Tip: Be Administrator

Programming is full of ambiguous surprises :D You keep writing code, or configuring your environment just to be faced by a mysterious error message that takes you into a long cycle of search - try - search...etc

Okay, enough chitchat...

I was developing something against Azure Storage. For some reasons, I wanted to have my Azure Development Storage Emulator running on other machine than the development machine...

Well, that's pretty easy... Here are a couple of posts telling you how to do so:

• Configuring Azure development storage for team development scenarios
• Reaching Azure Development Fabriq from a remote machine

You just need to change the (127.0.0.1) in the "DSService.exe.config" file to the {IP Address} assigned to your network card. After starting the development storage service you will be able to let other computers on the network do work on this emulator.

However, you may get into problems running the service after modifying the config file! And that's my case.. I kept seeing "Access Denied" error message when trying to start the storage emulator :)

After some search, I dropped into this question on msdn. The answer was telling that the fabric and storage services can't listen on IPs other than the 127.0.0.1 for some reasons.. One of these reasons was:

Both of these are likely to be run as administrator...

So, I thought to use the "Run As Administrator" option in Windows. And YESS, It Worked :)

If you still have problems reaching the server after getting the storage emulator running and listening on the machine assigned IP, you may check your firewall settings.

Good Luck!

Innovative Maze Solving with Mathematica

A typical data structures assignment involves using stacks/queues to generate/solve mazes. This is usually performed by variants of BFS or DFS. As many of my students are currently busy with this task, I thought of presenting them a number of nontraditional solutions incorporating a real world example and some advanced techniques.

There has been a series of posts on a this problem on the Wolfram blog attacking the hedge maze at the Blenheim Palace. The solutions presented started with processing the aerial image acquired from Bing Maps, and proceeded to explore a variety of techniques from standard graph theory to a twisted application of topology.

The series progressed as follows:

• aMAZEing Image Processing in Mathematica


• Navigating the Blenheim Maze


• The Battle of the Marlborough Maze at Blenheim Palace Continues


• Retreat from Blenheim

Hope you find it interesting!