index.json

[
{
	"uri": "https://blog.uitlanders.com/",
	"title": "Learn by doing!",
	"tags": [],
	"categories": [],
	"series": [],
	"description": "",
	"content": ""
},
{
	"uri": "https://blog.uitlanders.com/posts/",
	"title": "Posts",
	"tags": [],
	"categories": [],
	"series": [],
	"description": "",
	"content": ""
},
{
	"uri": "https://blog.uitlanders.com/posts/2020-02-02-try-hugo/",
	"title": "Try Hugo!",
	"tags": [],
	"categories": [],
	"series": [],
	"description": "",
	"content": "It\u0026rsquo;s been a while (and another child) since my last post. The couple of times I went to post something I seemed to run into problems with running jekyll (previous blog site generator) on my local PC.\nI\u0026rsquo;ve been using Hugo / docdock at work for documentation generation and decided to make the switch on the blog as well. Haven\u0026rsquo;t had anywhere near the same number of issues/quirks and installation just requires a single binary (or choco install hugo-extended in reality).\n"
},
{
	"uri": "https://blog.uitlanders.com/contact/",
	"title": "Contact",
	"tags": [],
	"categories": [],
	"series": [],
	"description": "Contact page",
	"content": "Contact via email below (or possibly twitter if notifications are working).\n Your email:    Your message:   Send "
},
{
	"uri": "https://blog.uitlanders.com/posts/2017-11-25-app-store-not-friends-with-ipv6/",
	"title": "App store not friends with IPv6",
	"tags": [],
	"categories": [],
	"series": [],
	"description": "",
	"content": "I recently had some issues trying to download a game Shadows Of War from the Microsoft Store. Despite a number of google searches including reddit threads, official forums etc, there didn\u0026rsquo;t seem to be any recommended solution/s (Some places suggested re-installing windows but I wasn\u0026rsquo;t quite up for that).\nI tried looking into task manager and then resource monitor and noticed that store application was making some IPv6 connections but no data was being transferred. I disabled IPv6 and downloading started flawlessly.\nThis may have just been co-incidence but maybe this post can help someone.\n Windows 10 / Version 1709 / OS Build 16299.19 *  "
},
{
	"uri": "https://blog.uitlanders.com/posts/2017-06-26-normal-programming-resumed/",
	"title": "Normal programming resumes...",
	"tags": [],
	"categories": [],
	"series": [],
	"description": "",
	"content": "Normal programming\u0026hellip; Despite my best intentions I haven\u0026rsquo;t posted recently. What I did do was test the \u0026lsquo;Reset this PC\u0026rsquo; functionality built into windows 10.\nI used to re-install windows as a matter of course every six months or so but haven\u0026rsquo;t done so since free time became so limited. I started\nto have issues with my browser (and http traffic in general) where it would just stop working. SSH and other TCP services were fine.\nI removed anti-virus/firewalls and still nothing.\nSo the \u0026lsquo;Reset this PC\u0026rsquo; function in windows 10 works well. What I didn\u0026rsquo;t count on was the fact that I\u0026rsquo;d installed/tweaked things for quite\na while getting Jekyll to play nice on windows. In the end I decided to try the new Bash on Ubuntu (on Windows). There still\nended up being a couple of quirks with Jekyll (even when following the most recent docs).\nzlib required! zlib is missing; necessary for building libxml2 Solved that error with : apt-get install zlib1g-dev\nVersion hell (just not the DLL kind) I ended up with incompatible versions of the various libaries required to run/jekyll after attempting bundle update\nThe solution that worked for me was to follow the github-pages info here. Which seemed like a good idea since it\u0026rsquo;s hosted on\ngithub-pages anyway.