Today we had a visit from Richard Stannard which was very worthwhile. Chatting to a world class althete was not only inspiring but he was full of useful advice. It has made the whole prospect of swimming, cycling and running at Silly-o’Clock on Sunday morning less daunting. I say morning, I think I need to get there just after the milk does, so its more a.s. (Apres Sanity) than a.m.

There have been times at the gym these last few weeks that I did question my own sanity for attempting this but it has been a great goal to aim for.

The motley crew from Sales, Operations and Development are joining in with the semi-professionals and this will be my first triathlon. I think Julian has such a good swim time that he’s starting on Monday (I joke!). Despite gunning for the wooden spoon prize I am just looking to have fun and make it around in one piece. Oh, and I’m also trying to aim to not be overtaken by Adam or Julian

Thanks to Ewan for his kind words of support. I’ll let you all know how I got on (if I have the energy to type!)

The Irish Times wrote a story last Thursday about how an air traffic controller used SMS to guide a plane down safely.

He then lost audio telephone contact but the air traffic controller switched to texting and told the pilot that he had a primary radar signal on the aircraft and that Cork would allow them to land there. He then used texts to guide the 30-year-old plane in.

So maybe rethinking the usage of phones on planes needs revisiting? SMS might be small but it can be powerful. A bit like the Twitter story of the guy whose one word triggered a whole community response to his arrest in Egypt.

As you can probably see, there’s not much cork left in view! Saying that, I’ve just seen the inch-thick pile of cards that Nicholas has just removed from the current release. Whilst electronic methods of project tracking might offer lots of improvements, there’s something satisfying about hearing the riffle of all our hard work!

“Does anyone know of an application that is capable of loading a log file that has been written to using the RollingFileAppender?”

He was answered by Ulrich Proeller, author of Log4View, saying that at the time his application didn’t support that but would process XML Formatted log files.

We’re currently using a ConversionPattern with a Rolling File Appender in Log4Net to custom-format the output of the logs. I did try swapping to the XML format briefly on my development machine, but the output logs really are only machine readable after that.

I recently got in touch with Ulrich as I spotted he’d added Pattern support to Log4View along with XML for file based logs. (For those who prefer network logging, there’s also excellent support for UDP and TCP appenders as well.)

Today, he’s sent me a preview beta copy of Log4View with the pattern changes made and I’m pleased to report it is performing very well. He informs me there’s a new version on the cards very soon which will include the changes he sent me today, alongside some other improvements which sound exciting.

For someone who has spent countless hours trawling through the vast amount of logs that our services can produce while we’re testing them, Log4View offers a very slick, well thought out way of exploring live or archive logs. Being able to specify the Log Level you want for each Logger it finds in the log files, supported by smart Filtering rules really allow you to find what you need quickly.

My thanks go to Ulrich for continuing to actively support his application and for the quick turn-around he’s done after I made suggestions.
If you use Log4Net, you should seriously consider both trialling and supporting Ulrich for his efforts in producing a very useful view on your logged data.

SLAP is a helping hand to provide and consume network-based services.

• For a service provider, SLAP will help it broadcast its location and status.
• For a service consumer, SLAP will help it find a working instance of the service it needs to use.

Adam’s been introducing SLAP and the two basic UDP messages that make SLAP work: LOCATE and ANNOUNCE. We’ve included these two simple messages in a SLAP Node and built on top of this. The following descriptions illustrates how SLAP can be very useful when integrated into your services. These examples are based on how we’re using SLAP, and not fully reproducible from the basic SLAP examples on Adam’s blog. I’m sure there’ll be more sample code to come.

Brief Description

LOCATE is analogous to a shout across the valley saying “OK, I need to find this kind of service, is there anybody out there?”. The ANNOUNCE is a response back to a LOCATE request saying “Yes, I’m that kind of service and my current status is Green”, for example. Also the service will ANNOUNCE itself regularly to broadcast its current status: “I’m still here and I’m still Green”. (colours are explained later)

The service records all the ANNOUNCEs that it wants to consume in a SLAP State Table. This records all the ‘colours’ of the services to help you pick the best one when you want to send something on. We use colours to indicate the broad status of a service:

• Green – Service is fully operational and available
• Amber/Orange – Service is operational but under load
• Red – Service is not operational
• Blue – Service state is not known

This information can be used by a SLAP Load Balancer to determine the best service to send to. It’ll pick a service in order of Green first, then Amber/Orange. Services that are exiting gracefully will ANNOUNCE a Red status on exit. Services that decide to go for a walk on their own will be marked Blue after a set timeout.

