FIX: Fix Plex Media Server Remote Access / Unable to Connect to Plex from The Internet (code=-52)
Monday, April 6, 2015Symptoms
You've opened the ports on your firewall and verified that they are open via an open port check tool on the Internet.You've tried Why am I locked out of Server after password reset or device token removal. You've successfully pulled out many locks of hair (optional).
You've even turned on UPnP on your router, just to test (you can turn it off, just make sure the port is opened and forwarded correctly).
Error 52 / code=-52
Your log has this line:WARN - MyPlex: Invalid response when mapping state (code=-52)
What's happening
Some part of the Remote Access registration process fails if the host operating system is configured to use Jumbo Frames. If you don't know what that means, that's OK. I'm running an OpenSuSE Linux box as my Plex server and I am not a Linux expert, so I can't even really tell you where to go (if you know, leave a comment, please!).For OpenSUSE, do the following:
$ sudo yast ... Your password ...In yast, go to Network Devices and select Network Settings.
Select each network adapter and choose Edit.
Go to the General tab and change the MTU to a value that will prevent Jumbo Frames (1400 is a safe test value for most people, but you can google your optimal based on the kind of broadband you subscribe to).
Exit and try it all again (I restarted the plex server as well, just for good measure).
Nermerle, Nitra, Parsing and Functional Programming
Monday, March 30, 2015Functional Programming
I started looking into Functional Programming about ten years ago and when F# 1.0 came out, I decided to start paying attention again. I initially explored it as part of a project I had embarked upon to parse a DSL and provide a suitable development environment that a non-developer could use to customize my application. It was a lofty goal and ultimately was scrapped in favor of a much stripped down model that was driven via web forms and a small subset of the features, but the DSL was still available for more complex needs.Parsing HLSL
Recently that need arose again. I've been messing around with WPF Shader Effects and 2D sprites. No, I'm not developing a game (sorry, no real interest here). The biggest frustration for me has been the lack of debugging information available. My usual process for exploring new languages is a combination of reading/research and poking/reverse engineering. I was the kid that took apart every piece of broken/outdated electronics growing up. After picking up "The Basics", I usually dive right in and write some (terrible) code to see what it does. I'll also read/step through open source code that I think I conceptually understand to validate my understanding.Hlsl makes my learning process more difficult. I can't step through the code; I can't watch. The way it encodes colors into float4 values is sufficiently different from what you'd expect that predicting what the value would be requires you to know about things like Premultiplied Alpha, mapping textures to float values between 0 and 1. Your college calculus class will come in handy even if you did poorly as most things related to programming/math require you to have a good understanding of how it works even if you don't remember the details. Wolfram|Alpha will will help you if you've forgotten the specifics.
Built-in IDE tools provide barely any information when the HLSL files are rendered by WPF. I'm not sure how valuable they are outside of that, but they're useless here. The larger tools available from NVidia/Intel are overkill and mostly don't cover the areas I was hoping (the NVidia product simply didn't support most of its features on my particular GPU ... Notebooks).
Building a narrow-purpose IDE
I started out exploring WPF ShaderEffects using the wonderful Shazzam. Unfortunately, at the time of this writing, downloading the tool from his site isn't possible but a slightly outdated version (in code only) can be acquired from CodePlex. I tweaked it a bit for my purposes and created a shader effect that I mostly liked. Getting to the fine details, though, was difficult and I knew I'd need more insight into what was going on.Enter Nemerle, F# and Nitra
The first thing I wanted was better parsing of the code before compile. I went digging around and found a syntax highlighting definition for HLSL. The language has some unique elements, such as Vectors whos parts are accessed via array notation, or .xyzw .agbr notation. It's quite elegant, but my eyes weren't naturally parsing it coming from languages that didn't do that.The rabbit hole began there. The editor used by Shazzam was a way old version of that used by SharpDevelop. It's since been updated and the core text editor can be grabbed independently from NuGet as AvalonEdit. It works quite differently from the version offered by Shazzam, and syntax highlighting is much more powerful. So I created a Syntax Highlighting Definition for AvalonEdit that would color the .argb items as a variant of gray, red, green and blue and used shades of gray with underlining for the wxyz (I'll get the definition out on GitHub when I have a chance and link to it here).
