Softwaremaker

Hi-Def AVCHD Video Format Processing for mere mortals ...

2008-06-13T04:13:25Z

I had recently purchased a Canon Hi-Def Flash Camcorder HF100 at wholesale price (please dont ask me how much and where I got it from). There was a long thought process before this high-end purchase. I knew I wanted a camcorder to record in Hi-Def (HD) format. The question I had was the recorded video format. I did some research and poking around and there were some pros and cons that I was seriously considering such as:

What is the recording storage medium ?
What is the recording format ? If answer to [1] was a DV Tape or sort, then the answer would probably be HDV/MPEG-2 format.
Do I have enought processing power / software infrastructure to deal with the answer to [2] ?

In the end, I decided that I would not want to do the route of using a DV Tape. Tape is proven, tested, good, mature and cheap but has its limitations. The fact that it is a sequential access medium puts me off. Even newER backup solutions of today seems to provide disk storage, whose prices have dropped in recent years, as an alternative to tape. Usually, the restoration granularity and the time it takes to restore is the deciding factor for customers to champion disk over tape. Moreover, if I record on tape and then later edit on disk, it does somehow seem that I am going backwards.

So, instead of carrying bulkIER tapes around with me (and I do a lot of random recording), not forgetting that the housing for these tapes in the camcorders itself does take up some bulk and effectively limits the handling of the camera at hand, I dumped the idea of either the Canon HV20 or HV30. Mind you - their dual recording format in a choice of either Standard-Definition (SD)or HD is really attractive but I doubt that I would want to record in SD in a couple of years down the road where computing power, screens, bandwidth are all commodities.

That left me with Question [3] above. What does it take to process/edit those videos ? From searches of many forums and reviews, a lot of people buy a AVCHD Camcorder (such as the Canon HF100) without realizing that they dont have the infrastructure to process and edit the recorded HD clips. I guess a lot of peple dont realize that there is not much choice of video-editing software that can process a AVCHD video clip today. So. what most of them did was

Pay X Dollar for the camcorder and then 2X Dollar for a brand new Mac - Holy Smokes. Since when does money grow on trees ?
Pay a couple of hundred dollars more to buy a decent video editing software such as the Pinnacle Studio or the Sony Vegas

I didnt like both options. First or all, I edit video clips - Yes - but I dont consider myself to be a "pro-consumer" of sorts that would want to fork out much money just to have 3000 over video transitions up my sleeve ... and ... I am not a MAC fan. Yes, I admit. Crucify me. I am just not genetically engineered to use a MAC or any of Apples' products. Yes, I love my ZUNE and its marketplace very much. Thank you.

Therefore, I had to look for an intermediate solution since my old, trusted and most FREE Windows Movie Maker and Media Player cannot handle AVCHD video files natively and I am not willing to fork out anything more than SGD100.00

Luckily, my prayers are answered and my search leads me to media\video developer ShedWorx who has the VoltaicHD for both the PC and the MAC. Bascially, VoltaicHD transforms your AVCHD High-Def video clips to WMV-HD, which both Windows Media Player and Microsoft Movie Maker can handle. FAQ here. This little known shareware (just USD30.00) has gotten some great independent reviews so I went for a trial, downloaded a sample AVCHD .MTS file and it worked like a charm.

[Note to ShedWorx]: Now if you could make a command-prompt version of your awesome tool, that would be a great addition as it would complete a workflow scenario of an "unattended" conversion process of the captured AVCHD .MTS files to WMV-HD.

With that, I bought it and went broke but GOSH - what a camcorder !!! Its light, intuitive, great handling and churn out great looking HD video clips. I guess the reviews out there in the wild will do it better justice than me writing about it here.

Yes, the computing power and storage resources are high. At the best quality mode, the HF100 records at 17Mbps and my usual mode would be to record at a compromised (between storage and battery power) bitrate of 7Mbps. Even with a decent Core2 Duo Processor T7200 2.0 GHZ (highly-rated) Merom chip and 2Gs of RAM that I have, editing a WMV-HD 7Mbps video clip does require some patience. And the file recordings are huge - as a rough gauge - AVCHD are abt 120Mb (15MB) /min of footage and becomes 500Mb (wmv) after decompression !!!

