Ranjan Banerji

I am so certain that I blogged about this issue but now I can’t find it.  It would indeed be embarrassing if I did blog this, for it would imply that my search skills totally suck. :-)

So recently I purchased a Sony LCD HDTV.  Like most modern home entertainment electronic devices the TV comes with Netflix, You Tube and and host of other capabilities built into it.  The TV is also a DLNA compatible client.  What this means is that it can receive media (music, images, video) from any DLNA server (your computer, various NAS drives, etc) on your home network.  This last feature about the TV being a DLNA client I found cool.

I have a Thecus N2100 NAS drive and I use it as a backup for images as I do a lot of photography.  I figured using a nice large screen TV as a means to view the photographs could be cool.  So I set up the TV to receive media from the Thecus NAS drive.  I could now listen to music (I don’t see the point of doing so via my TV), watch videos, and view images stored on my NAS drive.

While viewing images I realized that none of the images from my photography collection were viewable.  This was strange.  They were just regular JPG images.  Luckily I had other images too.  And they were viewable.  There was something about my images that the Sony TV did not like.  After much trial and error I realized that any image processed by any Adobe product would not render on the Sony TV.  I shoot in RAW and then use Adobe Lightroom.  To test this out I took RAW images from my Canon and saved them as JPG using Corel Paint Shop Pro.  These JPGs rendered fine.  But if I used Lightroom they would not.  I even tried tricks such as telling Lightroom to save the image without any EXIF or other similar data.  No luck.  When I have more time I will try and see what the difference is between JPG generated by Adobe vs. any other software in the world.

I called Sony and after hours of being on hold and being passed from one level of support to another I finally spoke to their so called expert who had no clue of what I was talking about.  It took me a good 15 minutes to simply explain the problem to the guy.  His final response was that this is not a problem with Sony.

Now I do agree that its got to be something the Adobe is doing, but these images are viewable on various computers, display types and operating systems.  So part of the blame has to be on Sony too.

Sigh!!!!!

Recently noticed that an application was throwing a System.OutOfMemoryException.  A little bit of analysis determined that the exception was being thrown from the application/middle tier which is accessed by the client/web tier via .Net Remoting.  The error was occurring when trying to get a DataSet from the middle tier to the front end via a .Net Remoting interface.  At first I thought the DataSet was huge and using up too much memory.  But on further analysis I noticed that the code for retrieving the data and filling the DataSet worked just fine.  The OutOfMemoryException was occurring somewhere between leaving the remoting host and entering the web code.

That’s when it occurred to me that the problem maybe in the Binary Formatter.  A quick search on the web confirmed my hunch.  The error occurs during the serialization of the DataSet.  To prevent the problem use the RemotingFormat property.  This holds true for a DataTable too.