Yes, It's true. After about 4 years and 75000+ lines of code it feels like I am soon ready to release this visualizer into the world. Hopefully during this weekend unless some major issue shows up.

A lot of new scenes has been added. In total there are now 31 scenes and over 25 nodes. The winamp plugin is now also working and I also throw together a Windows Media Player. It only took about 5 hours but it's not 100% yet however since a lot of people don't have winamp so is it time well spent.

A whole bunch of new web pages have also been created for the screensaver where you will be able to look at screenshot of each scene and even a flash movie. Some simple documentation have also been added.

The visualizer now requires OpenGL 2.0 and is completely shader based. This doesn't effect the system that much but it's nice to know that it's a bit more future proof now.

The most time consuming thing that is left is to change all scenes...

If you have been setting up dotnetnuke websites for a while you have probably got this very annoying error.
The error shows up by firefox telling you that it has prevented a redirection loop. IE on the other hand doesn't tell you anything however if you watch the packets you see that you get a constant stream of 302 redirect responses from the web server.

A few fixes has been found to this issue as can be seen here and here but they revolve around the problem having to do with the trust level set on the web site. The sites I set up are using fulltrust so that wasn't the case. What however fixed it was to add the hostheader in IIS.
Normally you setup your site on a specific port and just tell IIS to catch any web request that goes to that port. You can still keep that but you will also need to add any aliases you have for your site as new entries. This will fix the problem once and for all.

The Plane9 screensaver have taken a few big steps towards an actual 1.0 release.

For one I have finally found a bug that has been bothering me for literally years. The screensaver works on most machine but not on my HTPC running vista home. I tried to make a VM out of the HTPC computer but in the VM the screensaver worked. What happened was that as soon as the screensaver exited it also crashed with a windows error dialog. This was after the actuall screensaver had exited so my crash handlers didn't catch it. Visual studio has a quite good remote debugging application that you can use on another machine. However that application doesn't support Vista home. I seriously don't understand what Microsoft was thinking when they skip supporting the probably most used vista edition.
I couldn't track down the problem the old fashioned way (Using log messages) since it crashed after the application had exited.
The thing that started to unravel the crash mystery was that...

The year is quickly going towards it's inevitable end so what better time to spice up the old web page a bit. I'm quite happy with how it turned out. Had to train my graphics skills in Paint.Net. But since I have absolutely no art skills so can't I complain about the results. Much thanks to how easy it is to work with Paint.Net.
Now the site uses php. I would prefer asp.net but the server runs on a linux machine so there isn't much to do about that. My main problem with php is that there isn't any easy logical containers/custom controls. ie i can't do But that's not much of a problem for this simple site. This update also gave me some time to play around with the wonderful jQuery and found a nice lightbox for all the screenshots that exists around the site.

That is it for this year so a happy new year to all of you and see you in 2009!

Choosing the right API is far from easy. They are both good API and they will both get the job done no matter what you pick. So when I started on the screensaver I couldn't really decide on what API to choose. This lead me down into the 'middle road'. I used both. The engine design does get nicer this way too. Then later down the road I realized that I spent just about all my development time into implementing the render part. So to cut down on that time I skipped D3D. The reason was that OpenGL was easier to get up and running and just worked for the simple cases. Using a API thats platform independent is also a good thing down do road. If I, for whatever reason, decided to port the application to for example Mac or Linux.

I was happy with the decision for a while. But then came the problem that if I wanted to do anything advanced in OpenGL I had to resort to extensions and the small hell they bring with them. Since the extensions might or might not exists.
So now...

So you sit there in front of your computer and you have an idea of how to solve a problem or maybe realize that you have or will have a problem with something. So you figure you better write it down so you don't forget this information. But where do you write this information down? Does this sound familiar?

I have had this problem for a long time and I also run into it on a daily basis. This has lead me to have pages upon pages of brainstorming and design ideas written down all over the place. Topics have included things like a better SOA (Service orientated architecture) design, data center design, scene ideas for plane 9, event system for our management program and the list goes on.

I have tried a whole bunch of tools to fix this problem like TodoList and OnTime and they do work but they still feel limited. In their defense they weren't made for this exact problem. So I usually end up using notepad or as an email I never send out in outlook or gmail. I also...

So now the vacation has come and gone. Two weeks was all I had time for and I still had to work during those two weeks. But at least it wasn't unexpected since I have written 200000+ lines of code and also have the responsibility that all servers do what they should. Even though there wasn't a single critical issue during those two weeks. Instead I had to add a new payment system (Metcharge) and some new features to another (WebMoney).

As frustrating as it is I haven't managed to get any inspiration to continue with Plane9. It's always something else that's more interesting to do. Lately it has been to look into server virtualization for our new data center. I have been working with it for a while now and I still find it very neat that it just works. That you can virtualize a OS, do snapshots and move the whole OS with all applications to a new computer without any downtime. The latter I haven't had the opportunity to work with yet but I guess I will eventually. Currently...

The configuration windows has annoyed me for a while now since it looked old as can be seen from the attached screenshots at the bottom of the post. So it was time to give it a much needed visual overhaul. Now after a few days works it's complete and I'm rather happy with the result. Not only does it look better I also managed to incorporate a preview window on the scene selection tab. This should help a lot when deciding on what scenes you want to add to the current project. Without further ado here is the result

One of my primary positions is currently in building and maintaining our web pages. The original system I built was using plain asp.net 2.0. But we didn't plan on just how much the project would grow and the requirements with that. So the lack of flexibility made us take the jump into DotNetNuke. It was more work than planed but now 30+ modules and 20+ web sites later I feel it was well worth it. It's nice to have a system that our customers can change and expand as they want. Some really utilize this and changes their webpage daily with new promotions and news. Something that we had to get involved with and do for them before.
Helping our customers get up to speed usually ends up on my table and I'm surprise as how few people actually knows about a few critical web tools.
The most important one that I simply can't live without anymore is
firebug. It's simply the best web tool out there and if you only ever use one web tool this year it should be that one. Not only...

Previously our gaming administration toolkit, also known as GAT for short, used click once for installation.
Now I have made the switch so we use NSIS instead and do I ever regret that I didn't do that a long time ago. The problems with clickonce are just staggering if you want to do anything except take a program and just get it onto another computer.
For one, and this is the big one, everything need to be signed in all ways possible. You application needs to be signed and the dist needs to be signed. Then you also have problems like if you need to retaget your exe from "Any" to say "32 bit" then your update wont work at all since the checksum is different so the updater refuses to run it and you need to tell all your clients to download the setup file again.So change anything and you break clickonce and need to resign it.
It can be done and that's what we did however the time spend to make it work is counted in days. Not hours or minutes as...