The fix was relatively simple – it was all down to the cheap and nasty floppy power connector socket on the sound card – which had moved forward of the pins resulting in a partial connection.   The white plastic “socket” needs sliding back over the pins until it can not go any further – the floppy driver power cable then fits much nicer.  I’ve even put a tie-wrap around it now to prevent it sliding forward.

Oddly, the card never told me the power wasn’t connected, so I guess at least one of the pins was making contact – enough for the card to believe it had full power anyway.  I suspect this was probably the ground connection it was detecting.

The flaw with the white plastic “socket” is that it isn’t anchored to the card – so when you remove the power supply you can slide it forward of the pins without realising.  Lets hope Asus fix this in some of their updated revisions, when they come out.

A quick review of the sound card while I’m here:

Pros: It sounds very nice.  Lots of features.  DTS/DD support is nice.

Cons: Its drivers feel bloaty and it’s EAX support is not hardware, but software.  I’m also noticing some sound glitches in games which I assume is the sound cards fault again.  STALKER: Clear Sky is particularly bad when a distant gunshot is produced.  The sound card clicks in and out of its digital modes as a sound channel is created and destroyed.  Why it can’t hold the DD or DTS on I have no idea.

Summary: Nice hardware ruined by rushed drivers – typical ASUS really.

The error message I received was:

Tonight I finally fixed it!!! Hurrah!!

The problem it seemed was with my Audigy 2 drivers, I’m not sure why Stalker had such a problem with it as every other game, including some equally recent titles had no such problems.  It was pure luck I found this out, nothing I could see pointed me to a potential problem with my sound-card, the only clue I had was that a 0x1000008e error is typically a hardware driver issue.

It was this wonderful little file that fixed it all: http://support.creative.com/downloads/download.aspx?nDownloadId=10581

It wanted to remove my current Audigy driver, which I let it, it then rebooted and went straight back into the installation of the new drivers, one more reboot and it was all complete.

It also looks like creative have wrapped up a nice generic Audigy driver installation, rather than having you pick out the specific model and revision of your sound-card, which never ever worked for me.  Well done creative for finally having a user-friendly driver package.

It’s perhaps also worth noting that the file I linked will update any Audigy series sound-card.

If this worked for you, please link this post or otherwise spread the word.

Learn about some simple engineer tests you can perform on your telephone line.

Before I go any further I need to point out that this test is for British Telecom (BT) analogue phone lines in the UK only. There are likely similar test services out there for other services, but I don”t know of them.

Testing from the local exchange to your building.

In order to rule out interference from inside the building it is important you test at the master socket. This socket is where the copper pair from the street enters your house. You can remove the front panel from the master socket which will disconnect all extensions in your house and reveal a single phone socket. This phone socket is a direct connection to your street.

Connect a good telephone into your master socket and dial 17070.

At the time of writing you hear a female pre-recorded voice say:

This circuit is defined as 01234 123123.
BT line test facilities.
Please press 1 for ring back, 2 for quiet line, 3 for fast test, 4 for fast cleanse or clear down.
[message repeats 3 times]

Select option 2 (quiet line) and listen to what you hear. You should hear perfect silence on the line – there should be no pops, clicks, whistles, buzzing and the like. If you do not hear silence first check it isn’t the phone you are using, wiggle the cable a bit to see if that affects it, if not then you know you have a problem with your line to the BT exchange. Any problems with ADSL connectivity (low speed, connections always dropping, etc) are likely caused by this.

You can now put your master socket together again and re-enable all the phones in your house.

Testing the internal wiring of your building.

So you’ve performed the test at the master socket and all sounds good.

Now you can perform the exact same test again, but this time with a phone where your ADSL modem would connect in. This should include any and all telephone extensions you intend to use.

If you hear noise on the line now you can deduce that the interference is coming from inside your house.

Things to check for are telephone cables running near transformers or motors and compressors, faulty equipment on the line introducing noise. Hopefully by removing equipment and tracing back the line you will be able to identify the source of the noise and replace/remove it.

