Top posts
Latest articles
Synchronizer 2.0 Beta 1
(1 votes, average: 5.00 out of 6)
Loading ...A long time ago I released an early alpha version of Synchronizer. A tool that can automatically synchronize files between directories. Today it’s finally time for the first beta release. Which fixes a lot of problems people had when using the tool.
One of the first problems reported back to me was that the tool crashed whenever ran with some strange error message. Well appearantly this was caused by the .Net framework, a problem which I solved.
For a quick list of bug fixes:
- Program no longer requires .Net framework to run, which was a big bug in the early alpha release
- Logging is a lot more robust and stable, this actually caused some crashes in the past
- Memory usage is way down, solved a lot of memory leaks
- Solved a problem that for some systems directories were not created at the destination folder
- Solved a problem causing synching to mounted network folders to fail
Of course some things have not yet been solved, but are in the works:
- Multithreaded causes some logging problems and crashes (please be carefull with multithreading at this time)
- If debug information is enabled the memory usage is huge on large directories, on the Windows directory it rose to 89 MB.
If you find any trouble running it or it crashes on you then let me know, and if at all possible send me the log file created by the tool using the -dd option. That will help me track down the problem.
You can download it by clicking this text.
Gadget Time: iRiver Clix 2
Every time I get a new gadget or some new piece of software I will write something about it. Well this time round it’s the iRiver Clix gen 2.
I’ve been looking into getting a new MP3 player for some time and I looked over the Creative, iPod, Philips and Sony series. But finally I choose for the iRiver Clix gen 2. Why, well I’ll try and explain below.
MediaPortal 1.0 a serious improvement
In a recent post I did I talked a little about how to install your HTPC (Home theater PC). Well so far I have been using MediaPortal 0.2 for watching TV and listening music. Though this is not completely true, I initialy started using Microsoft Media Center.
But because the channel changing is very poor and the digital TV support made me cry 
I decided to try out Media Portal. The change only brought me good fortune. I could finally change channels they way I liked. Being able to see which show was running. And even better have a good TV Guide.
I do have to admit that the first version I used had a few problems:
- Setting up the channels was hell. It took me over 2 hours to build a full channel list. Mainly because there was no dvb file for my region, so I had to create one manually. And once I completed a scan it only found 10 channels. So I had to rescan over and over and over and……
- The damn thing kept crashing if I left it on over night in TV mode, real bummer since I don’t turn of the HTPC.
- Media Portal seems to be unable to record anything if the program is closed, but if left open it crashes.
Luckely for me a new version was released not that long ago. Hoping some problems might disapear I downloaded and installed. Not wanting to do the pain in the ass scanning again I first saved the channel list to an XML file.
It all installed nicely, not much fuss and pretty quick. But when I tried to import the channel list I got really f**ked. The new version did not want to import the channel list. I was really worried that the scanning would take forever again. I was in for a big surprise when I found that I could start a channel scan and at the same time organise them the way I wanted. All within 10 minutes, so a big improvement.
Another big surprise was that the recording happened dispite Media portal being closed. And even better even if I didn’t close it the program no longer crashed after being open for the whole night.
Download latest RC – Download Skin displayed
Common memory errors in C++
When working in C++ you often get unexplained memory exceptions. At least at first it might seem like random and unexplained memory exceptions. But when you pay closer attention you notice that the value of the pointer actually has meaning.
At least it does when you are using the Visual Studio Debugger. Below is a list that I hope you will find useful with the most common memory exceptions and their meaning.
- Memory violation at address 0xcdcdcd
In almost all cases this means that the pointer has not yet been initialized. So if you see it you forgot to nullify the pointer or didn’t create a new instance of a class for it. - Memory violation at address 0xdddddd
The memory has been deleted but the pointer was not yet nullified - Memory violation at address 0xfeeefeee
This pointer is no longer valid. You basically already deleted the memory that the pointer is for. Thus creating an error since the pointer was not nullified properly. - Memory violation at address 0xccccccc (C++ v6 only)
The memory has not been initialized yet. Please do so
Knowing what a memory location means is the first half of solving the problem causing it. The second step is walking through the call stack to try and locate the actual location of the problem.
Some errors I always made were deleting a string in a calling function and again in the function being called. A big noonoo 
.
The secrets of TCP Chimney offloading
Some time ago, about a month or so, we had a problem with our SQL Server 2005 running on Windows 2003. What started happening was that the scheduled jobs were failing due to many connections errors. After some searching I found out that the errors could be caused by the TCP/IP chimney offloading. This gets installed with the ‘Scalable Network Pack’ of Microsoft.
One of the things I tried to fix the problem was disable it but this caused even more trouble.
