I have been procrastinating whether or not to write my own open source Google Drive / DropBox clone in C# for some time now. I’ve been looking for a cloud based backup solution but am to cheap to pay and have only used the free storage that DropBox, Google Drive & SkyDrive offer. Google Drive & DropBox work awesome and seamlessly but I have had various “issues” with SkyDrive.

The reason I wanted to write my own clone of these cloud based storage solutions is because I am already paying for “Unlimited” storage with my web hosting account that this site and all my other web sites are hosted from. So for me to pay extra for storage on SkyDrive, DropBox etc doesn't make much sense.

I used to use SyncBack for a while but stopped using it. I started looking around for free alternatives and came across Duplicati. Duplicati is almost what I had planed on making myself. it’s open source, written in C# and can back up files to a multitude of storage destinations like SkyDrive, Google Drive, FTP etc. It’s multi platform (Mac, Win, Linux) & it supports encryption, compression & incremental backups! It’s pretty much everything I could have hoped for and a little bit more.

Although I have not used it for very long I think I may have found a backup solution I can live with.

I recently purchased the $40 windows 8 pro upgrade deal. I already had windows 7 and was in the process of upgrading my computer to 32gb ram and a ssd so decided to take advantage of the offer.

I got the Windows 8 pro install utility to generate a iso for me and then made a usb boot stick and proceeded to install windows 8 as a clean install so I could start from scratch.

The problem came when I tried to activate windows and it said I could not. Even though windows 8 allowed me to perform a clean install the activation said I could not activate because I used the windows 8 upgrade to do the clean install?

After some searching I came across this article and it allowed me to activate my windows 8 installation.

http://www.ghacks.net/2012/10/27/windows-8-upgrade-clean-install-possible/

• Open regedit by pressing Windows-q, entering regedit and selecting the result from the list of hits.
• Navigate to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE/Software/Microsoft/Windows/CurrentVersion/Setup/OOBE/
• Change MediaBootInstall from 1 to 0
• Go back to the start screen and enter cmd there.
• Right-click Command Prompt and select to run it as administrator.
• Type slmgr /rearm on the command line and hit enter.
• Reboot Windows now.
• Run the activation utility afterwards, enter your product key to activate Windows. (I didn’t have to do this step it was already activated)

If your suddenly finding that Unity will instanty terminate while running your code, check if you are invoking any infinite recusion loops. This has recently happened to me and it was a bit of a pain to track down with Unity 3.5 instantly terminating. Hopfully the Unity team will handle the infinite recustion issue in a future version.

Was just back in town for two days and was catching up on some emails and rss feeds when I learned Steve Jobs has passed away. I've never been a apple user, never really used or owned an apple product other then brief uses of an iPod and iTunes, but I still tip my hat to Steve and Apple for creating the slickest & sleekest tech around.

It's widly accepted that Apple is Steve Jobs and Steve Jobs is Apple, so it is interesting times for the future of apple. Personally I think long term Apple's future may be bleek without steve being there as the moral center guiding Apple's direction.

I have taken a look at Unity and have decided to make an extra effort to try and dive deeper into it and learn more. The last time I even took a look at unity was quite some time ago, probably not long after it became availible. I've decided to try and document my learning process here in the blog.

The current iteration 3.4 seems promising, from the videos I've watched and some of the reading I've done on it. I am currently working out of town for about two weeks so I have no internet access and must rely solely on the Unity documentation.

Problems

1. Poor documentation! Unity comes with help docs but I have yet to find any starting point guide. I can't find a API other then what C# language/api features are available. I need a clean clear and concise api reference documentation for Unity if I am to figure out how to use it. First and foremost I am a programmer so without an API to browse through I'm lost. At least in Visual Studio you have the Object Browser and can browse trough the assembles and read the documentation.
2. Poor UI. One of the bigger drawbacks is that the unity UI is that it is to "custom" aka programmer designed. It works but the look and feel is too cumbersome and nor easy to work through. To much reliance on File menu structures rather then say a context aware Microsoft Office style tool bar.
3. Can't determine the exact nature of the scripting system, There seems to be a choice of JavaScript or C# or some other language I have never herd of called "Boo".
4. Poor flow control.
5. I have zero clue where to start. I am having trouble even trying to get a single object to move in 3D space with keyboard input.

