I’m currently working on a project that requires making several concurrent asynchronous calls to a web service. Now, the service work fine synchrounously, but change the pattern slightly and I was getting the following error.
“There was an error during asynchronous processing. Unique state object is required for multiple asynchronous simultaneous operations to be outstanding.”
The solution, courtesy of a post on the MSDN forums was to pass a new GUID as a state object.
Problem solved.
Who’d have thought, just a few short years ago, that I could be sitting on a train, using my MP3 player to write a blog post? Got to love the tech. 
I’ve been a bit slack with my back garden, but I have to say, I’m quite pleased that I left a couple of small patches to their own devices. They’ve sprouted a small number of wild flowers, and last weekend, they were just about as good as I’ve seen them.
This morning I was given a tracking number for a parcel I am expecting. However, I didn’t get the name of the company who were to deliver it. Not a good start if I wanted to use the tracking number to actually track the parcel.
Then I remembered a discussion at work about Google’s recognition routines, and one of my few remaining synapses fired into life.
I went to Google’s homepage, typed in my tracking number (nothing else, just the number) and hit search. I have to admit I was very pleasantly surprised when the top of the results page said “Track UPS package 1Z6 ….. 70″
Very neat.
I’ve just seen that picasaweb have added a slideshow feature to their web photo albums. I was going to post about something else, but I thought this was cool enough to put the other post to one side for a while.
Here’s an example…
It is almost inevitable in the modern world that someone will manage to get hold of at least part of your identity. It happened to me this week.
I went downstairs first thing this morning to see what snail-mail had been delivered, only to find an urgent letter from my bank. It seems that someone has managed to get hold of my bank card details and used them to spend around 4-500 pounds of my money. It would have been more, but something tipped the bank off that there was something wrong and the put a stop on my card.
I am happy that the bank managed to catch this behaviour, and prevented another 500 pound being spent. I can’t help but wonder, though, whether we are all a little complacent about our details. I’ve always taken time to destroy paperwork that could hold vital information for use by an identity thief, but it seems that is not enough. Just using your debit or credit card in the wrong place is enough to leave you open to fraud – a quick skim of your card details is all it takes…
It’s easy to be wise after the event, but now may be a good time to fall back on using good old cash for a while.
Last night Chester was directly under a fair sized thunder storm with some really impressed bolts of lightning. Seeing that I had my camera with me, and that it could be set for up to 3 second exposures, I decided to try to photograph some of the lightning. Please note the use of the word “try”. As you can imagine, it was something less than completely successful, but I am now the proud owner of about 60 almost identical digital images of the street outside my hotel with a totally calm and lightning-free sky above.
Next time…
Tucked away, back from the road between Guiseley and Menston is the High Royds Psychiatric Hospital. Or rather, the buildings that house it.
Build by the Victorians, and originally (and gloriously) named The West Riding Pauper Lunatic Asylum, the hospital closed its doors in 2003. Now the property developers have moved in and are making the place into luxury housing. Fortunately for those of us with a love of architecture, the buildings are grade II listed and as a result, the developers are not allowed to alter the external structure.
As you can see from the picture below, the buildings were connected by a series of covered walkways. Unfortunately, these are almost all gone now. They weren’t listed in their own right, so they have been demolished to make way for car parking.
You can see some really good photos of the place over at one of the urban exploration websites, but I’d really suggest that you get over there for a look yourself before the development is finished. If you like Victorian utilitarian architecture, you’ll love High Royds.
Having just moved all my hosting, I am pleased to be able to say that the zombiesheep.co.uk site is back up. It is nowhere near complete, and all the music and software is still awaiting upload, but the site is up, at least.
If you feel the urge, why not pop over for a look?
I’ve just installed the RC2 release of Windows Home Server. It looks pretty good, to be honest. I wasn’t expecting much, but the feature set seems to be rich enough for most users’ purposes. I’ll update this post later when I can tell you how it’s getting along.
**UPDATE**
I’ve just spent a few hours playing with the server software, and it appears to be quite useful. I popped the client cd into each of my laptops, and within a few minutes, they were backing their data up to the server. A few hours later, and everything was backed up.
I also looked at the remote access features (although I have since disabled them – I don’t want to open up a hole in my firewall if I don’t need to). Setting my router/firewall to UPNP mode, the server was able to auto-configure everything to allow access from the nasty ole web without hitch. I am sure that there will be many users who will find this feature very useful, but I’m not one of them. As I said before I don’t want to open up my firewall any more than I have to.
I also took a chance and installed SlimServer on the box. I doubt it is supported, but it works well enough so I am happy to leave it on there. It also means I can migrate the music from my existing SlimServer – handy as the old box is about 3MB short of running out of disk space.
That was a very quick spin through the server’s capabilities. I’ll hopefully get some more time next weekend to play again. If I find anything I missed, I’ll let you know.