Luckily, I delegated the conversion of AVCHD -> WMV-HD files to one of my servers, running a Dual Core XEON Pro 5140 2.33GHZ 4MB L2 cache 1333MHz FSB - Woodcrest Chip and this was much faster, comparatively. In any case, this can be done unattended, and this would also give me a good excuse to plug in another same processor on this 2-way box in the near future. i-wink.

All in all, this is a great buy at near-wholesale price and I already had quite a lot of fun doing roving and recording real 1080p high-definition videos and enjoying the processed WMV-HD clips on my wide-screen LCD monitor, my HDTV as well as my Rapsody N35 media center (which plays WMV-HD High-Definition videos).

Below is a "short" clip I took with the above Canon HF100, with the sarcastic emphasis on "short". I took this 50-second clip in full 1080/9Mbps HD glory. Uncompressed file size is 210MB. In order to "dumb" it down so that it can squeeze and play better over the HTTP ravine, I had to re-encode it to a smaller scale/Mbps at 856x480/3Mbps. Even then, this same 50-second 856x480/3Mbps clip's file size is still at a large 19MB !!! If you blow up the player to your full-screen, you can see that it maintains a clear and good quality at full-screen even at 3Mbps. Mind you, the source look great on my local playback at 1080/9Mbps/25fps.

var qs = new Querystring(); //alert(qs.get("vidfile")); var cnt = document.getElementById("130bb010-294a-4382-94e3-e2cc9d89d140"); var src = 'http://www.softwaremaker.net/jwslplayer/wmvplayer.xaml'; var cfg = { file:'http://j2ci5a.bay.livefilestore.com/y1pMMNQE7uqg8YP9kQaCzN7qdfHRagU0B3zJgUKGeQitDEkwkxjxcFIZTiQo4gokXkaAWMk4ys2W0Spm3ma_YPJlA/CanonH100InOutTest1080_480HD_140608.wmv?download', image:'http://www.softwaremaker.net/jwslplayer/Silverlight.jpg', height:'220', width:'400', autostart:'false' }; var ply = new jeroenwijering.Player(cnt,src,cfg);

Windows Cardspace Breach ? I think NOT

2008-05-31T08:45:51Z

I was recently pointed to this post that highlights a "successful attempt" by some students in Germany to crack _Infocards_.After reading through the post several times, I became convinced that it is NOT what it seems it is and that if the "breach" is what it says it is, there must be some pre-conditions that must be satisfied before it can happen and these criteria are not going to be easy...

Just as I was putting some of my thoughts down that relates to why I think the attempt is somehow "inappropriately glorified":

If an end-user would be stupid enough to put and store his/her passwords, credit card information on his PC
There must be some sort of DNS compromise on the end-user side, which also means successfully hacking into his/her router
There must be some sort of Digital Certificate Store compromise on the end-user side, which also means successfully hacking into his machine with highly-elevated priviledges or saying, the user's machine password has been stolen

Points [2] and [3] relates to the statements from the attempt and I quote from the above post:

To reproduce the demonstration, you should change your own DNS settings and install an untrusted certificate

If I can do both those points sucessfully, to be honest, I already have control over what the user does on his machine, stealing his Infocard is probably of low priority at that point in time.

Then, the brains behind Cardspace, Kim Cameron, himself, wrote a comprehensive reply, which basically was a detailed answer to my brief thoughts above, to counter the students' attempt and should really put any doubts in anyone's mind to rest.

[Added 02 June 2008]: In this video on his blog, Kim demonstrates how YOU, the end-user, must FIRST POISON your own machine first before the attack can happen: http://www.identityblog.com/wp-content/images/2008/05/Students/Students.html

Some comments standout and I quote:

The demonstrator shows that if you are willing to compromise enough parts of your system using elevated access, you can render your system attackable. This aspect of the students’ attack is not noteworthy.

