, he went down the kit route, where I’m still waiting for all my parts to arrive (not the ones listed in a previous post).

    Well, after some initial indoor trials, he took it outside for some flying.  It was a bit windy, and we were only using the small battery packs we had (1300mAh), but it was crazy fun.  The GPS lock on his is nuts.  I wish I was filming when the wind picked up and the quad banked into it…under its own brain power.

    These things are crazy fun, and driving one is just like a first person shooter.  I was pretty worried about how the controls would be, but after flying his, I’m not worried at all.  Now I just wait for the servo wires and frame to get here, and I’m off to flying too!

    A few pics and videos from the D800…

  • Enable Enterprise Library Cache Performance Counters

    These instructions are to enable the cache counters on a server where you have deployed code, and not installed Enterprise Library explicitly.  This works for 4.1, but did not work with 3.0 a few years ago.

    1. Run InstallUtil against the Common and Caching dlls
      1. %WINDIR%Microsoft.NETFrameworkv2.0.50727InstallUtil Microsoft.Practices.EnterpriseLibrary.Common.dll
      2. %WINDIR%Microsoft.NETFrameworkv2.0.50727InstallUtil Microsoft.Practices.EnterpriseLibrary.Caching.dll
    2. Update the web.config to include the following items:
      1. <configSections><section name=”instrumentationConfiguration” type=”Microsoft.Practices.EnterpriseLibrary.Common.Instrumentation.Configuration.InstrumentationConfigurationSection, Microsoft.Practices.EnterpriseLibrary.Common, Version=4.1.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=31bf3856ad364e35″ /></configSections>
      2. <instrumentationConfiguration performanceCountersEnabled=”true” eventLoggingEnabled=”false” wmiEnabled=”false” applicationInstanceName=”” />
    3. Counters should show up on the server as Enterprise Library Cache Performance Counters

  • Quadcopter Research and Education

    Understanding Electric Power Systems – Part 1

    Understanding Electric Power Systems – Part 2

    Understanding Electric Power Systems – Part 3

    Understanding Electric Power Systems – Part 4

    Understanding Electric Power Systems – Part 5

    xcopterCalc

    Airplane motor combos: Estimate Electric Motor & Prop Combo

  • SharePoint 2010 Image Sync to AD

    Similar to previous identity management issues with SharePoint (I hate you FIM!), I just ran into another issue the other day.  There is a requirement to have SharePoint 2010 be the place where users can managed their profile information, but the most important thing is to have images sync to AD so they can be used in Lync and Outlook.

    The guys on the ground were pulling their hair out, as they had followed the instructions from two corroborating sites.  Unfortunately, even with all of that setup, images were not being successfully added to AD.

    Knowing how much fun FIM is, I did a bit of banging prior to arriving on site and found an article that sounded very similar to the issues they were having.  Turns out it was the answer, but I’m going to duplicate a bit of it here just in case it disappears.

    1. You have correctly configured FIM to sync the images correctly as per the TechNet article linked above (“sites”).
    2. Looking in the IIS logs of the mysite (or whatever name is accurate) web app, you see 401.1 214807254 and/or 214807252 errors on anonymous users accessing the thumbnail jpegs.

    What you need to do is log into the box where FIM is running as the FIM user sync account.  From there, add your mysite URL to the intranet zone in IE.  Re-run the sync and it should work.

    The reason is that the error IIS log error is because FIM is not passing the credentials as it is being challenged.  By adding the mysite to the intranet zone, it will automatically send credentials and not wait to be prompted (unless a GPO has overridden this setting).

  • Windows 8 RTM, Realtek NIC, and WOL

    At home I have my NAS setup with VPN so that I can pretty much always get back on my home network if required.  This comes in handy for running virtual machines.  However, since I moved to the NAS I run my virtual machines from my desktop.

    The whole point of the NAS was for less power and noise though, so I don’t want the desktop on all the time.  My solution was wake-on-lan (WOL) and in Windows 7 it worked great.  However, over the past couple of days, I’ve upgraded to Windows 8 RTM and I couldn’t get WOL working when the machine was powered off.  It worked great when the machine was asleep, but not completely off (most of the time).

    Turns out the default realtek NIC drivers in Windows 8 aren’t really the best, but downloading the Windows 8 drivers from the realtek website fixed the issues.

    P.S. Being able to run Hyper-V instead of Virtualbox is nice, plus you don’t loose hibernation!

