I am happy to report that the A320 is progressing very nicely - there were some new pictures posted in the FSLabs Facebook page that you can check out here.
Monday, December 05, 2011
Friday, July 29, 2011
Restore your System drive from Windows Home Server - a tip
My main office PC experienced a hard disk crash the other day. No worries, I said, that's why we've invested in the Windows Home Server backup setup, so that snags like this can be resolved with the minimum of downtime, right?
Wrong.
Four days later and several attempts at restoring (I could work in the meantime using my laptop) provided fruitless. I was close to giving up, formatting the new hard disk that came as the replacement and installing Windows 7 anew. I could not, however, ignore the "piss off" factor that was telling me I would not be defeated by a bloody program, especially since this is exactly why we had installed WHS in the first place - so we could restore anything, anytime.
Well, the problem was simple, silly and, as it turns out, easily fixable (aren't they all), but I couldn't really detect it as I never bothered sitting out the entire process (or timing it): When I would start the restore process, WHS would say that it would take about 3-4 hours to restore my disk. As such, I usually started this process at night, before bed, etc. only to find out in the following morning that it had failed with an "unspecified network error".
The first time, I thought it was the Ethernet switch to blame, so I plugged the PC directly into the router where WHS is connected (topology not important, as it turned out).
The second time, I thought it was the (new) hard disk to blame, so I switched hard disks.
The third time, I decided to read all sorts of blogs and discussions which suggested I had to have the new disk formatted first, but without an assigned drive (C: or whatever), only mount it as an active partition.
The fourth time (I was getting close to throwing the thing out from the second floor window) I finally decided to give the error log some attention and the truth appeared in front of me: The "unknown network error" was in fact a timeout of the DHCP-provided IP address that the WHS Restore CD was getting for the PC's network card, as the router providing the dynamic IP was set (by default) to expire the DHCP lease after one hour (ONLY - what are they smoking?).
Setting the router to expire the DHCP leases after a week and restarting the PC finally got the restore process to finish properly and I am now writing this blog entry from my main office PC.
Let's hope others might read this and save themselves the grief.
Wrong.
Four days later and several attempts at restoring (I could work in the meantime using my laptop) provided fruitless. I was close to giving up, formatting the new hard disk that came as the replacement and installing Windows 7 anew. I could not, however, ignore the "piss off" factor that was telling me I would not be defeated by a bloody program, especially since this is exactly why we had installed WHS in the first place - so we could restore anything, anytime.
Well, the problem was simple, silly and, as it turns out, easily fixable (aren't they all), but I couldn't really detect it as I never bothered sitting out the entire process (or timing it): When I would start the restore process, WHS would say that it would take about 3-4 hours to restore my disk. As such, I usually started this process at night, before bed, etc. only to find out in the following morning that it had failed with an "unspecified network error".
The first time, I thought it was the Ethernet switch to blame, so I plugged the PC directly into the router where WHS is connected (topology not important, as it turned out).
The second time, I thought it was the (new) hard disk to blame, so I switched hard disks.
The third time, I decided to read all sorts of blogs and discussions which suggested I had to have the new disk formatted first, but without an assigned drive (C: or whatever), only mount it as an active partition.
The fourth time (I was getting close to throwing the thing out from the second floor window) I finally decided to give the error log some attention and the truth appeared in front of me: The "unknown network error" was in fact a timeout of the DHCP-provided IP address that the WHS Restore CD was getting for the PC's network card, as the router providing the dynamic IP was set (by default) to expire the DHCP lease after one hour (ONLY - what are they smoking?).
Setting the router to expire the DHCP leases after a week and restarting the PC finally got the restore process to finish properly and I am now writing this blog entry from my main office PC.
Let's hope others might read this and save themselves the grief.
Wednesday, July 20, 2011
A picture is worth a thousand words...
so I wonder... how much are a thousand pictures worth? :)
Sunday, July 03, 2011
ILSpy - a free .NET assembly browser and decompiler
My good friend Arno Gerretsen, developer of various famous tools for Flight Simulator model and scenery development, found a very useful undocumented parameter that can be used in one of the base FSX SDK tools, XToMdl.exe to help with scenery object manipulation.
This got me thinking: Knowing that most of the tools developed for the FSX SDK were written in a .NET language (C# or VB), would I be able to detect other undocumented goodies, or even possibly look into the source code to decipher some of the logic and/or see if there could be work-arounds available for known issues?
This led me into a search for tools that can be used to decompile .NET code. Unfortunately, all my searches came up with commercial products that were more expensive than the funds I could allocate (namely: Zero dollars) so I was running on empty, until I bumped into a news article (written in dotnetzone.gr, the Greek software developers community) which explained that there is now an open-source .NET assembly browser and decompiler called ILSpy.
I downloaded and tested ILSpy and found it quite worthwhile, so I can only recommend for inquiring minds who want to know!
Tuesday, April 05, 2011
A320 - A small update
I don't know if you saw, but we posted a small update on the development of the A320 for FSX. While it only shows the 2d captain main panel, it should offer some insight on what we're planning for the A320. To read more about it, go here.
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