There is, however, one interesting aspect to their attack. It doesn’t concern CardSpace, but rather the way intermittent web site behavior can be combined with DNS to confuse the browser. The student’s paper proposes implementing a stronger “Same Origin Policy” to deal with this (and other) possible attacks. I wish they had concentrated on this positive contribution rather than making claims that require suspension of disbelief.

However, the students propose equipping browsers with end user certificates so the browsers would be authenticated, rather than the sites they are visiting. This represents a significant privacy problem in that a single tracking key would be used at all the sites the user visits. It also doesn’t solve the problem of knowning whether I am at a “good” site or not. The problem here is that if duped, I might provide an illegitimate site with information which seriously damages me.

While I know the ignorant media will find some ways to sensationalize this unworthy episode, especially when Microsoft is such a big target, this brings to mind a popular joke which I think can be used as an anology:

Q: How do you make 1 million dollars ?
A: Start with 2.

Too many books - too little time and space

2008-04-29T11:08:53Z

Gosh, I think I am in desparate need for some new empty bookshelves ...

<-- Click this pic to see a higher resolution for even more details.

...and you havent even seen my other bookshelves containing my other interest, which I wont share for now ...

Windows Workflow Foundation: MultiThreaded Parallelism

2008-02-25T08:44:37Z

I remember back in 2005/2006 when I was still touring the APAC circuits such as Sydney (Australia) and Kuala Lumpur (Malaysia) doing training and consulting gigs for customers, partners about _WF_ and _WCF_ and some of the initial Windows Workflow questions came up regarding the use of Parallel Activities. It came as a surprise to many people that parallel activities are not independently asynchronous.

I explained that a WF instance gets only one instance from the runtime. There are reasons for this single-threaded execution model so each activity have to work with this single thread efficiently. There are ways to spin off differents thread when real parallelism activities are reqquired but because documentation was scare at that time, I had some trouble articulating how to do so.

I just read "Multithreaded Parallelism in Windows Workflow Foundation" on MSDN and while it is a definite deep technical article, if you can grok it, you will understand how "MultiThreaded Parallelism" can be done in WF using both the (rather hard-to-use) "Call External Method Activity (CEMA)" and the "Handle External Event Activity (HEMA)". Not only that, the authors (whom actually implemented such a system for their own use) also shared how to pair those 2 activities up using correlation and how to create wrappers aoround them so that it can be reused and therefore "not require talented software developer use of call-external-method and handle-external-event activities along with the CLR thread-pool"

A gem of a read.

BizTalk 2006: BizTalk Server Operations Guide is available live

2008-02-16T22:25:50Z

If you make your living installing, deploying, managing and operating _BizTalk_ 2006. I guarantee that you will be excited and be thankful for the availability of the BizTalk Server Operations Guide. So, what's in it ?

Guidance based on real-world experience. The idea for the guide originated with Microsoft field representatives, partner organizations, and customers who plan, deploy, and maintain BizTalk Server installations. This group of IT professionals has accumulated extensive hands-on experience with a diverse range of BizTalk solutions. As they gained experience they created checklists, best practices, and presentations to guide future BizTalk Server operations. We collected and organized this information to create the guide.
Key portions of this guide are new; however, a considerable portion consists of documentation taken from BizTalk Server 2006 R2 Help, white papers, Knowledge Base articles, and other sources. It has been carefully reviewed and vetted by experts from the community of BizTalk Server IT professionals and members of the product development team, whom we gratefully acknowledge at the end of this topic. We believe that the information presented here will help BizTalk Server users solve, and above all, avoid many of the common problems that can occur while deploying and maintaining a BizTalk Server installation.

Enjoy.

The BizTalk Server Operations guide is now available for download in DOCX, CHM, and PDF file formats.

I am a fan of monster lice

2008-01-20T12:14:53Z

There are not too many movies that will get me rushing onto the web once I get home to find our more about it and the various viral marketing and spins behind it. Blair Witch project was one. This one, which I just caught, is another. Spoilers here.

