Receive/Transmit

I’ve previously written about the browser based game Neptune’s pride, and having played a few games now I’m going to share some of the tricks and nuances of the game I’ve come across. I won’t be covering the basic stuff like capturing planets since this can be read from the game’s help page. The first part of this will cover an area of the game that causes a great deal of confusion for new players, the combat system. Once you’ve read this those confusing defeats where your 10 ships were beaten by 1 should make make more sense.

(continue reading…)

There is a very annoying issue in Windows, in that it doesn’t let you have more than one partition on a USB drive. There was a workaround for this in XP, but I haven’t been able to get it working in the newer versions. In addition if you have a multi partition USB device and try to use Windows to format it via disk management, you will run into more difficulties where it can only manage the first partition. I can’t help with the first problem, but here is how you solve the second.

(continue reading…)

I’ve been playing with a little Silverlight app which requests data from an XML webservice on a remote server. Ths is the first time I’ve done this and like most people I fell into the trap of not setting up my crossdomainrequest.xml file. This is a file you need to put on the remote server in the root directory, and it basically permits Silverlight to access the data on the server. If you haven’t set this up correctly you will be seeing a lot of the dreaded System.Security.SecurityException

There is a lot of info out on Google about this which has sample xml files, however none of them were working for me and I spent quite a bit of time scratching my head. I eventually came across this document which gave me a clue as to what I was doing wrong – basically my silverlight app was running on http but the site I was pulling data from was https. In order for this to work you need an extra line in the xml to permit ‘cross-scheme’ access, ie an http site accessing an https one. The xml which got me up and running was this:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<access-policy>
 <cross-domain-access>
  <policy>
   <allow-from http-request-headers="*">
    <domain uri="*"/>
    <domain uri="http://*"/>
   </allow-from>
   <grant-to>
    <resource path="/" include-subpaths="true"/>
   </grant-to>
  </policy>
 </cross-domain-access>
</access-policy>

Save this as crossdomainrequest.xml at the root of your web server, but bear in mind that this allows full access and so you might want to edit it to lock it down (again, lots of other turorials on this). Its annoying that I had to spend a good couple of hours sorting this. Looking around its a very common issue and the error messages could be a lot more helpful in pointing you in the right direction

Building a template is something you don’t do very often – you tend to do it once and then forget about it. Today I had to make a Windows 2008 R2 template VM for VMware, but luckily I found a handy guide which had done all the hard work for me.

If you use it yourself its worth looking at each setting and asking if it applies to your environment. Some of the settings will probably be set by your GPOs anyway once you add machines deployed from it to your domain, other bits are just slightly anal and unnecessary.

As a side note 2008 R2 only supports 64 bit processors, so make sure your environment is capable fo this before you proceed.

If you’ve ever been to the beach, you’ll probably have noticed there are two types of kids – those who have fun building sandcastles and those who prefer kicking down other peoples. I’ve been playing a game called Minecraft recently, and it strikes me as a perfect online representation of this constant cycle of creation and destruction.

A nice castle that someone has spent a lot of time on

(continue reading…)

I read this blog post by Steve Schwartz recently and thought I’d share it as it presents a really interesting angle on what our goals in life should be with regards to learning. Since I’m always looking at new stuff (as most people are) its important that I know what my goal should be at the end of it all. Previously I was of the opinion that this goal should be to know as much as possible, but after reading this I’ve changed my mind.

(continue reading…)