Instant Benefits

Whilst there’s plenty to talk about SLAP, the great thing that I’ve been finding from a development point of view is how easy it is to start instances of services to help testing.

Imagine a case where you’ve got a set of working services but you wanted to test an improvement you’ve just made. If you want to step into the code as its run, then deploying it as a Windows Service on the testing server would take time and wouldn’t allow you access into the code without the usual peppering of debug logging statements which aren’t as easy to read through than stepping through live code.

The solution with SLAP is to stop the running instance(s) of the Service you’re working on and start your own version on your development machine. SLAP sends out its ANNOUNCE message from your new version of the service and the other services pick up on this new instance. Bingo! You’re in business with real traffic to test your service with without having to do any deploying or reconfiguration of the other services (which might have involved bringing them down anyway).

So there we go, a very brief introduction to SLAP, but in the brief time we’ve been implementing it here it’s already proved itself very handy.

One thing that’s not instantly clear from the documentation is how to play back the ‘standard.pcm’ file that the standard demonstration application they provide generates. To be fair to them, they do tell you that the generated file is a PCM wave file which is 16-bit 8kHz. What they leave out of the documentation is any kind of suggestion of the software capable of playing this back easily.

I tried playing the file back in Quicktime, Audacity, WinAmp and tried converting it using dbPowerAmp, but to no avail. Thankfully the helpful people at Nuance replied to the incident I raised with them to say that I should try using GoldWave. Sure enough, trying to load the standard.pcm file resulted in GoldWave admitting it was having trouble loading the file, and offering a dialog box for me to set the details.

And there was the Attributes and Rate boxes that I’d been missing in other software. Setting these to the above settings results in the file playing back perfectly!

It was a hark back to the heady days of the 80s and 90s when I first became exposed to the emerging world of home computing, I was reminded of sample frequencies all over again which were referred to in tracker music. The Mod and Demo communities were rinsing everything they could get out of the Amiga and Acorn series with some very impressive demos that fitted on one floppy disk.

BlogIt is a free service where you can sign up to be able to blog by text message. There are a lot of fancy mobile phones out there which attempt to give you the Internet while you move. To save you having to navigate to a website to then struggle with a blog editor interface on a small device, we’ve taken the hassle out of the process allowing you to capture the moment and thoughts that drive you to want to blog on the move in the first place.

BlogIt provides a bridge to allow any mobile phone (as long as it can text!) to be able to write a blog and best of all, it’s free! (see note at bottom)

At present, we’re offering four ways of setting up your blog:

• Blogger.com / Blogspot.com
• Blogger XML Format
• MetaWebLog XML Format
• Email to Blog

For those of you who, like me, use WordPress as their blog (either self-hosted or on WordPress.com), then you can use the Blogger XML Format. You need to provide the full URL of your blog as the URL including /xmlrpc.php at the end. If you have the ability to create a new user on your blog that’s not an administrator to post to, then I think that’d be a good solution to follow.

The MetaWebLog XML format is provided if your blog type doesn’t support the Blogger API interface.

For those of you on Windows Live Spaces, or who would prefer to use email to blog posting, then you can select Email as a method of blogging. You set up your blog to accept emails usually to some secret trusted email address and we’ll send your BlogIt posts to that address.

So what are you waiting for? Why not try it out for yourself and see how easy it is.

Note: When I say ‘free’ I mean that Esendex do not charge for the use of BlogIt. You will still be liable for any charges incurred from sending an SMS text message from your phone to the BlogIt number. The mobile number we have provided for you to text your blog entries into is a normal long UK number so those of you who have text messages included in your price plans will be able to text it without incurring any premium or extra charges.

Disclaimer: These instructions are by no means complete, and are offered in good faith with no guarantees to their suitability to your own needs. Please read all the terms and conditions fully on the Esendex site before signing up.