I am not worthy, JJ Abrams

The movie's creepy monster louse is especially my favourite.

Do not ignore the correctness of casings in measurements

2008-01-10T14:13:01Z

So...Let me start off this New Year 2008 with a rant post.

I am constantly amazed at the technical knowledge of some of the folks manning the shops selling computer peripherals. I was in the market shopping for an external casing for my SATAII HDD and someone recommended for me to use an USB2.0 external interface because, as he simply puts it confidently and points to the marketing material on the box, "it is faster"

I have to correct him that the theoretical speed of USB of 480Mb/s is not faster than the theoretical speed of SATAII, which is pegged at 300MB/s. The astute reader will notice the difference in casings.

A quick glance at this article will show the usual naming and differering configurations and the huge difference between a Byte and a bit.

To do some simple calculations - The max burst transfer rate of SATAII is 3 billion bits per second, which is equivalent 3 Gb/s, via normal conventions not definitions. This is equivalent to 300 million Bytes per second, or 300 MB/s. Some sites like this states 300Mb/s, which actually means we are moving backwards in technology. Worst, some people state it as 300 GB/s, which means I can transfer the equivalent data of 31 DVDs in 1 single second and overstating it by about 1000 times faster than it really is.

The same applies for USB2.0. Many technical sales people I talked to told me its 480MB/s and I have seen the same marketing collateral on the packaged boxes it comes in. In actual fact, it is 60MB/s.

Now, if you compare apples to apples - it is a no-brainer to compare 300MB/s against 60MB/s, isnt it ? Of course, the arguments will always begin when people start arguing whether is it really a 5 time performance difference, taking into account the costs of USB's overheads and the cache memory that some of the higher-end SATAII HDD offers.

Well, lets just leave those arguments in those other blogs and forum posts for now.

Speaking in the Singapore .NET Usergroup December Meeting

2007-12-02T22:39:03Z

It has been a long time since I spoke in a usergroup meeting. This time, I will replicate what I did in Microsoft TechED Asia 2007 in KL in the Dec 2007 SgDotNet Usergroup meeting.

Languages, Frameworks and Architectures
New language solution frameworks are emerging to make solution development less cumbersome. For example, AJAX for building rich, interactive, internet applications, SCA for composing components into services, Ruby-on-Rails for building web applications, and Blinq for generating ASP.NET websites based on a database schema. This session will look at how these languages are evolving to include architectural constructs and where that evolution will go.

If you are free, do come drop by with an open mind, dont take any notes and get ready to interact.

Differences between the Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) Line-Of-Business (LOB) Adapter Pack and the BizTalk Adapter Framework

2007-11-15T14:04:07Z

With the impending release of the _BizTalk_ Adapter Pack (Beta 2 available here), there are some confusions as to the differences between the BizTalk Adapter Pack, Microsoft's WCF Line of Business (LOB) Adapter SDK, and of course, the (older) BizTalk Adapter Framework.

In a nutshell, the BizTalk Adapter Pack is written and developed on top of the WCF LOB Adapter SDK (which is free and freely downloadable). The value-add is that the LOBs that it can integrate with ootb are SAP (mySAP Business Suite), ORACLE (Oracle Database) and SIEBEL (Siebel eBusiness Applications). Of course, a lot of grunt work is taken away from you, as explained here.

One of the confusing part is the play of the words "BizTalk" in the product name. As I have explained above, built on the WCF LOB Adapter SDK, these adapters are host agnostic i.e. they are not tied to a specific product like BizTalk. You can use it with BizTalk 2006 R2 specifically (The WCF LOB adapters cannot be used in BizTalk Server versions prior to BizTalk Server 2006 R2) but you can use it outside of BizTalk as well (some configuration work required, such as the Add Adapter Reference plug-in, etc) but this also means you do not have to buy BizTalk for it, if you dont have to.

