When you have the motivation to do something, why do you never have the time?! Ever since I got back from the trip to Malta, I’ve been wanting to continue the work on TWatch, but I’ve been unable to fit it into my schedule; family and work takes all my time.

However, I’ve had some time to reflect on the current state of the code, and I’ve decided to refactor some of it. It’s not that it’s badly written (do any programmer ever admit that? ), I just feel that there are room for some improvements.

After three visits they finally managed to fix the leak! Thankfully they manged to do it before the real winter hit us, shame they had to come three times - the second time to conclude what we concluded the first time and a third to fix it. *grumble*

The development on TWatch is a bit slow at the moment, but it is coming along. I sent out a test copy a while back, but the tester then went silent, guess he didn’t really care to test it…

The service guy is coming tomorrow to fix the leak that he supposedly fixed the last time he was here. I sure hope he gets it right this time! I just checked how much it has leaked the last few days and it is very little, but it does leak so something has to be done for sure.

Work continues on TWatch, it is seems stable so once I add a bit more error-handling it is time to start adding the fun stuff. The first thing I’m adding is network support - remote viewing.

We all know legal stuff is boring, right? EULA’s, CoC’s etc….we all just scroll down the text box to get that “I accept”-button enabled so we can push it whenever we get one of them thrown in our face…

I certainly consider legal stuff boring! But why is it then that I want to write a disclaimer for TWatch? That’s a question I’ve been asking myself for the last few days…I realy don’t *want* to - I just feel I need to.

Any legal-geniuses out there that wants to do it for me?

Oh well, time to send a copy of TWatch to a tester!

The user ‘köldmedie’ over at Husdata.se’s forums wanted some statistics for a system with a volume tank….here’s mine for the last five days.

…on TWatch, just a bit short on time at the moment.

Development continues on TWatch, but in order to accomodate the features I want to implement, I need a logging library. There are a few available, but none of them has the features I want…so I’m writing my own.

If you are interested in testing TWatch, feel free to send a mail to twatch-beta {at} pmalmberg.com (It’s OK to write the mail in Swedish). Not all applicants will be accepted so give a good reason why you should be. Also, the program will be delivered without warranties of any kind so you will use it at your own risk. You’ll need to have .NET 2.0 installed as it is required by the application.

Here’s an example of how the configuration file might look, resulting in a graph similiar to the image.

<ApplicationSettings>
  <Parsers>
      <Parser>
          <Name>Ute GT2</Name>
          <BasePath>Z:\</BasePath>
          <FileName>Ute GT2.txt</FileName>
          <Start>2006-10-01 23:00</Start>
          <End>Infinite</End>
          <Color>255;0;0</Color>
      </Parser>
      <Parser>
          <Name>Kompressor</Name>
          <BasePath>Z:\</BasePath>
          <FileName>Kompressor.txt</FileName>
          <Start>2006-10-01 23:00</Start>
          <End>Infinite</End>
          <Color>255;0;0</Color>
      </Parser>
  </Parsers>
  <Graphs>
      <Graph>
          <Title>
          My graph test
          </Title>
          <Curves>
              <Curve>Ute GT2</Curve>
              <Curve>Kompressor</Curve>
          </Curves>
      </Graph>
  </Graphs>
</ApplicationSettings>

There are two main secions; Parsers and Graphs. The first one specifies what data shall be available, the second one then tells the application to create a curve-group, based on the specified data. It is possible can have an unlimited number of curves in one graph and an unlimited number of curve-groups. “Unlimited” means within reason, of course.
As can be seen the example, you can specify Infinite as the end date/time. This results in the application parsing all available data, including newly written data. I’m planning on adding several more of these keywords later on to make the graphs dynamic.

…to name the application I’m working on. If you have any ideas, please post them as a comment.

I’ve completed the FileSystemMonitor replacement class. I’ve intentionally left out the part that would check for newly created files as this is not needed at this stage. The result is that when there is a change of dates, i.e at midnight, the monitor will no longer receive any updates since the values are now written to another file.

…if you want something done properly. Argh!

As I stated in an earlier post, I had the file monitoring working. Well, so I thought. After installing the computer that will be the one I’ll use to log all the data I discovered something that really ruined my day - networked drives does not support monitoring very well.

I am (read was) using a class named FileSystemMonitor that comes with the .NET platform. This class has the capability to monitor changes in the filesystem. Nothing in all the articles I’ve read about this class have suggested that it won’t work over a network - I’ve actually seen several examples that are supposed to work on a network drive.

After much testing I’ve come to the conclusion that this class won’t do what I need it to do. Sure, it works on the local file system just fine but networked drives is just a big black hole it seems. Very annoying.

So - I’m currently writing my own file monitor with support for networked drives.