Unanswered Questions

1. How do I respond to keyboard events and move an object?

Notable Discoveries

1. Democratizing game development as the Unity team describes it, with Union and how they are trying to setup a way for Unity developers to market and sell there games an a vast array of platforms from set top boxes, XBox, PS3, Wii, PC/Mac etc.
2. The Unity team seems to be in talks and making deals with more and more AAA publishers and game companies regarding Unity. This give them credit as a legit and serious contender in the game dev space.
3. They provide a free version of Unity that can compile your game

I've been making numerous updates to my Zider project over at codeplex. Other then that I have not been getting much done programming wise, been busy with other things.

GAH! Google is such phail, Bing is no better either. Been trying to find out how to use EF + SqlCe without having to specify any settings in my web.config.

Finally I found this page on unit testing that pointed be in the right direction.

And here is how to do it in code!

    
    public class testModel
    {
        [Key]
        [Required]
        public int ID { get; set; }
        [Required]
        public int SomeID { get; set; }
    }

    public class MyClass : System.Data.Entity.DbContext
    {
        public MyClass() { }
        public MyClass(string filename) : base(filename) { }
        
        public DbSet TableTest { get; set; }
    }
   
    public class HomeController : Controller
    {

        public ActionResult Index()
        {
            var path = this.Context.Server.MapPath("~/bin/");
            Database.DefaultConnectionFactory = new SqlCeConnectionFactory("System.Data.SqlServerCe.4.0", path, "");
            Database.SetInitializer(new DropCreateDatabaseIfModelChanges());
            var tmp = new MyClass("test.sdf");
            tmp.TableTest.Add(new testModel() { SomeID = 5 });
            tmp.SaveChanges();

            return this.View(); 
        }
    }

ISP's frustrate me sometimes. I was playing around with some numbers in order to gain some perspective.

Crude Number Crunching

Average days in a month is days in year divided by months equals average days in month.

365 / 12 = 30.416

avg days in month divided by 24 hrs in a day
30.416 * 24 = 729.984 (hrs in a month)
729.984 * 60 = 43,799.04 (minutes in month)
43,799.04 * 60 = 2,627,942.4 (seconds in a month)

Total monthly transfer cap equals 75 Gb at 5Mbit (downstream) connection

75 * 1000 = 75,000 Mb
75,000 * 1000 = 75,000,000 Kb
75,000,000 * 1000 = 75,000,000,000 bytes
75,000,000,000 * 8 = 600,000,000,000 bits

Bits of data per month divided by average number of seconds per month
600,000,000,000 / 2,627,942.4 = 228,315.5064 Bits per second

Converted back to MBits sec
228,315.5064 / 1000 = 228.3155064 KBits sec
228.3155064 / 1000 = 0.2283155064 MBits sec

Actual Mbit per sec cap is equal to 0.228 Mbit/s

So you would need to be transferring data all day every day for the entire month at a minimum of 0.228Mbits a sec and at no point in time
could you ever drop below that transfer speed. Only then would you reach the 75Gb monthly cap.

I pay for $50 month for up to 5Mbit connection speed as it is advertised. But technically speaking my connection speed is 0.228 Mbit/s if I want to remain within the 75Gb
monthly transfer cap.

Or to put it another way somebody with a really good dial up connection at 28.53Kb/s could reach the 75 Gb transfer cap.

My argument is that my ISP is providing a huge transfer speed but then turning around and restricting how much data can actually be transferred. Thus negating the transfer speed
all together.

The actual monthly transfer cap if you use the 5Mbit/s advertised speed is as fallows

Bits per sec transfer speed multiplied by 2,627,942.4 seconds in a month

5,000,000 * 2,627,942.4 = 13,139,712,000,000 Bits
13,139,712,000,000 / 8 = 1,642,464,000,000 Bytes
1,642,464,000,000 / 1000 = 1,642,464,000 Kb
1,642,464,000 / 1000 = 1,642,464 Mb
1,642,464 / 1000 = 1,642.464 Gb

1,642.464 Gb potential data per month transferred. Assuming that you were able to transfer at the advertised speed of 5Mbit/s and at no point in time
could you ever drop below that transfer speed for the entire month.

1,642.464 / 75 = 21.89952 That's over 21 times the actual monthly cap of 75Gb of monthly transfer.

Retarded policies and plans

Basically the whole idea of ISP's putting a monthly transfer cap on customers internet traffic is ridiculous in my opinion. For example given what I laid out above my transfer cap is 1,642.464Gb assuming that I can download at 5Mbit/s and at no point in time could I ever drop below that transfer speed for the entire month.Which is impossible because 5Mbit's that my isp offers is just a "potential" download speed the actual speed is slower.

So by putting a cap on the speed at which I can transfer data they are all ready putting a cap on how much I can transfer per month.