This SDK is based on _WCF_, and it surfaces an adapter to an LOB system as a WCF binding. For an adapter consumer, the adapter can be accessed like a typical WCF service; the consumer does not have to learn a new programming model. The same adapter developed can be reused in multiple .NET applications including custom .NET applications, Microsoft® BizTalk® Server 2006 R2, Microsoft Office SharePoint® Server 2007 SP1, and Microsoft SQL Server™ Integration Services (SSIS) through adapter development provided. In addition, the adapter provides metadata browse, search, and retrieval functionality for the adapter consumer to selectively generate WCF contracts that reflect live type modeling of the LOB system.

Confusions from customers and partners alike usually stem from the the primary differences between WCF LOB Adapter SDK and the BizTalk Adapter Framework. I will hereby summarized it in the following table:

Feature	WCF LOB Adapter SDK	BizTalk Server Adapter Framework
API	.NET 3.0 Assembly, provides help classes for metadata processing, connection management, and messaging	COM, provides basic support for adapter operations.
Adapter exposure	Exposed as WCF binding; available to any application that can consume a WCF binding including BizTalk Server 2006 R2 (using the WCF adapter)	Exposed only to BizTalk Server; not reusable by other applications.
Tools	Adapter Code Generation Wizard, metadata browser for Visual Studio 2005	n/a
Extensibility	Yes (as WCF channel extension)	No

If you are knee-deep into writing, shipping and selling adapters for BizTalk, I strongly urge you to visit the Adapters' Team Blog here.

Threading and Throttling differences between WCF and ASMX

2007-10-12T22:40:28Z

I know I havent been posting deep technical stuff that I used to do. Contrary to what people think my current role entails, keeping abreast of the technology landscape is what I am supposed to do and what I enjoy and so when colleagues joked with me when was the last time I booted up Visual Studio, for example, I enjoyed seeing their shocked faces when I told them: "oh - just last night. why you asked ?" i-wink.

I dont dwell deep like I used to but I still code up decent projects which I implement within my own developmental testing environment (yes, I have one running latest versions of Active Directory, SharePoint, Exchange and all the other goodies), driving the houshold crazy when I think of new and different ways to document expenses, publish a Book or CD library, home automation projects using all sorts of different technologies (yes, that includes Ruby-on-Rails) or in my new Windows Mobile 6 Device. Of course, I admit I dont post topics deep like I used to. It is not so much the content but more so, the limiting factor of time.

Recently, I was involved in some internal technical discussions with regards to the issue of scale comparisions between _WCF_ and ASMX. Below are some discussions:

If you have a web service that is going to be IO bound, you would definitely want it to be scalable and almost every resource in the world tells you to implement ASP.NET asynchronous pattern (BeginSomething/EndSomething, etc) on it so to go easy on the thread pool. ASP.NET uses an IAsyncHttpHandler to handle the request, which means the worker threads are not blocked while the IO-bound operation executes somewhere else. Sounds good so far.

If you make a WCF version of it with webHttpBinding (which actually means you can invoked it AJAX-style) following the same async pattern for the methods, you may find that each invocation of the WCF service eats up two threads – one for its ASP.NET HttpModule.ProcessRequest and the other for the actual IO. Ouch! You may think that this means your WCF implementation may end up eating all threads reserved for ASP.NET, which would indeed scale down the server

Is this true OR are we missing the complete picture ?

While the scenarios explained above are reasonable observations, it doesnt paint the complete picture. WCF does perform better scalability than ASMX.

Threading:
For ASMX, when a request comes in, it would be queued up immediately for async ASMX. So the thread is released for that request and a new thread will pick up the work item later.

For WCF, when a request comes in, we queue it up in WCF and let an IO thread handle the request. At the same time, the request thread-pool thread is held to wait for the request to complete.