\nAfter adding this to the Gemfile everything mostly worked:\nsource 'https://rubygems.org' require 'json' require 'open-uri' versions = JSON.parse(open('https://pages.github.com/versions.json').read) gem 'github-pages', versions['github-pages'] Last error /var/lib/gems/2.3.0/gems/bundler-1.15.1/lib/bundler/runtime.rb:317:in `check_for_activated_spec!': You have already activated liquid 4.0.0, but your Gemfile requires liquid 3.0.6. Prepending `bundle exec` to your command may solve this. (Gem::LoadError) from /var/lib/gems/2.3.0/gems/bundler-1.15.1/lib/bundler/runtime.rb:32:in `block in setup' from /usr/lib/ruby/2.3.0/forwardable.rb:204:in `each' from /usr/lib/ruby/2.3.0/forwardable.rb:204:in `each' from /var/lib/gems/2.3.0/gems/bundler-1.15.1/lib/bundler/runtime.rb:27:in `map' from /var/lib/gems/2.3.0/gems/bundler-1.15.1/lib/bundler/runtime.rb:27:in `setup' from /var/lib/gems/2.3.0/gems/bundler-1.15.1/lib/bundler.rb:101:in `setup' from /var/lib/gems/2.3.0/gems/jekyll-3.5.0/lib/jekyll/plugin_manager.rb:48:in `require_from_bundler' from /var/lib/gems/2.3.0/gems/jekyll-3.5.0/exe/jekyll:9:in `\u0026lt;top (required)\u0026gt;' from /usr/local/bin/jekyll:22:in `load' from /usr/local/bin/jekyll:22:in `\u0026lt;main\u0026gt;' Points it out right in the console. Solution is to run using:\nbundle exec jekyll s Next steps Dealing with these setup quirks kept me busy but since I understand next to no ruby/liquid if I run into other problems I may try something else\nto publish this. There\u0026rsquo;s a dotnet static site generator Wyam that may be slightly easier to rip apart and work with.\nJekyll has been interesting and allowed publishing for near zero cost but there seem to be a few ways of chaining together services like\nAppVeyour+Github to do the same thing.\n"
},
{
	"uri": "https://blog.uitlanders.com/tags/octopus/",
	"title": "octopus",
	"tags": [],
	"categories": [],
	"series": [],
	"description": "",
	"content": ""
},
{
	"uri": "https://blog.uitlanders.com/posts/2017-05-02-restarting-tentacle/",
	"title": "Restarting Tentacle",
	"tags": ["octopus"],
	"categories": [],
	"series": [],
	"description": "",
	"content": "Short post this time. I was reviewing the newsletter for Ocotopus Deploy and came across an article on automatically restarting Octopus Tentacle services.\nI liked the idea but as part of my automate all the things preference at the moment I thought it should be possible to do this without getting an GUI involved. Fortunately this is easily possible. Start a console/cmd session with suitable Administrator rights and type the following:\nsc failure \u0026quot;OctopusDeploy Tentacle\u0026quot; reset=0 actions= restart/0/restart/0/restart/0  This happily set the first / second / subsequent failure actions.\nsc config \u0026quot;OctopusDeploy Tentacle\u0026quot; start= delayed-auto  To set the startup to \u0026lsquo;Automatic (Delayed Start)\u0026rsquo;\nHopefully this helps someone and/or makes me internet famous if it hits the Octopus Deploy newsletter! I might even check how hard it is to use the Ocotopus script console to run it.\nUpdate\nScript console worked well. Just used the following powershell to update a bunch of tentacles.\n1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10  #Enable automatic recovery of *Tentacle* services $TentaclesServices = Get-Service | Where-Object {$_.name -like \u0026#39;*Tentacle*\u0026#39;} foreach($Tentacle in $TentaclesServices) { Write-Host Update serivce options for : $Tentacle.Name Write-Host `tDelayed start... sc.exe config $Tentacle.Name start= delayed-auto Write-Host `tRecovery options... sc.exe failure $Tentacle.Name reset=0 actions= restart/0/restart/0/restart/0 Write-Host \u0026#39;Complete\u0026#39; }   "
},
{
	"uri": "https://blog.uitlanders.com/tags/",
	"title": "Tags",
	"tags": [],
	"categories": [],
	"series": [],
	"description": "",
	"content": ""
},
{
	"uri": "https://blog.uitlanders.com/posts/2016-09-05-you-have-chosen/",
	"title": "You have chosen...",
	"tags": [],
	"categories": [],
	"series": [],
	"description": "",
