My Huawey E585 does not work with T-Mobile any more

I can't use mobile internet any more with T-Mobile using my E585 Huawey mifi device. For the past few weeks it fails to connect. It displays the operator (T-Mobile), says "connecting" then "disconnected" and that's it. I talked to phone support, restored the factory defaults, no success.

I brought my SIM to a T-Mobile shop to try out the data feature with another device: the data download was still ok. So my SIM and my account are fine.

EverytingEverywhere will be soon available in the UK. A T-Mobile assistant told me this would involve getting a new SIM, a new contract and new hardware. If they still use Huawey devices, I guess they will go for the E589, the one that supports LTE...

Until then I'll get myself an unlocked E586es (the model T-Mobile actually uses). It supports HSPA+ so I should get faster speeds than with the E585.

Using Reactive Extensions with Bloomberg

 

Lately I had a chance to use the Bloomberg API to build a price capture service. In the context of finance the Bloomberg API -when run on a PC where the Bloomberg terminal is installed- allows you to read prices and rates for financial instruments. The “Bloomberg terminal” is an expensive piece of software that looks like nothing you’ve seen before unless you are old enough to have used the French Minitel. It comes with a funny-looking keyboard and a Mission Impossible-style fingerprint authentication system.

The API is straightforward and fully asynchronous. When opening a session you specify a single delegate that processes all notifications received from Bloomberg.

Bloomberg provides several services, some for real-time market data, others for reference static information, another for historical data… When you start a session, Bloomberg sends you a  SESSION_STATUS message confirming the session is up. If you open a service you get SERVICE_STATUS messages . If you start subscribing to an instrument’s updates Bloomberg sends SUBSCRIPTION_DATA messages with the price updates as well as SUBSCRIPTION_STATUS messages containing subscription errors if something went wrong.

When writing such a client you find yourself waiting for a message before taking action. For instance you wait for a service to open before subscribing with instruments, you wait for subscription updates to arrive in order to save them to memory…

If you take action following the reception of a message, you run this action in the same call stack as the delegate you passed to the API. Is that a problem? Yes it can be: if your action takes too long, you slow down the Bloomberg thread consuming the messages and the system starts sending you ‘Slow Consumer’ warning admin messages.

So in the end you have to do things such as:

• redirect execution from a worker thread to the main thread (to avoid blocking the consumer thread)
• fire off a timer at regular intervals to display stats,
• schedule tasks at a set time (to schedule snapshots for instance)
• wait for several tasks to complete before starting a new one

Of course you could do all this using threads/handles/message loops, or the BackgroundWorker pattern which I used a lot when building windows UIs but it’s just not practical. So I started looking up MSDN to get familiar with the latest tools that make async programming easier (in .NET 4.0) with BeginInvoke / EndInvoke, thread pooling, the TPL…

@smwhit told me “Stop being such a C++ tard and take a look at Reactive Extensions”

Indeed RX is spot-on for this. One of the very very nice things with Reactive Extensions is that you can parameterize the scheduler. For each delegate you register you simply set a parameter to decide whether you want the code to run on a new thread, a thread pool, a dispatcher, an event pool or on the current thread the next time it’s available. You can even replace the scheduler with a TestScheduler, which makes unit-testing concurrent code possible.

Resources:

• Some examples of RX usage on Synchronicity and Code Project.
• The RX Workshop on Channel 9, including the one about parameterizing concurrency with schedulers.
• Virtual Time Scheduling

More about Windows Services…

Following up from a previous blog post:

• How to create a service project?
• How to create a setup project to install a service?
• How to debug it?
• Uninstall a service manually

To violently remove a service from the Services window when uninstall fails, type at the command prompt:

sc delete "My Service"

Currently Watching...

TechEd Europe 2012

• Windows power tools treasury: the best of power tools
• Windows phone: what’s new
• Business intelligence and data visualisation: SQL Server 2012
• What’s new in WCF 4.5

all the TechEd videos

Le Web
all the videos

Eating at Tossed

I got to try Tossed recently, totally by chance.

If you’re on a particular diet, Tossed is absolutely perfect because it allows you to fine tune what you eat. This is something you usually can’t do with places like Pret-A-Manger, where sandwiches always come with bread and salads with pasta.

Chipotle is not bad because if you’re targeting a slow-card diet, you can eliminate the tortillas, have more beans, peppers, a bit of guacamole, some lettuce and a choice of 4 meats. But you get bored after a while.

So I was happy to try something different. Tossed give you the option to include / exclude a base (the carbs). And most of the base options are slow carbs: whole wheat couscous, brown rice or whole wheat noodles… Then you choose 1 of 9 meats, 1 of 12 delis and 3 of 23 veggies. The create your own page is here.

You can also go for a ready-made salad and swap ingredients.

And they have peanut butter smoothies!

How to set the Thread Pool Size in Quartz.Net?

By default Quartz.net creates a pool with 10 threads. How to change the size of the pool?