Yes, WCF uses more threads than async ASMX. But there is a reason for this. Using asynchronous ASMX is dangerous and not really a good practice (and I have hinted at this many times in the many Web Service/ASMX presentations I have done over the past few years). While it does well at what it is supposed to do, it does trick the developer into a "false sense of security". Essentially, if you dont know how the ASP.NET blackbox works, you may find yourself thrown against the car wall when you take a hidden, unsuspecting corner at high speeds. It does not provide enough throttling for client loads. Basically the server takes all items and queue them up for later processing. The server does not have a good throttling mechanism to control the number of work items. To everyone else, it seems that the server is quite friendly to all clients. However, if the number of clients is unbounded, this is really bad. First of all, the server working set would grow unlimited due to unlimited requests queued up. Secondly, many client requests would become obsolete when it’s picked up by the server from the queue. The latter accounts for a a good set of problematic scenarios I have come across in my past consulting gigs with regards to high-load and high-transactional ASMX asynchronous implementations before I joined the borg.

Think of it as a side of the brain (that tells you that you are about to be full) not functioning properly when you sit down at a buffet table. You eat and eat and eat without knowning when to stop and then your ingestion/digestion system starts kicking in, you actually hit the wall. Hard. Literally.

Server Throughput
When you measure scalability, the most important measurement is the server throughput. That is, how many requests the server can handle per time unit? For async ASMX, it would be pretty fast at the initial phase. However, like the ingestion/digestion analogy I was referring to above - Once the server is in a steady phase (as when CPU is fully loaded), the throughput will go down because the server capacity has reached. You can compare the data between async ASMX and sync ASMX over the long run to see what I mean.

Also you would see higher memory usage of the async approach.

ASP.NET Throttling
That said, ASP.NET does have a throttling mechanism that is used for sync ASMX, which is the threadpool thread limit. The number of threads used to handle requests are bounded (http://support.microsoft.com/kb/821268). WCF uses this fact to throttle incoming requests. You can always change the configuration settings to increase number of threads to be used to allow more work items to be queued up.

The max number of threads follows the following formula:
MaxWorkerThreads x #CPU – MinFreeThreads
This is 12 by default on a single-proc machine.

Two-level Throttling for WCF
WCF leverages the ASP.NET threadpool throttling to throttle client requests. At the same time, WCF has its own item queue throttling. The former is throttled by the setting mentioned in the immediate above point, while the latter is controlled by WCF throttling settings (maxConcurrentCalls etc). ASP.NET can automatically adjust threads based on CPU loads so that you would always get full load of the server.

In this way, you may experience client failures because the requests are rejected at ASP.NET layer beforehand. So you can increase the ASP.NET throttling to get better experience. But eventually you would still be bounded by the physical server capacity, no matter whether you use async ASMX, sync ASMX, or WCF as mentioned above.

There is improvement work done in .NET 3.0 SP1 and of course, .NET 3.5 (beta 2 here), with the use of prioritized item queues. Do expect even-better WCF performance even in some of the common scenarios. Fine tuning minWorkerThreads will even give us even better results.

Thanks to Wenlong for helping out with the guidance and explanation. The complete scenario and the design principles for it will be published in greater detail in a MSDN whitepaper later. Do watch out for it.

Please sell us solutions, SingNet

2007-10-11T16:37:24Z

I have been a SingTel and SingNet customer for the longest time and do recommend friends and family over sometimes. While I have no complains about the service, I do have questions about some of their front-line staff operations and capabilities.

Another incident struck today.

I decided to sign up for the ADSL upgrade package from the current 3500kbps to the ADSL2 6000kbps after my contract is up for renewal. On the day of service activation, things just weren't going well. To cut a long story short, the downtime and service disruption was almost 3/4 of the day (which meant no www and email access == no work gets done) and my router power-supply cable failed today for some reason (due to age, I believe) and luckily, I had an old power-supply cable lying around which was put to good use. When the ADSL2 modem arrived late, I hooked it up, expecting a simple plug-n-play.

I was wrong.

The SingNet technical service staff was at a loss to help me. The only thing they could do was tell me that I could hook up my single machine (I have 8 at home) to the modem directly and things work fine. That is not a solution. Solve my problem, SingTel. Dont you know how many people in Singapore uses a Router to share broadband bandwidth amongst the household. If ADSL bandwidth was made for 1 machine and 1 user, we dont need anything more than 256mbps. Their technical staff did 1 step further and said they supported only 2 brands of routers with their modems. Fine - given that there are hundreds of models of routers anyways. I qualify myself as a technical person and asked if I could have the settings of those "supported" routers so I know how to tweak and configure mine to work with the new modem.