	"content": "It\u0026rsquo;s been an interesting year at work. I\u0026rsquo;ve been hard at work on creating a cloud based offering of our application. This wasn\u0026rsquo;t something on the roadmap as the application was a thick client built on .NET in WinForms. Recently cloud providers have been trying to ensure that they\u0026rsquo;re able to migrate any and all software and so we ended up investigating a Azure RemoteApp.\nRemoteApp allowed us to take an application built for LAN/WAN deployment and without needing to make huge changes provide a service with very low initial costs (no expensive servers, no windows licensing \u0026amp; no SQL licensing). Having a Mac OS X, iOS and Android applications proved very popular. The multiple options to accessing data (including the preview of the HTML5 client) was great and it\u0026rsquo;s quite incredible seeing an application originally written in .NET 1.1 (and slowly migrated through the years) suddenly accessible on an iPhone.\nBut sometimes good things must come to and end and Microsoft is shutting down RemoteApp. There aren\u0026rsquo;t many details available yet but hopefully the migration path proves easy to implement. The existing processes to manage template images/collections (and even configuring drive redirection) weren\u0026rsquo;t without issues, (I had to switch from powershell to web API to workaround some quirks) but were definitely simpler than configuring/managing a complete desktop services environment (and having to come up with session management/tracking/pricing)\nOn the plus side, I do feel like I\u0026rsquo;ve finally managed a right of passage.\nLINQ to SQL (dodged)\nSilverlight (dodged)\nAzure RemoteApp \u0026hellip;.\n"
},
{
	"uri": "https://blog.uitlanders.com/tags/conf/",
	"title": "conf",
	"tags": [],
	"categories": [],
	"series": [],
	"description": "",
	"content": ""
},
{
	"uri": "https://blog.uitlanders.com/posts/2016-01-06-ddd15/",
	"title": "DDD Brisbane 0x5",
	"tags": ["conf"],
	"categories": [],
	"series": [],
	"description": "",
	"content": "Another year another DDD. The 2015 event was great and lives up to the by developers for developers mantra. This year was just as relaxed and amusing as last year. Two sessions stood for me and I suspect I\u0026rsquo;ll investigate a bit further:\n Parsing Text: the Programming Superpower You Need at Your Fingertips ( Nicholas Blumhardt | [@nblumhardt][2] |  ) After reading the Aggregate Queries in Seq series of blog posts I was definitely intrigued to see how deep this session would go into the Sprache library. A great talk though there was only soo much that could be covered in the hour.\n Introduction to Akka.Net ( Jaime | [@jaimefebres][5] ) This talk mainly covered quite introductory concepts for Akka.Net which I\u0026rsquo;d already been exposed to after doing the bootcamp. He did then provide an awesome demonstration of using Akka.Net as a facade around an existing service/component to ensure thread-safe access. This wasn\u0026rsquo;t something I\u0026rsquo;d thought of before and could definitely be of benefit with some legacy code at work.\n Maybe if I get my act together I could put together/present a session myself for DDD Brisbane 0x6. "
},
{
	"uri": "https://blog.uitlanders.com/posts/2015-11-10-reading-listening/",
	"title": "Reading >> Listening",
	"tags": [],
	"categories": [],
	"series": [],
	"description": "",
	"content": "#Excuses\nI haven\u0026rsquo;t had nearly as much free time recently due to the feature creep of son 1.0\nTime well spent however I haven\u0026rsquo;t been spending much time doing which was my main goal for the year. I\u0026rsquo;ve kept up with the usual blogs and tech news ( and decided I should really find a way to make the crazy amount of cash required to purchase a Surface Book).\n#Doing\nFor quite a while I\u0026rsquo;ve been hoping to do some experiments/side projects exploring Akka.NET. There was an interview with one of the creators on Hansel Minutes 472. I don\u0026rsquo;t have headphones for the train (the one reliable block of free time I have) so I\u0026rsquo;ve been patiently waiting for the transcription to be made available. Six months patient even.\nThen fortuitously I managed to find a block of free time while at home. Yes I could have listened to the mp3 version. But instead what I did was think : How hard can it be to transcribe the audio myself so that next time there\u0026rsquo;s an awesome podcast without a transcription I have some kind of solution.