0 Pandela/Ultrahosting review Posted on 14. Jan, 2009 by Wim Haanstra.

Because of the datatransfer that my Wallpaper application generates, I am looking for a better solution for my hosting. The host that I am with now is MyDomain and they offer a reasonable package for a good price. The problem with MyDomain.com is, is that their Windows shared hosting is based on very old technologies (no .NET 2.0/3.5, and their database server is a SQL Server 2000 machine).

So, I convinced myself to finally get a more serious hosting package. After browsing the internet I found out that probably VPS hosting would be the thing for me at the moment. I am also looking if I can merge the hosting package of my bro and dad together with mine.

I created an account at Pandela.com, which is part of UltraHosting.com. They offer Windows 2008 Hyper-V based VPS hosting for a reasonable price.

Account creation
Well, within minutes I signed myself up for their service. I prefer paying through PayPal instead of directly using my Credit Card and that was possible too. After a couple of hours I received a call from the US, confirming my order and they went through my account details to make sure everything was correct. After that they asked me if I had anymore questions (which I didn’t) and we hung up.
I thought this personal approach was very nice and it makes me feel confident that my order is handled with the right precision.

After my account was created, I could immediately log in to their website to review my order, also a good thing.

Setup time
My account was setup within 24 hours, although they stated that it would take 48 to 72 hours. I could login to Remote Desktop immediately. The machine has a dedicated IP address, so that makes configuring everything a lot easier.

Speed
Speed testing to Europe resulted in a nice steady 700k/s. Downloading files from within my Remote Desktop from a mirror in Canada, resulted in a nice 4 MB/s. Speed is very good and also stability seems nice.

Overall thoughts
The service of this party is pretty good. Most support tickets I entered were answered within the hour. There is one thing that really limits me at the moment and that is that there is a 1GB memory limit for the machines. I just sent a support ticket to ask what it would cost to upgrade the memory to more.

All in all, I would rate this party a nice 9 out of 10.

4 Getting ready for a new release Posted on 08. Jan, 2009 by Wim Haanstra.

I have been working on version 2.0 of Wallpaper lately and it’s getting closer to a release. Besides improved stability there has also been a complete rewrite of the server-side code.

The interface also has a new design, which I think clears things a bit more and gives me a way to communicate to the users.

Messages Screen

Categories Screen

2 Another hero… gone…. Posted on 07. Jan, 2009 by Wim Haanstra.

You know those moment that you see one of your ‘heroes’ do something that immediately makes you lose respect for that person. Well today I was shocked!

I was zapping around on the TV, coming across multiple tell-sell channels, you know those channels where they try to sell you incredible useless stuff by pretending it is actually working.

Well, I came across some ’super-infra-red-cooker’ and is actually done by Mr. T. Mr. T. is one of those heroes from way-back, when he still starred in the A-Team.

Goodbye Mr. T.

You will always be remembered as the tough guy.

0 2,062,616 Posted on 01. Jan, 2009 by Wim Haanstra.

Just on a small side note. My webserver just served a grand total of 2,062,616 wallpapers!

8 On a personal note…. Posted on 01. Jan, 2009 by Wim Haanstra.

Zwolle, tuesday december 30th, in the future often called ‘D-day’.

I told my girlfriend that I needed to go to some shops to pick a gift for my brothers birthday. In the meanwhile, I was planning a scheme! I was out to get a nice engagement ring for my girlfriend . After almost 7 years of being together, I thought it was time to “pop” the question.

Well, just to sum it up. I asked her to marry me and she said yes! We decided we want to get married in 2010, we don’t know the exact date yet, but it will most definitly not be 20-10-2010 or 10-10-2010. We want to get married in the spring or summer, just to maybe get a little sun over here (Go global heating! Go!).

So now the hunting for the perfect wedding is begun! First question that pops into my mind? What kind of car? Just tell me what you think would be a nice car for me to get for that day.