Me: "Could I have those config settings of those routers so I can see how I can configure mine"
SingNet: "Err...We support 2 brands X and Y of routers but I am sorry, the settings are NOT in my knowledge base so I cannot help you there..."
Me: "OK. What else can I do ? If it doesnt work with my router, I cannot surf so tell me what I am paying for again ?"
SingNet: "I am sorry, Sir but those are the only 2 brands of integrated Router-modem we support"
Me: "Huh ? Integrated Router-modem ? Are you asking me to throw away my VPN Firewall router so I can use your modem ? Duh !"

So, we have this pipe of 6mpbs of bandwidth flowing through, we share. It makes sense and is cost-effective. So, while looking at the PO of the delivered modem, I saw the vendor who actually was being subcontracted by SingTel to sell those modems so I decided to give them a call and it was great that their support-line was open till 2100 hours. This would have never happened in the Australia, US or Canada. i-smile

It turns out that SingNet has only subcontracted to bundle their modems with their ADSL service offerings and the modem they are bundling is actually a router-modem !!! which explains why it cannot work with my current router as both services and DHCP will clash. To cut another long story short, I had to do some research, together with this vendor, to see how we can disable the router function and use this modem mainly as a bridge. There is no user iterface. Guess what I have to do ?

I have to telnet into the device with the proper credentials and command-lined these:

_{Administrator}=>ppp relay
{Administrator}[ppp relay]=>flush
{Administrator}[ppp relay]=>..
{Administrator}[ppp]=>flush
{Administrator}[ppp]=>:eth
{Administrator}[eth]=>flush
{Administrator}[eth]=>:atm
{Administrator}[atm]=>flush
{Administrator}[atm]=>phonebook
{Administrator}[atm phonebook]=>flush
{Administrator}[atm phonebook]=>add
name = pvcInternet
addr = 0.100
:atm phonebook add name=pvcInternet addr=0*100
{Administrator}[atm phonebook]=>..
{Administrator}[atm]=>ifadd
intf = atmInternet
:atm ifadd intf=atmInternet
{Administrator}[atm]=>ifconfig
intf = atmInternet
[dest] = pvcInternet
[qos] = default
[encaps] = llc
[retry] = 10
[fcs] = disabled
[ulp] = mac
:atm ifconfig intf=atmInternet dest=pvcInternet ulp=mac
{Administrator}[atm]=>ifattach
intf = atmInternet
:atm ifattach intf=atmInternet
{Administrator}[atm]=>..
{Administrator}=>eth bridge
{Administrator}[eth bridge]=>ifadd
intf = snbbridge
:eth bridge ifadd intf=snbbridge
{Administrator}[eth bridge]=>ifconfig
intf = snbbridge
[dest] = atmInternet
[portstate] = forwarding
[retry] = 10
[vlan] = default
[prioconfig] = disabled
[ipprec] = disabled
[priority] = 0
[regenprio] = 01234567
[ingressfiltering] = disabled
[acceptvlanonly] = disabled
[mcastfilter] = disabled
[dynvlan] = disabled
[igmpsnooping] = enabled
:eth bridge ifconfig intf=snbbridge dest=atmInternet
{Administrator}[eth bridge]=>ifattach
intf = snbbridge
:eth bridge ifattach intf=snbbridge
{Administrator}[eth bridge]=>saveall
{Administrator}[eth bridge]=>:
{Administrator}=>dhcp server config state=disabled
{Administrator}=>saveall
{Administrator}=>exit

After this exit, this particular router-modem functions as a bridge mode and I was able to post this blog.

WTF ?!?!?!?! Are they expecting home-users and lay-men to be typing these commands into a UNIX firmware ? I consider myself to be fairly technical and yet I barfed at the idea of doing this. Goodbye Civilization, Hello Stone Age ...

... which brings me to my main point ...