\nAnd so was born: BingVoiceTranscription!\nA jury-rigged system comprising of Microsoft\u0026rsquo;s Azure Bing Speech Recognition and NAudio. No GUI (or even console input yet), just a simple program using XUnit tests to execute/drive it.\nNAudio is used to convert the mp3 -\u0026gt; wav. It\u0026rsquo;s also used to split the wav data into 10 second chunks (the maximum allowed by Bing Voice).\nThe chunks of wav audio are then passed to the Bing webservice with the returned text being concatenated together.\nThe output is an impressive wall of text:\n Hey rock at a time for Ndc Oslos again June 15th through 19th in Oslo Norway Richard and I will be there of course.As well as all your favourite speakers world class stuff your folks in DC -oslo.com will see youthere.net rocks app.Srod 1134 with guest Erin Spattered recorded Friday April 10th 2015.Banner off Hey Richard Buddy are you doing I\u0026rsquo;m you know hanging along here by the years gone by really fast am again.Into the crazy conferences and so on what a good conference season It\u0026rsquo;s gonna be is not so many things happening at once I\u0026rsquo;m judino I\u0026rsquo;m gonna have to end of juggling shows around.Is there gonna be a legitimate answer to stop at things coming to play yeah Yeah yeah well How do I load ka go first it\u0026rsquo;s crazy that\u0026rsquo;s true well and some things we can talk about that?What\u0026rsquo;s even crazier yeah Not that I feeling like now we\u0026rsquo;re gonna start having shows in the can that I can\u0026rsquo;t even put on the schedule until were allowed to talk about on out with come out.Just say it\u0026rsquo;s gonna be a goodyearfor.net developers It\u0026rsquo;s been so much fun Yeah Alright Alright man Let\u0026rsquo;s roll The music for better know framework awesome dude.Are you Would you got Well I would looking for some good current articles amtda I found one?It isn\u0026rsquo;t directly related to akka.net or even the actor model but you know a lot of um games are programs with the actor model it makes.Lot of sense chair yet and so I found a great series of articles on codeproject.com about Unity 3D ok.This from April 4th filter in her Yep 5 stars 62 votes and the average is 4.96.Is people love this article is from Vahe Karamian and I\u0026rsquo;m sorry bye have fun miss pronounce your name but um because I\u0026rsquo;m stupid like I from Connecticut.But seriously I this is a great article I started a reading it in your I didn\u0026rsquo;t go to the walk through But if you go to tiny url.Dot com slash unity walkthrough What unity \u0026hellip; (there\u0026rsquo;s more but you get the idea).\n It\u0026rsquo;s kind of incredible some of the things that can be done in an hour or two of hacking these days. The text isn\u0026rsquo;t quite good enough so I may just need to listen to the podcast anyway but I\u0026rsquo;m curious what a bit more effort could do. A few things come to mind already:\n detecting silence before splitting the file in to chunks using long pauses to create new paragraphs trying to train/feed some hints to Bing voice recognition (especially if I know what the mp3 source is about)  Creating transcripts from audio recently came up in a Xamarin application being developed at work so maybe I\u0026rsquo;ll get to it sooner (and while on the clock).\n"
},
{
	"uri": "https://blog.uitlanders.com/posts/2015-06-30-vps-hosting/",
	"title": "VPS Hosting",
	"tags": [],
	"categories": [],
	"series": [],
	"description": "",
