Talking to someone who is not listening is annoying and a waste of time. If there was a foolproof way to check if the person you’re talking to is actually receptive you can spare yourself the trouble of further communication if they aren’t. In case of an automated workflow it can be useful to know if your intended target service is listening on certain ports and based on the outcome perform certain actions / logging / alerting. When you are creating workflows with a tool such as RES Automation Manager it would be nice to check one or more TCP...

According to the documentation you can enable the WebAPI on any dispatcher running the Dispatcher+ Service by simply adding a registry value. This exposes a REST and SOAP interface to some basic interaction with the AM environment. [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\RES\AutomationManager\Dispatcher] “WebAPI”=”yes” This article focuses on the SOAP interface and how to address it from a non-SOAP-speaking entity. E.g. say you want to check a job status or schedule a specific job but the software you want to initiate these actions does not know how to form those fresh foamy xml envelopes. Or perhaps you just want to fiddle around with the SOAP...

My dad came over for coffee with his laptop and asked me if I could “do something to add a little lifetime to it. ” ? Sure! I said, just leave it here and I’ll see what I can do. I knew he had this thing forever, but when I noticed the manufacturing date on the harddisk, 2002, I figured I might have spoken a bit too soon. To get any performance out of this old beast of a machine I figured it needed as much memory as it could handle and a SSD. Where the hell would I get...