I bought into an upgrade path. My old modem was A modem, nothing more, nothing less. I used a router to connect to it. An upgrade path should be seamless. But SingNet decided to have a field day with me ...

Their technical service staff have no idea it is a router modem. They kept using the term "Modem" only so I had to run around in circles figuring out why it doesnt work in the first place
It gave me a router modem, with no user interface and documentation on how to use it, much less how to enable it to switch to a bridging mode. Obviously, an upgrade path is given to customers who have been on a certain older plan for x amount of time and obviously had their way of doing things. To share a ADSL connection, most people (if not all) use a router. By introducing a router modem into the picture, SingNet is forcing customers to throw their old router away. People like me have VPN rules, Firewall rules, Port Forwarding rules in this router and if it functions as a wireless access point as well, absolutely NO ONE would throw it away.

That is not a solution. Solve my problem, SingTel. Give customers options, SingNet. Follow the lead of UOB. A customer like me, and I am sure there MUST be hundreds of me in Singapore, at least, who were on the older plan for an x amount of time uses a current router. Then give me a pure modem, please. Give what you gave me today to those people who are looking for a router modem. Have choices. Choices are good. No choices are bad.

To make things worse, after I got it all set up, I ran multiple FTP test plus the famous SpeedTest and found my speed to be about an average of 2900kpbs. This is only a fraction of my promised 6000kbps and even worse than my older 3500kpbs plan. If this doesnt get fixed in time, I will make sure everyone in Singapore hears about this though formal and informal complaints through chat rooms / forums and the press

Gosh - when are our service providers ever going to get it right ?

Speaking in our Singapore Government Public Sector Day - 22nd Oct 2007

2007-10-02T08:13:20Z

This is targetted at our Singapore Government Public Sector customers and obviously this blog post is targetted at those customers who are reading this post. i-smile.

I will be speaking at the above event, which will be held at our office premises. As to the topic I am speaking about, this area is something which I have been focusing of late and it really is all about architecture and the alignment of it through businesss and information technology.

Aligning Business and IT for Greater Corporate Agility
For long, IT and Business has communicated. While they may be speaking in the same language but are they speaking in the same "dialect”? In this session, William Tay will share his field experience as well as explore Microsoft's vision for service-oriented architecture:

What are the best implementation approaches so that instead of being led by the business, IT strategies are driven by business needs
How Microsoft supports this vision by way of an integrated platform, etc.

If you are coming for my session at the Enterprise Architecture Summit 2007 (18th Oct 2007), which coincidentally, is also targetted at the Public Sector customers (regionally, of course), the above event on the 22nd Oct 2007 will be a good sequel to my Enterprise Architecture Summit pitch where I will be discussing in greater details on the value of the Microsoft platform to implement those business capabilities.

Does what happens in Facebook stay in Facebook

2007-09-27T03:00:47Z

My friend, Chester, shared this link with me. I am fully aware of Facebook's privacy policies and I think that it leaves much more to be desired. This is precisely the reason why I dont share much in Facebook or dont put up incriminating pictures of myself up there.

I wonder how many of the millions of people in Facebook knows about this. Come to think of it, who wouldnt do so. I would assume that the Googles, Amazons, LinkedIns would love to have that kind of leverage and power, wouldnt they ?

How to hack around the .svc curse

2007-08-25T06:06:02Z

It was not so long ago when I made my intentions known that the .svc extension in _WCF_ is really a clutz. It is obstrusive and really unnatural, especially when it comes to RESTful Web Services.

In a closed door meeting with the product group folks back in 2005, before WCF rolled out and way before I joined the borg, I was told that this is a issue not with WCF itself, but by its web host - Microsoft Internet Information Server (IIS)

There are some attempts to hack around it but one of the best I have seen is to do URL Re-Writing: Off Jon Flanders here. You can see from the bottom of his post via Christian Weyer that this still will not work with IIS6 (damned legacies) but this will give you a good excuse to move to a Better, Leaner and Meaner IIS7, which is a complete rewrite of its predecessor. About time, I say.