	"content": "Before hosting here on the awesome GitHub Pages, I contemplated setting up a VPS server. One of my first choices, Digital Ocean recently sent me an offer for a free T-shirt if I set up a droplet and answered some survey questions.\nI haven\u0026rsquo;t gotten a free T-shirt since my initial take on Xamarin, so I decided to see how hard it would be to setup Jekyll on a clean VPS.\nInitial seutp was easy and the VPS control panel was clean and simple.\nGetting the current blog up just required running a few commands: (and I didn\u0026rsquo;t even need to look them up)\napt-get install jekyll apt-get install git git clone https://github.com/tmpreston/tmpreston.github.com  Running jekyll using the inbuilt server (jekyll server \u0026ndash;host=0.0.0.0) proved to be nice and speedy too.\nAnd just for completeness I tried nginx too.\napt-get install nginx cp -R * /var/www/html/  The control panel has some basic in-built reporting already.\nAnd a handy reset root password utility if you end up not pasting a valid SSH public key during droplet creation.\nEverything worked well and prior to destruction of my little droplet I thought I\u0026rsquo;d check how fast the SSD disk was.\nhdparm -t /dev/vda hdparm -T /dev/vda  So if ever GitHub does decide that they don\u0026rsquo;t particularly want to be in the free hosting business I should be able to happily keep on blogging about my latest IT/Dev adventures.\n"
},
{
	"uri": "https://blog.uitlanders.com/posts/2015-05-03-life-on-the-bleeding-edge-bleeding/",
	"title": "Life on the bleeding edge... bleeding",
	"tags": [],
	"categories": [],
	"series": [],
	"description": "",
	"content": "The start Exciting times at the moment with the release of the RC for Visual Studio 2015 Community (\u0026amp; Enterprise Editions). Since I\u0026rsquo;m normally technically curious I thought I\u0026rsquo;d download and have a look. Obviously the first step I took was to run\nvs_community.exe /layout  via the commandline to allow downloading the complete installer (in case I want to re-install it later). A few hours later in the morning before work I decided to kick off the install only to find out I did not have the required 25GB free space on my aging 120GB SSD.\nThe unnecessary but totally justifiable shopping trip\u0026hellip; My free space problem was easily solved by a short trip to Umart to purchase a shiny new Crucial MX100 256GB SSD\nThe next goal was to relocate my windows 8.1 installation from the old SSD to the new one. My attempts to do this using the provided Acronis True Image software was unsuccessful and I didn\u0026rsquo;t have any luck with EaseUS Partition Master either. Third time lucky with Clonezilla which I turned to rather the resorting to a linux live cd and looking up the unfamiliar commandline arguments required. (I used the awesome Rufus to create a bootable USB stick because really who has a CD/DVD drive on their computer these days).\nFinally with some free space. I completed my initial goal: Install Visual Studio 2015 Community.\nScope creep  Technology\u0026hellip; is a queer thing. It brings you great gifts with one hand, and it stabs you in the back with the other.\nCarrie Snow\n At this point most people would bask in the glory of their technical achievement and fire up VS to see what\u0026rsquo;s new. I however saw my now unused SSD and thought you know I could probably install the new Windows 10 Preview build that was released today too. Some downloading and some creating bootable USB sticks later and I\u0026rsquo;ve got a nice dual boot system. Windows 10 has some big changes (the re-designed start menu really stands out) but otherwise is much more evolutionary. The UI is subtly different but will be very familiar to anyone who has used Windows 8/8.1.\nMy foray into Windows 10 was short lived however. Either the nvidia drivers, one of the windows updates available or possibly switching to the fast ring updates rendered my machine unbootable after the required restart. Windows would start (bypassing all attempts to enter safe mode via F8) but end up on a black screen with a responsive mouse cursor.