A traffic monitoring that has never worked

My current cable isp (CityWest) took over another cable isp (Monarch) that had been operating in the area. The CityWest used the exact same software Monarch used for customers to log into and check there internet usage, create and manage there email etc. There has only been one slight problem that seems to have persisted for the last 10 years from the old isp Monarch to the current isp CityWest. The traffic usage page has never fucking worked and has never worked for the last 10 years. All you ever get is a 404 or cgi error page.  Hmmm isn't that interesting.

I left my original isp (Monarch) and moved over to a different company that offered dsl (Telus). I made the move because at the time I was playing a lot of Counter Strike: Source and I was getting bad latency times. After moving over to telus my latency times went way down. Then up to about 2 years ago I left telus because they were claiming I was going over there monthly traffic limits by a lot. Like 2-3 times over the limit. There traffic usage website was reporting some very suspect numbers that was totally wonky. After they cut my internet connection a few times and fighting with them to get it turned back on, guess what had happened.

Somehow telus managed to lose my account in a move over to a new system. I was still operating under the old system so my traffic usage was fucked up. What I was seeing on the telus website was different then what the operator was seeing on there end.

Now by this time Monarch had been bought out by CityWest and after the aggravation with telus I said fuck it I'm going back to cable internet. So I signed on with CityWest. It didn't take long for me to figure out that CityWest simply inherited the old Monarch systems. As soon as I logged in to the customer service page I saw that it was the exact same page Monarch was using and hey hey guess what! After 7 years the internet traffic usage page was still returning a 404/cgi error page.

Sigh.

Flip Flops. Suspect = NetFlix

A few months ago my ISP (CityWest) sent me a letter that they will be starting to charge people who go over there monthly plan. As if to suggest they were not charging people who went over there monthly limit in the first place even thought they claimed they would. Then after a few months passed there was no updates on there website. Then they made a news post ...

"In November, we sent letters to our customers to point out that there are usage limits on our Internet plans, and that we planned to begin charging for over usage in March. 

Since then we have decided to delay billing for over usage so that we can provide better information to our customers.  CityWest customers will not be billed for any usage over their plan limits until further notice. 

As we work towards this transition, we will be providing more information to our customers."

As it turns out just after they made the initial announcement that they would be charging people that go over there monthly usage Netflix came to Canada! Netflix in recent years now claims the largest overall internet traffic in north America.

Coincidence I think not. "Netflix Lowers Data Usage By 2/3 For Members In Canada" The blog title says it all. Not long after netflix came to canada they reduced there data streaming for canadien customers so us poor little Canadians would not go over our traffic limits. Again only more proof of how behind the times canada is getting in terms of what our isp's have to offer.

I am a dedicated netflix user. I watch 1-3 shows a day somtimes more. I don't own a tv and I stopped watching tv years ago. So netflix streaming movies is ideal for me.

Conclusion

As with a lot of things, I started writing this a while ago but have not gotten around to finishing it until now. The power of the internet as a communications platform has exploded onto the world and within two very short decades has changed the course of human history forever. It has led to the devastation of countless industries. From classified newspaper ads, music, movies, tv, gaming, crowd sourcing, basically anything involving the transfer of information.

The internet and access to it is becoming as important to society as the very air we breath.

Just watched a cool video about simple toys made from common household or trash items for kids, and thoguht it was worth mentioning.

http://www.ted.com/talks/arvind_gupta_turning_trash_into_toys_for_learning.html

My World of Warcraft account has finally expired again so hopefully now I will have time to spend getting some work done on my various projects.

List of recent site changes

New Content

• Friday, January 14, 2011 (Post): *crickets*
• Monday, April 25, 2011 (Post): System.Console.WriteLine("Back to bizniz");

Updates

• Friday, October 15, 2010 (Post): Srsly Kewl & I R Back!
• Monday, November 01, 2010 (Post): Netflix comes to canada
• Monday, November 01, 2010 (Post): XNA Issues
• Saturday, November 06, 2010 (Post): A little sumthin sumthin for the Neoforce community
• Saturday, November 27, 2010 (Post): Kingslayer
• Friday, December 03, 2010 (Page): Subdomains at createdbyx.com
• Saturday, January 01, 2011 (Post): ISP Rape
• Saturday, March 26, 2011 (Post): From the PTR trenches
• Wednesday, April 06, 2011 (Page): xGameConsoleXNA Release 1 Images
• Wednesday, April 06, 2011 (Post): Realm first level 25 guild achievement !
• Wednesday, April 13, 2011 (Page): Silverlight
• Wednesday, April 13, 2011 (Page): Gallery
• Monday, April 25, 2011 (Page): Movie Review List