blinnov’s blog

Recently I have been evaluating different options and solutions for creating distributed network applications. Of course, this definition is too broad and there might be hundreds of answers and they all would be useful in different circumstances but I paid special attention to WCF.

As Microsoft released a Visual Studio 2008, I can hardly see any reasons why someone who is up to developing a distributed network application might choose anything different. New Studio even has a project template for WCF services, what makes network servers and clients development as easy as can be… But, of course, that would only work if no other platform except Windows is considered. Which is not uncommon.

So, what options are there if we need to build a client for existing WCF service that would work where .NET framework is not installed (because it is not available for that platform)? There is one way offered by Microsoft (using sproxy.exe) and some could use it. Other way involves writing “moniker” in .NET and then use it via COM. They both would work on windows platform only, moreover, I couldn’t make sproxy.exe to work with WCF service at all, so I had to look for the third option, which was gSOAP. And this worked.
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Software is Too Important to be Left to Programmers, by Meilir Page-Jones

More proverbs here.

Another joke:

Thou shalt not follow the NULL pointer, for chaos and madness await thee at its end. (Henry Spencer)

From here.

Before writing this post, I sent this picture to my friend in Russia and got just an awesome reply “What the hell is this?”

After a short introduction to animals’ world of Australia and a short (40-45 minutes) lecture on that topic I got a little bit more fitting description concluded in its comparison with a mole.

Read more about the mole…

Those who get to Australia first may notice certain lack of creativity in how Australians give names to streets, roads and other geographical objects. Similar names happen quite often, but, from the other side, this is not uncommon at all – I can remember Finland with their Kirkkokatu or Linnankatu in every small town, but Australia seems especially passionate about a few historical names. That is, Macquarie street is found in almost all Sydney’s suburbs, not mentioning famous Mrs Macquarie chair (remember spectacular Sydney’s NY fireworks photos?) and Macquarie Uni. And this is understandable – he happened to be the first Grosvenor of the colony and with no doubts should be threated with all possible respect. Names of other political persons as Banks, Hume, and, of course, Her Majesty are not less popular. Surprisingly, name of capt. La Perouse whose main achievement was arriving a few weeks after capt Cook is remembered more often than a Cook’s name itself. But I wanted to tell about other person from Australia’s history who’s now even got a whole national park named after him.

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In Tilba Tilba we visited quite exciting shop.

The last thing we expected to find in a town which population hardly counts 60 inhabitants was a store where we bought very funny souvenir

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It happened.

Now it is hard to get amazed by a newly released hi-tech gadget or a new “technology”. It looked like everything has already been invented, and while we discuss whether .NET framework’s performance is good or bad or what hard disk drive to buy to install Vista on it, Asus released motherboards with integrated linux.

Just imagine – you turn your PC on and desktop appears immediately with  read-to-use Web browser, Skype and more. Of course, this still looks like a toy rather a useful solution, but it depends what we want from computer. This technology exactly fits “home media center” idea – it is not a big deal to add all essential media players, photo gallery software to the flash and you’ll get a device that just works. No more worries about viruses, firewalls, malware and the whole hard disk is at your hand – operating system does not take a fraction from it, not talking about enormous tens of gigabytes needed for Windows Vista.

I don’t think Windows will die in near future, however I think such ideas can add a big nail into its coffin.

I wonder how soon we’ll see notebooks and desktops with all essential software in a flash on motherboard?

I do not know why but this name reminds me an old joke about Baden Baden

Tilba Tilba is a place, somewhere three hundred km south from Sydney. The capital of that place, which is proudly called Central Tilba is a town with population of about 60 citizens. But somehow this place attracts so many tourists from everywhere its inhabitants are seriously concerned about problems with parking.

What potentially might be so special in a village that has only one street and a shopping center looking like this:

This is a post office, convenience store, souvenir store, cafe, chocolate shop, tourist information center and petrol station(!)

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Something silly happened in NSW right on NY eve. Almost all beaches have been closed – lifeguards raised signs “no swimming” almost everywhere. Some say surf was up to three meters high, which is quite scary.

We did not believe when TV said that beaches are closed and decided to check it out by ourselves. It has proven true – the waves were so high that well-know Narrabeen rock pool was more suitable for surfers than swimmers.

Just believe me, it looks tremendous right there.
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I already mentioned in one of my early posts that traveling in a car is probably the best way to travel at all as one in a car has a great freedom of altering the route and stopping everywhere she or he likes. For example, a few years ago we were crossing Finland from North to South and we had to stop at a petrol station in the middle of nowhere. We spent two hours at that place which turned to be a biggest bell museum I have ever seen (I will write about it eventually).
Of course, most of places like that are well-know and there is tons of information about the in Internet or, at least, in tourists booklets and it is possible to find them all when planning the trip, classify them, draw a route and make a schedule. But this just would not work – as I already mentioned, schedule and a good holiday cannot go together. In any case, it is not possible to plan everything.

And this is what happened to us in Mogo. We were just overwhelmed by its exciting zoo and it seemed there was nothing similarly exciting. Well, there was another surprise. They have got the Museum there!

Hopefully, it is not an inquisition museum. This is Gold Rush Theme Park, or Old Mogo Town

Read more about symptoms and treatment of the disease…