\nTurning once again to my bootable USB stick I attempted to run windows recovery. This automated process has saved my install/s in the past so I was happy to give it a try. So now my original Windows 8.1 install is no longer available in the boot screen and the machine is still unbootable :(\nUsing the USB to enter the console and force a safe mode start up allowed me to create a Windows 8 USB stick to repair the original install. Some hours later and I\u0026rsquo;ve recovered my original windows installation. At this point I\u0026rsquo;ve decided maybe I\u0026rsquo;ll just use my old SSD for some games / programming projects. (At least untill the next major Windows 10 release is available. RC can\u0026rsquo;t be that far away).\nQuitting while I\u0026rsquo;m ahead So for now I\u0026rsquo;ll look into some of the new shininess that VS 2015 brings to windows. I\u0026rsquo;ve got a draft post about Telerik AppBuilder so I\u0026rsquo;ll maybe finish that off next and then compare it to the new Cordova support now available through VS 2015.\n"
},
{
	"uri": "https://blog.uitlanders.com/posts/2015-04-21-brisbane-net-meetup-april/",
	"title": "Brisbane .Net Meetup April 2015",
	"tags": [],
	"categories": [],
	"series": [],
	"description": "",
	"content": "This month\u0026rsquo;s .Net Meetup was all the new things to see in Visual Studio 2015 and ALM 2015 - Adam Cogan\nThe talk covered a brief walk down memory lane including screenshots of each of the versions of Visual Studio since 2002. Quite amazing to see exactly how much has changed. No real discussion on how stability has greatly improved but some highly amusing discussions regarding the dreaded ALL CAPS MENUS.\nThere was a brief look at the impressive App Insights which sadly doesn\u0026rsquo;t have an easy binding for WinForms meaning it may be some time before I\u0026rsquo;ll get to use it.\nGreat relaxed atmosphere as usual and while the talk pointed out a few things that aren\u0026rsquo;t quite going to make it into the initial release we only covered half the topics. I\u0026rsquo;ll be looking forward to next month and ASP.Net + .NET Core changes (provided son 1.0 doesn\u0026rsquo;t require my supervision).\nI\u0026rsquo;ll also try and remember to thank Paul or someone from Octopus as the free pizza is a life saver after missing lunch.\nPSA Removing all caps can be achived by posting the following in Powershell or follow the original instructions on stackoverflow.\nVS2012 Set-ItemProperty -Path HKCU:\\Software\\Microsoft\\VisualStudio\\11.0\\General -Name SuppressUppercaseConversion -Type DWord -Value 1  VS2013 Set-ItemProperty -Path HKCU:\\Software\\Microsoft\\VisualStudio\\12.0\\General -Name SuppressUppercaseConversion -Type DWord -Value 1  There\u0026rsquo;s also a menu option in VS2013 Update 3 if you\u0026rsquo;ve updated already.\n"
},
{
	"uri": "https://blog.uitlanders.com/posts/2015-03-03-hello-world/",
	"title": "Hello World!",
	"tags": [],
	"categories": [],
	"series": [],
	"description": "",
	"content": "So in my ongoing quest to become a better developer I\u0026rsquo;ve decided I should be reading less and doing more. Reading blogs has helped improved both my code and general development practices but ultimately I\u0026rsquo;m going to learn more by trying things out for myself.\nIn the past my participation in side projects could be easily explained\u0026hellip;. This isn\u0026rsquo;t likely to change but I\u0026rsquo;ll be taking the time to upload some of these experiments/side projects to github (learning more git along the way) and hope that someone else can benefit from them too.\nI\u0026rsquo;ll also be posting the odd troubleshooting tip when I come across particularly annoying or hard to track down issues. Progress is likely to be slow initially due the arrival of son 1.0 but\u0026hellip;\n A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step\n So here\u0026rsquo;s to writing more and learning some markdown ASAP. (Although this post itself is step 1).\nLinks Comic image thanks to Commit Strip\n"
},
{
	"uri": "https://blog.uitlanders.com/categories/",
	"title": "Categories",
	"tags": [],
	"categories": [],
	"series": [],
	"description": "",
	"content": ""
},
{
	"uri": "https://blog.uitlanders.com/series/",
	"title": "Series",
	"tags": [],
	"categories": [],
	"series": [],
	"description": "",
	"content": ""
}]