Remember, we live in europe. Also, I would like an ‘open car’, not an old timer but a new one. Something like a BMW 645 or something.

1 Piracy Posted on 28. Dec, 2008 by Wim Haanstra.

Coding Horror just published an article about software piracy and I too have been the ‘victim’ of software piracy.

Since a couple of weeks my iPhone application has been hacked and distributed around the web a lot. Currently about half my users are non-paying users, but there is no way for me to identify the good users with the bad ones. There have been a couple of solutions, developers thought of to get the bad ones out, but most of them actually mean that you have to hassle the good ones too. For me, that’s not worth it.

We all used pirated software somewhere in time, even if it was just for ‘testing’ some game out or if that tool you really wanted is really worth the money. But as I grew older I also saw what kind of work developers have to actually create that kind of tools. Most of the tools I use are like $20 to $40 to buy and that is most of the time a bargain for the software you get. The weird thing is, it seems that developers buy more of their software than other people. Some of my friends, laugh at me when I tell them what kind of tools I acutally bought and what the grand total of my software collection is.

The cool thing is, that upgrades are free (most of the time) and you can actually help to make the product better.

0 NMT Skin Posted on 23. Dec, 2008 by Wim Haanstra.

I am currently trying to create a skin for my HDX1000. I want the skin to be a little more than just a theme where some images are changed. I want to create a complete skin that actually changes the shape of the default NMT software.

Current features I thought of:

- Indexing of Movie, Music and Photo directories.
- Movie pages should have movie posters, to show which movies are which, also showing all kinds of information about the movie.
- Music pages should show cover-art.
- Photo pages should show thumbnails of the photos in the library. Maybe with support for folders.

The first hurdle I got to take is: getting the HDX1000 to run PHP/ASP of itself. I don’t want to have an external PHP/ASP server running, because that would make it harder to distribute to other HDX1000 users.

Is there anyone out there that knows how to get PHP to run on the machine itself? I heard that a cgi version of PHP was included in the NMT software.

I created a dedicated page about it here.

0 Paying for online play Posted on 21. Dec, 2008 by Wim Haanstra.

When my brother got a PlayStation 3 a couple of weeks ago, I was very interested in the online play part of the machine. Especially because playing online multiplayer is free on the PS3. Well, after a couple of hours of screwing around on the PS3, I noticed a couple of things.

Installing demo’s from the internet takes AGES… and when I say AGES, I mean… a very long time. Ofcourse I am aware that the downloading speed depends on the speed of your internet connection. But even after the LONG download was finished, it started installing the demo…. installing?? Call me spoiled, but pffeww, I am so glad that the Xbox 360 does not need this.

Getting in a multiplayer game was my next objective. I noticed that getting games to actually run without lag was a nice mission too.

Why is everybody (who owns a PS3) so positive about PSN? Is it because no paid alternative is available?

I am glad that I can pay for an online service, which is very stable. Ofcourse Xbox Live has some outages too, but those are mainly when new system updates are released. And I remember one outage that took longer than a day, which got me an extra month of free Xbox Live.

0 foreach and mixed array Posted on 17. Dec, 2008 by Wim Haanstra.

Yesterday I was just coding along and I was (accidently) filling an ArrayList with strings and Guids.

After that I tried to read all strings from that ArrayList with just some simple code:

1
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foreach (string myString in myArrayList)
{
// some code here.
}

It bombed out with an exception, telling me that it couldn’t cast a Guid to a String.

I thought that with an foreach, you only grabbed items of a certain type from the ArrayList. But somehow it just tries to grab every item and cast it to a string. Weird.

0 Wallpaper Application Stats Posted on 17. Dec, 2008 by Wim Haanstra.

My wallpaper application in the AppStore is doing better than I ever thought.

So here are some stats:

Days in AppStore : 51
Wallpapers : 3,553
Total Bandwidth : 94,991 MB
Categories : 18
Contributers : 3652
Wallpapers served : 1,364,911

Contributers aren’t the total users, but users who actually submitted a review or image.