This is not obvious from the documentation, but burried inside one of the examples that come with the library:

            NameValueCollection properties = new NameValueCollection();
            properties["quartz.threadPool.threadCount"] = "1";

            ISchedulerFactory sf = new StdSchedulerFactory(properties);
            IScheduler sched = sf.GetScheduler();

 

Why did I need to change the pool size to 1? Well my jobs are executing third-party .NET wrappers around some native code that is not exactly thread-safe. I had a situation where I couldn’t schedule the same job twice: on first execution the job would run fine on thread 1. On second execution the same job would start on thread 2 then hang on a 3rd party method call. Forcing both runs to happen on the same thread fixed the problem.

Tutorial:

http://quartznet.sourceforge.net/tutorial/lesson_10.html

API Documentation

http://quartznet.sourceforge.net/apidoc/2.0/html/webframe.html

The End Is Nigh!

I was visiting Foyles the other day… Most books in the General Finance section have alarming-sounding titles. With the exception of a few books about Richard Branson or Warren Buffet it’s all about catastrophes, burns, falls, crashes, crunches, collisions, lies, delusions, failures, etc…

I’m not making this up, look at this list, all picked from the same bookshelf at Foyles:

Dark markets
How markets fail
When genius failed
When markets collide
When money dies
The end of money
How I caused the credit crunch

Market panic
Panic!

Bubbles and crashes
Why stock markets crash
The legacy of the crash
The great credit crash

No one would listen
A decade of delusions  
Masters of nothing
House of cards
Rigged money
Fool's gold
Devil's casino
Liar's poker
The wizard of lies
Biggest lies on wall street

Currently Watching…

...while brushing my teeth

GoingNative 2012

• Threads and Shared Variables in C++11 (Hans Boehm) no need to use any platform-specific code to create threads, it’s now part of the language.
• STL11: Magic && Secrets (Stephan Lavavej) shared pointers have been improved over boost.
• A Concept Design for C++ (Bjarne Stroustrup) what concepts are and how they were implemented in C++ 11.

Misc

• Introducing Windows Runtime in Windows 8 (Bart De Smet) the language projections allow direct access to the Windows API with 0 interop code from native C++, managed C# and Javascript. The API appears natural to each language. That’s a big change over the annoying C-style Win32 with its LPTSTR and HSTRUCTs…
• Windows Runtime internals: understanding “Hello World”
• C#5, ASP.NET MVC4 and Asynchronous Web Applications more interesting than the title suggests. Gives a historical view with live demos of the various ways of making asynchronous calls from polling to await.

Windows Service Gotchas

• the current directory is not the location of the executable, it’s System32! But that’s easy to change.
• anything logged to the console will be lost. You can redirect anything you output with System.Diagnostics.Trace. That includes for instance the internal debugging output from log4net (useful when you don’t know why your service is not logging anything).

Quoted from log4net documentation:

 

There are 2 different ways to enable internal debugging in log4net. These are listed below. The preferred method is to specify the log4net.Internal.Debug option in the application's config file.

• Internal debugging can also be enabled by setting a value in the application's configuration file (not the log4net configuration file, unless the log4net config data is embedded in the application's config file). The log4net.Internal.Debug application setting must be set to the value true. For example:

  <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?>
  <configuration>
      <appSettings>
          <add key="log4net.Internal.Debug" value="true"/>
      </appSettings>
  </configuration>

  This setting is read immediately on startup an will cause all internal debugging messages to be emitted.

• To enable log4net's internal debug programmatically you need to set the log4net.Util.LogLog.InternalDebugging property to true. Obviously the sooner this is set the more debug will be produced.

Internal debugging messages are written to the console and to the System.Diagnostics.Trace system. If the application does not have a console the messages logged there will be lost. Note that an application can redirect the console stream by setting the System.Console.Out. The Trace system will by default send the message to an attached debugger (where the messages will appear in the output window). If the process does not have a debugger attached then the messages are sent to the system debugger. A utility like DebugView from http://www.sysinternals.com may be used to capture these messages.

As log4net internal debug messages are written to the System.Diagnostics.Trace system it is possible to redirect those messages to a local file. You can define a trace listener by adding the following to your application's .config file:

<configuration>
    ...
    
    <system.diagnostics>
        <trace autoflush="true">
            <listeners>
                <add 
                    name="textWriterTraceListener" 
                    type="System.Diagnostics.TextWriterTraceListener" 
                    initializeData="C:\tmp\log4net.txt" />
            </listeners>
        </trace>
    </system.diagnostics>

    ...
</configuration>

Make sure that the process running your application has permission to write to this file.

Your Home Address on the Web

 

I’ve always thought privacy concerns over Facebook were exaggerated -they usually come from your parents who have been publishing their home address and phone number on the white pages for decades anyway. There is much much worse.

The mere act of voting in the UK ends up in having your home address published on the web.

If you registered to vote on the Electoral Roll and ticked the wrong box, the one with the confusing caption, something like “tick here if you don’t want your details to appear in the private listing”, then all your past addresses are on the web, year by year. Yippee!

It’s not just your home address, but also the list of people who lived with you. That must be the most blatant breach of privacy I’ve ever seen. It’s like Facebook for flatmates with privacy settings set to ‘Everyone’.

Look at this. Only the first part of the postcode is available. To get the full info all you have to do is register at 192.com.