The Shazzam tool was also missing Intellisense and some of the code signals that Visual Studio provides, so I went looking for a solution there knowing that my old friend F# was probably going to find a way back into my life for this one.
Surprisingly, it was Nemerle and the [Nitra Project from JetBrains]|(http://blog.jetbrains.com/blog/2013/11/12/an-introduction-to-nitra/) that got my attention this time. Tom Jones' Getting Started with JetBrains Nitra specifically covered parsing HLSL! Thanks for that!
It lacked the ability to understand shader2D and had no preprocessor support, but after adding shader2D, I now had a library that easily integrated with AvalonEdit to provide syntax highlighting failures and guidance for repair... All from a concise syntax file.
I wanted something a little more. Inspired a while ago by Bret Victor's Ted Talk, I decided to see if I could create an IDE that would give useful feedback about how the program works while it is being developed. HLSL is a limited purpose language, and WPF ShaderEffects limitations limit it even further. It's the perfect target for an IDE that gives intelligent feedback about the program being written while it is being written. By providing sample inputs and the ability to provide custom inputs for the function, a person can see what the outcome of the code would be in various scenarios,... as close to live as possible.
At this point, I'm building a new HLSL parser specifically targetting the limitations imposed by WPF to ensure that code syntax and rules are followed carefully.
I'm then going to start evaluating ...
Enter the God Awful Visitor Pattern
I'm an OOP guy most of the time. The pattern fits well much of the time and most .Net programmers are comfortable with it. However, The Visitor Pattern hurts my brain.C# lacks Multiple Dispatch without the DLR. I'm not interested in passing type safety all the way to runtime. The Visitor Pattern is the way around that problem. The pattern is relatively straight forward, but figuring out its intent by looking at the code is painful. F# and Nemerle have pattern matching capabilities and allow multiple dispatch. The resulting code is readable with a small reference to the syntax (Nemerle is easier to read coming from C# than F#, IMHO) and the amount of resulting code is substantially less.
My Plan for Next Time
Unfortunately, this is not my day job. It's Saturday/Sunday Early Morning/Late Evening work. I have no code samples at the moment because I just moved my F# code to Nemerle (and it's so much easier to understand). I hope to spend some time with the parser next weekend when I will have a little more time to poke at it. If I get it to the point I want it, I'll write it up and thow it out on GitHub.Until then ... Don't panic!
Nemerle documentation can be found here.
Nitra syntax, not terribly well documented, but somewhat easy to follow after going through the Nemerle documentation.
HOWTO: Add Code Syntax Highlighting to your Blogger / BlogSpot Blog
Tuesday, March 24, 2015Solving my own problems
Last year I decided to poke about in my blog again and managed to utterly destroy the template along with all of my past customizations. I've decided to take the time to figure this out and then document it so that I can do it again when I decide to "code in production" again. So in the typical, slimmed down style, here's how it's done.- Get to your blog's dashboard (log in, select blog from blogger dashboard).
- Select Template on the left hand navigation and Edit HTML on the screen that loads
- Locate the </head> tag (side note for testing later: better to not put this in head because it will prevent page from displaying until loaded).
- Paste the (hopefully now highlighted) code below. We're using cdnjs as the host for the .js scripts. I've read other instructions that suggest hot-linking directly to the author's site. I checked the install instructions on the site and he specifically asks you to copy the files locally.
