General

Welcome to the new Rambling Comments

I’ve just finished upgrading the blog from Movable Type 2.64 to Movable Type 5.0.x. The main reason behind actually getting around to doing this (the ‘update blog’s MT version’ todo item has been on my list for several years!) is so that I can integrate Rambling Comments with my other technical blogs. At present it’s just The Server Framework blog, but I have two more micro blog sites due in 2011 for products that I’m working on and I wanted to be able to include the entries from these new blogs into the main Rambling Comments feed.

ServerFramework.com

I’ve put together a new website for my super scalable, high performance, I/O Completion Port based server framework. This has all of the information that you need to decide if you can use The Free Framework or if you’d prefer to license The Server Framework. There’s also a new server example, WASP, which is a pluggable server platform that is available in compiled form and is free for non-commercial use. Over the next few months WASP will evolve to support most of the key features of the various options that are available with The Server Framework such as SSL, Managed hosting, UDP and TCP, etc.

DevPartner Studio 10

My previous rant about DevPartner Studio (and especially the BoundsChecker portion of it) resulted in several emails from guys on the development team and a call from product owner at MicroFocus. They pointed me towards the latest ‘web sync’ (service pack) which was released shortly after my rant, explained how the issues I’d noticed had made it through testing and why they existed and commiserated with me over the state of support.

DevPartner Studio 9.0 and VS2008

It seems that there’s a ‘known issue’ with DevPartner studio’s instrumentation and VS2008. Apparently the compiler architecture changed somewhat between VS2005 and VS2008 and sometimes the instrumentation is incorrect which is the cause of my ‘strange crashes’ with DevPartner 9.0. There’s no patch available at this time…

Comments are off for a while

I’m in the process of moving the blog from one host to another and until I get all of the perl configuration working so that the various comment spam protection methods are working properly I’m turning off comments. Email me if you have a comment to add.

Spam problems

This morning a spammer somewhere seems to have used my main email address as the return address on a whole bunch of random spam that has been sent out from all over the place. As such I have around 3000 undeliverable mail responses flowing into my in box. No doubt this will now have knock on effects with ISPs who use DNSLB type systems as my domain is being used by spammers again.

Comments, captcha and blacklist...

I’ve turned the blacklist back on. I turned it off yesterday and have had a couple of spam comments get through. The blacklist itself doesn’t always catch the spam comments but it does give me a one click method of removing them. With it turned off I lose the easy removal. If your comment is refused you should get a message telling you why; the reason is logged, but, unfortunately the full comment txt isn’t.

Where did August and September go?

What with holidays and having my head down doing x64 and CLR hosting stuff for a client it seems that the last month and a half has rushed by… The good news is that the x64 port is slowly slipping out to clients; the bulk of the work has been done for ages but I’m using this release to bring all of my example servers in line with best practices for using The Server Framework.

Back in the UK

Normal service is about to resume… I arrived back in the UK yesterday evening after lots of good skiing in France and Switzerland. Conditions in France could have been better (it’s still best to hire skis or use your rock skis - in Avoriaz at least!) but that only served to make us realise how good the conditions had been in Switzerland. I now have a couple of weeks to get some work done and let my legs rest before 3 weeks in Jackson Hole…