  • Proxy Other Ports to Port 80 on Synology

    Ok, so you want to be able to access services running on a random port on your Synology NAS over standard ports (80 and 443).  To do that, you need to do the following items:

    1. Enable the web station from the web services icon in control panel.  This gives you Apache
    2. Add the following lines to the end of /usr/syno/apache/conf/httpd.conf-user (you must re-do this after doing a DSM update).  Replace <accessPath> with a name, and <port> with the port it is running on.  For example, http://localhost:8080/party. 
      LoadModule proxy_module modules/mod_proxy.so
LoadModule proxy_http_module modules/mod_proxy_http.so
ProxyRequests Off
ProxyPreserveHost On

<Location /<accessPath>>
ProxyPass http://localhost:<port>/<accessPath>
ProxyPassReverse http://localhost:<port>/<accessPath>
</Location>
    3. Restart apache with “/usr/syno/etc.defaults/rc.d/S97apache-user.sh restart”

    Just make sure whatever service you are doing this with has a base url of <accessPath>.

    UPDATE:  Just updated to DSM 5.0 and a few things have changed:

    1. /usr/syno/apache/ has moved to /etc/httpd/
    2. /usr/syno/etc/rc.d/S97apache-user.sh is gone, so just use ‘httpd -k stop|start|restart’
    3. You may need to create the folder /var/services/web/internal for httpd to restart

  • My Perfect Windows 8 Tablet

    With Computex in full swing and Windows 8 Release Preview being released last week, I think it’s time I start thinking about a new tablet.  A few of my colleagues and I have been really excited about having a tablet that can also double as a media center.  In fact, one of them currently uses his Samsung Slate in just such a fashion.

    • 10″ or 11″ display with >=200ppi
    • Minimum of 8 hour battery life
    • Ivy Bridge CPU
    • Active Digitiser for pen support (yay OneNote!)
    • TPM Module
    • WIDI or WHDI
    • USB 3 port
    • HDMI port
    • 64-128GB SSD
    • >=4GB RAM (would like it to be upgradeable)
    • Ideally, the ability to drive 2 24″ external monitors

    Based on what I’ve seen so far, this definitely looks like it could be possible in the very near future!

    Update: Well, after the MSFT announcement, it looks like we have a tablet that is definitely a front-runner (Pro).  There are some outstanding questions, but it looks like it ticks most of the boxes…

    • 10″ or 11″ display with >=200ppi – 207 ppi!
    • Minimum of 8 hour battery life – No idea yet…
    • Ivy Bridge CPU – Yes!
    • Active Digitiser for pen support (yay OneNote!) – Yes!
    • TPM Module – We think so!
    • WIDI or WHDI – No idea yet…
    • USB 3 port – Yes!
    • HDMI port – DisplayPort gives the same flexibility!
    • 64-128GB SSD – Yes!
    • >=4GB RAM (would like it to be upgradeable) – Not sure, but should be 4GB!
    • Ideally, the ability to drive 2 24″ external monitors – No, but a matrox dualhead2go would work.

  • Find PID of Application Using a Port

    Best way to do it is to run the command

    netstat -lnptu | grep :<port#>

    This will give you the PID of the service, and then you can run

    kill <PID>

    or

    kill -9 <PID>

    if just a regular kill doesn’t work.

  • United System Wide Upgrades

    As I can’t find this nicely spelled out anywhere, here are the economy fare class codes that you need to book to ensure you can use your system wide upgrades on any flight: Y, B, M, E, U, H, Q, V, W.  And for Business: J, C, D.  This is especially true for those of us flying in and out of Australia…

    1 http://pss.united.com/web/en-US/content/mileageplus/awards/upgrade/default.aspx

    2 http://www.united.com/web/en-US/content/booking/flight/fareClass.aspx

     

  • nopCommerce Install

    The other day I was playing around with nopCommerce.  There was some talk about it internally, and I thought I’d see what it was all about.  I didn’t get very far, and realized the installation instructions were definitely missing a few steps.  The guys over there have outlined most of the steps in the documentation, but they’ve forgotten a few:

    1. Ensure that your worker process (what the AppPool runs under) has the ability to create a database if you check the box Create database if it doesn’t exist.
    2. How to access the installation page.  You need to browse to http://site/views/install/default.aspx

    There are other OWASP and scalability best practices that I may go into later if I really dig down further, but three that immediately come out:

    1. Unencrypted DB Connection string info
    2. compilation debug=”true” being set in the web.config
    3. Single DB