Template Code
Here's the code I added to <head>:<script type="text/javascript" src="https://cdnjs.cloudflare.com/ajax/libs/SyntaxHighlighter/3.0.83/scripts/shCore.min.js"></script> <script type="text/javascript" src="https://cdnjs.cloudflare.com/ajax/libs/SyntaxHighlighter/3.0.83/scripts/shBrushPlain.min.js"></script> <script type="text/javascript" src="https://cdnjs.cloudflare.com/ajax/libs/SyntaxHighlighter/3.0.83/scripts/shBrushCSharp.min.js"></script> <script type="text/javascript" src="https://cdnjs.cloudflare.com/ajax/libs/SyntaxHighlighter/3.0.83/scripts/shBrushBash.min.js"></script> <script type="text/javascript" src="https://cdnjs.cloudflare.com/ajax/libs/SyntaxHighlighter/3.0.83/scripts/shBrushJScript.js"></script> <script type="text/javascript" src="https://cdnjs.cloudflare.com/ajax/libs/SyntaxHighlighter/3.0.83/scripts/shBrushXml.js"></script> <script type="text/css" src=""></script> <link href="https://cdnjs.cloudflare.com/ajax/libs/SyntaxHighlighter/3.0.83/styles/shCore.min.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" /> <link href="https://cdnjs.cloudflare.com/ajax/libs/SyntaxHighlighter/3.0.83/styles/shThemeMidnight.min.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" /> <script type="text/javascript"> SyntaxHighlighter.config.bloggerMode = true; SyntaxHighlighter.all(); </script>
And the Html
I've included the exact HTML used to render the above. Note that the "<"'s are all replaced with <. That's a limitation I've decided to accept rather than using the alternative <script> block style.<pre class="brush:js"> <script type="text/javascript" src="https://cdnjs.cloudflare.com/ajax/libs/SyntaxHighlighter/3.0.83/scripts/shCore.min.js"></script> <script type="text/javascript" src="https://cdnjs.cloudflare.com/ajax/libs/SyntaxHighlighter/3.0.83/scripts/shBrushCSharp.min.js"></script> <script type="text/javascript" src="https://cdnjs.cloudflare.com/ajax/libs/SyntaxHighlighter/3.0.83/scripts/shBrushBash.min.js"></script> <script type="text/javascript" src="https://cdnjs.cloudflare.com/ajax/libs/SyntaxHighlighter/3.0.83/scripts/shBrushJScript.js"></script> <script type="text/css" src="https://cdnjs.cloudflare.com/ajax/libs/SyntaxHighlighter/3.0.83/scripts/shBrushXml.js"></script> <link href="https://cdnjs.cloudflare.com/ajax/libs/SyntaxHighlighter/3.0.83/styles/shCore.min.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" /> <link href="https://cdnjs.cloudflare.com/ajax/libs/SyntaxHighlighter/3.0.83/styles/shThemeMidnight.min.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" /> <script type="text/javascript" src="https://cdnjs.cloudflare.com/ajax/libs/SyntaxHighlighter/3.0.83/scripts/shBrushXml.js"></script> <script type="text/javascript"> SyntaxHighlighter.config.bloggerMode = true; SyntaxHighlighter.all(); </script> </pre class="brush:js">
Customizing for your purposes
SyntaxHighlighter can be customized. At this point, there's many available syntaxes to choose from. Find the brush you want and visit the cdn.js page for SyntaxHighlighter to get the link.There's also plenty of themes. Find what you want, visit the cdn.js page for a link and add it to the scripts above.
Weekend Adventures in Coding - Visual Studo Customization - Order of Adornment Layers
Saturday, February 14, 2015Font rendering was helped by re-running the OSes Clear Type configuration and installing Text Sharp. If this sort of thing is important to you, you also want this free gem: MacType. It causes Windows to render fonts in a way that is more similar to a Mac which I find improves readability substantially. Unfortunately, it doesn't work perfectly everywhere, but some of Visual Studio is affected.
I've decided today to see if I can apply the last bit, a white shadow to text. This is a common effect throughout MacOS/iOS and I find it improves readability (particularly for high-contrast backgrounds).
Here's what I'm looking to apply (apologies for formatting, I'll get the code formatter working again, soon).