How far from the local exchange are you?

The BT line test facility allows you to obtain your distance from the exchange. To do this dial the same line test number (17070), select option 3 (fast test) then option 1 (to say you are authorised). Then press option 2 (ring back test) and replace the handset.

After about 10 seconds you will be called back and one of the pieces of information returned will be the distance from the exchange (in kilometres). I understand BT engineers normally repeat this test 3 times and take an average. The results itself are calculated by sending a low amplitude high frequency signal down your line and listening to the farthest reflection (at your house) – therefore they are likely to vary by 100 meters or so.

The number doesn’t work for me, all I get is ”There is no CLI detected for this circuit”.

This means you have Caller ID blocked on your line. To get around this dial instead 1470 17070.

Do you use the .Net Cache API, or the Application State to store this data?

So what”s the difference?

The .Net Cache API is much more flexible than the Application State, but the most important part to understand is that it is volatile storage. This means that there is no guarantee your cached object is going to be there when you next request it. The .Net Runtime may well decide to destroy your cached object to free up memory, or after some explicitly set condition is met such as a caching duration (after which the cache object is destroyed).

The Application State allows you to store objects that will be available for the duration of the applications life, unless you explicitly remove them.

So which is it?

I always use the Application State to store data I wish to be available for the lifetime of the application. I see no reason to use the .Net Cache API simply because I cannot guarantee its behaviour.

If on each (or most) requests you need to use this data, then the most efficient way to write your application is to have it maintain the data indefinitely once it has been created. You are not saving on server resources by having an item removed from memory only to be recreated and added straight back in. You could argue the contrary as the effort to recreate the data will itself use more server resources. (If you are using a shared server then there are considerations here as other sites may have good use for the free memory in between requests.)

What about using caching with ”CacheItemPriority.NotRemovable”?

Great in theory, however I have had issues in the past with busy sites crashing because an object I assume cached suddenly isn’t. I cannot fully explain what happens here, and I always test the cache object exists before initially accessing it, but the problems are with a cached object suddenly becoming ”bad” mid-code block. The most common occurrence of this is when enumerating through a cached collection object.

Even though it should work the same, and if we assume for the sake of argument it works perfectly, there is still no reason to cache an object indefinitely when you can instead store it in the Application State and be confident it will remain there.

So when do you use the .Net Cache API?

Common sense tells you that you can”t possibly store everything you want to in the Application State without using a tremendous amount of memory. This is when caching comes into its own. You can throw a number of objects into cache and .Net Runtime will ensure only the least important objects are removed if more memory is needed. It is extremely easy to use, being no more complex to use than accessing a session variable.

A typical application of mine will contain a combination of both Application State and .Net Cache API. The Application State is used to store small frequently accessed data, and data which would noticeably degrade performance if it was recreated too often. The .Net Cache API is used for everything else, but typically datarows returned from sql tables.

Using the .Net Cache API with commercial shared hosting.

I wish to end this article with an observation of mine when trying to use the .Net Cache API on shared IIS servers. Simply put, it doesn’t work. The Cached objects are cleared out so fast they are unlikely to be there before the next request comes in. I don”t know why this should be the case, possibly too many sites are using the ”CacheItemPriority.NotRemovable” selfishly leaving no space for any other sites, or perhaps simpler still there is too little memory to go around. I have yet to find a shared hosting service where this does not happen, but on dedicated servers the .Net Cache API behaves as it you would expect it to. Please bare this in mind when developing applications destined for a shared server.

Run the speed test at: http://sod.ms/fast/

The test is run by a company based in the UK called Andrews & Arnold Ltd – I have heard nothing but good things about them.

Other speed test websites:

• BT Broadband Performance Tester – This is the site 1st line broadband support will always send you to in the event of you complaining of low speed on your broadband connection. [UK Only]
• Speedtest.net – A bells and whistles broadband speed tester. Seems pretty accurate, but a little too ”feature rich” (read: bloated) for my tastes.

If you know of any other speed tests out there that stand out from the crowd let me know and I”ll add them to this article.