item.Effect = new DropShadowEffect
{
Opacity = 0.34,
ShadowDepth = 9,
Direction = 542,
BlurRadius = 9,
Color=Colors.White
};
Finding an efficient way to do this (preferably without having to hack about with Reflection) has been frustrating, but I've managed to apply all kinds of effects elsewhere while I was attempting to fill in the gaps of the documentation with some reverse engineering.Default order of Adornment Layers
While poking about, I thought it might be helpful to know the order of the default adornment layers. I just started (re-)evaluating OzCode and it was picked up by the "Exp" (temporary debug instance), so some of these belong to that. I'm also on CU4 so any that aren't documented may belong to that (search PredefinedAdornmentLayers or hit F1 for the documented ones).CodeBackgroundTextAdornment
vsMergeHighLightSpaceAdornment
Outlining
DiffernceChanges
Difference Space
BraceCompletion
DeltaFullLineAdornment
DeltaNegativeSpaceAdornment
HtmlProvisionalTextHighlight
CurrentLineHighlighter
VsTextMarker
TextMarker
HighlightCommentAdornment
SelectionAndProvisionalHighlight
Inter Line Adornment
Squiggle
LineSeparator
CollaborationMethodEndorsement
ScriptDebuggerSectionDivider
Text
PinnedLayer
vsMergeHighlightSpaceAdornmentAboveText
SmartTag
DragDropAdornmentLayer
Intra Text Adornment
VisibleWhiteSpace
Caret
SimplifyVisualController
PinnableTips
InitialDifferenceWaitingAdornmetLayers
HtmlChrome
I have no idea what I'll be doing with these, but that's the fun of reverse engineering. If you have to do such a task, OzCode is very helpful. It allows searching the contents of objects through several layers and can surface interesting bits to play with. This is, of course, experimental and likely will break between updates, but they've made extending Visual Studio so easy, it's not that bad to tweak between updates/versions. More to come if I figure this out!
Another chapter after 17 years
Saturday, February 7, 2015On to new things!
After 17 years, I have decided to resign my position at Level (3). 17 years. That's a lifetime in IT. I started at a small telecom located in Southfield, MI and ended up at an international telecom with a headquarters in Broomfield.What a ride
I started as a desktop tech, within a half-year I was doing servers. Ultimately Allnet was purchased by Frontier, Frontier by Global Crossing and then the bottom fell out. For the remaining years until about last year, I worked for a company that was effectively a start-up in a very competitive sector. Layoffs every year were normal while Global Crossing struggled (and ultimately succeeded) with survival. Level 3 purchased Global Crossing in 2011. For 15 of those 17 years, I rode the wave down and for the last two I've been riding it back up. It was strange working for a company that was not operating in survival mode.It was 17 years for me, but nearly every year I was given a new position, more responsibility and new and interesting projects. Mix in the fact that I was working amongst, what I considered to be, some of the best people in our industry.
Onto Development
I'd always been a programmer. I'm not sure why I took the ops route originally, but within two years I was writing code that was changing the way our employees worked and I knew right away that this is what I was made to do. I love programming...love it. Over the years I was given the freedom to code, experiment and learn. I quickly jumped on the C# bandwagon, missing the days of hacking about in C and Pascal/Delphi and fell in love. And I learned...So why now?
After 17 years, I've discovered that it's time for me to move on. During my time at Level 3, I had the privilege of working on some special projects involving Lync and Office Communications Server. This was my first exposure to an API that I couldn't simply Bing (there's one for you, MS) a million answers from people who had just learned the API. The APIs I was working with were pre-release, but after release the situation wasn't much better. For some reason, I enjoyed this immensely!What now?
I had sent my resume out to Modality, a Microsoft Partner and a company with a very successful business in the Lync space, earlier last year. This wasn't unusual for me. If someone mentioned a job that sounded interesting to me, I usually prepped my resume, took and interview and turned down the job. It's happened so many times over the years that I almost expected to make the same decision when Modality had a position available to me. After talking to the guys over there, much to my own surprise, my mind was made up.I'll be a US based, "work from home" (I prefer remote) employee working for a company that sells services and software for an application that, since 2008, has been the reason I could work effectively as a remote employee for Global Crossing and ultimately Level 3. Being a part of a company that was an early adopter--eliminating all phones on PCs and replacing them with USB headsets and speakerphones was far less of an adjustment than anyone could imagine---was great for me. The quality and effectiveness of audio conferences suddenly made it possible to have a workforce that was distributed far and wide without losing much other than water-cooler conversation.
Finally
Farewell, my Level 3 coworkers and friends! You are among the best and many thanks for the help, support and just-plain-fun you've given me over the last 17 years.
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I write code, sometimes from a beach.