The Wiert Corner – irregular stream of stuff

Jeroen W. Pluimers on .NET, C#, Delphi, databases, and personal interests

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Archive for June, 2011

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IBM turns 100 today: Happy birthday, IBM

Posted by jpluimers on 2011/06/16

Today, a lot of articles and blogs will mention IBM’s 100th birthday.

My first encounter were their Selectric typewriters, followed by their PC and AT computers at high-school and university, both setting standards for personal computing.

I’ve used their AS/400 machines (via iSeries now named System i, and merged into their IBM Power Systems), RS/6000 (now System p) and mainframes (via zSeries now named System z) too.

However, being mainly on the PC side, I got totally addicted to their keyboards and to their  ThinkPad line of machines that – as part of IBM’s PC devision – got sold to Lenovo, and their hard drives (which got sold to HGST and are now part of Western Digital).

IBM still do a lot of research, which sets them apart from many other IT companies.

I love that, as a lot of good things has come from it: just google it or browse their lists with highlights on their research accomplishments.

Happy birthday IBM.

–jeroen

Posted in About, Opinions, Personal | Leave a Comment »

Finding out which client process is using a Windows network share

Posted by jpluimers on 2011/06/16

Sometimes when you want to release a network drive you get an error message that something still uses it:
C:\>net use h: /d
The device is being accessed by an active process.

More help is available by typing NET HELPMSG 2404.

Finding out about that something is the trick.
Luckily, Process Explorer allows you to search for handles pointing to resources that start with \device\lanmanredirector, as ASK-LEO explains.

–jeroen

Posted in Power User, Windows, Windows 7, Windows Vista, Windows XP | Leave a Comment »

#TMobile NL #fail: SSL error because of expired certificate when viewing MMS messages

Posted by jpluimers on 2011/06/15

When visting the Dutch TMobile site for viewing MMS messages, you get a big security message indicating their certificate has expired.

In fact, it expired on 20110612.
For me it is unbelievable that nobody at TMobile has been able to get the renewed certificate on-line yet!

In Google Chrome the message reads like this:

The site’s security certificate has expired!
You attempted to reach mmcp2.mms.t-mobile.nl, but the server presented an expired certificate. No information is available to indicate whether that certificate has been compromised since its expiration. This means Google Chrome cannot guarantee that you are communicating with mmcp2.mms.t-mobile.nl and not an attacker. You should not proceed.

Help me understand
When you connect to a secure website, the server hosting that site presents your browser with something called a “certificate” to verify its identity. This certificate contains identity information, such as the address of the website, which is verified by a third party that your computer trusts. By checking that the address in the certificate matches the address of the website, it is possible to verify that you are securely communicating with the website you intended, and not a third party (such as an attacker on your network).

For a certificate which has not expired, the issuer of that certificate is responsible for maintaining something called a “revocation list”. If a certificate is ever compromised, the issuer can revoke it by adding it to the revocation list, and then this certificate will no longer be trusted by your browser. Revocation status is not required to be maintained for expired certificates, so while this certificate used to be valid for the website you’re visiting, at this point it is not possible to determine whether the certificate was compromised and subsequently revoked, or whether it remains secure. As such it is impossible to tell whether you’re communicating with the legitimate web site, or whether the certificate was compromised and is now in the possession of an attacker with whom you are communicating. You should not proceed past this point.

–jeroen

Posted in Power User | Leave a Comment »

Top 10 Mobile Internet Trends

Posted by jpluimers on 2011/06/15

I’ve done quite a bit of mobile research development lately, so it was good to come accross the Top 10 Mobile Internet Trends (Feb 2011) slide deck.

Looking into the future is always surrounded with a lot of uncertainty, but that deck has quite some interesting data.

–jeroen

Posted in Development, Mobile Development | Leave a Comment »

c# – Generics and nullable type – Stack Overflow

Posted by jpluimers on 2011/06/14

A while ago, I needed some generic way of parsing data that could result instancef of both regular ordinal and nullable ordinal types.

Luckily there was a nice question about this on StackOverflow, of which I liked this answer (source code below) much more than the accepted answer: concise, elegant, period.

    public static T? Parse(this string text) where T: struct
    {
        object o = null;
        try
        {
            var ttype = typeof(T);
            if (ttype.IsEnum)
            {
                T n = default(T);
                if (Enum.TryParse(text, true, out n))
                    return n;
            }
            else
                o = Convert.ChangeType(text, ttype);
        }
        catch { }

        if (o == null)
            return new Nullable();

        return new Nullable((T)o);
    }

–jeroen

Posted in .NET, C#, C# 2.0, C# 3.0, C# 4.0, Development, Software Development | 1 Comment »

Resize your VMware ESXi/ESX/vSphere disks (via JJClements.co.uk)

Posted by jpluimers on 2011/06/13

James Clements explains how to resize your VMware ESXi/ESX/vSphere disks.

You can resize the disks live when using ESXi/ESX/vShere 4 and up.

When using Windows Vista or 2008 and up, you don’t need special tools for resizing the partitions on those disks: the built-in disk manager can do it.

When using Windows 2003 Server, Windows XP or less, then you need the EXTPART tool from Dell as explained by GeekSeat:

All you need to do now is provision the extra space to the VM, then run the tool at the command line and follow the wizard:

C:\>extpart.exe
ExtPart - Utility to extend basic disks (Build 1.0.4)
(c) Dell Computer Corporation 2003
.
Volume to extend (drive letter or mount point): c:
Current volume size : 66285 MB (69504860160 bytes)
Current partition size : 76285 MB (79990815744 bytes)
Size to expand the volume (MB): 76285

that’s it – job done . . zero downtime (watch out of course . . this works differently if you have a clustered disk to extend – see: http://geekseat.wordpress.com/2011/01/25/replacing-clustered-storage-for-a-sql-cluster-emc-ce-ms-clustering/ )

Note the “Size to expand” is actually the number of MB you are adding to the volume as Redelijkheid explains.

Sometimes you need to do this in multiple steps as diskmgmt.msc does not always give the free partition space in megabytes.

There is no need to reboot after expanding using ExtPart.

Edit: 20111222; you can download ExtPart through the DELL web-site; there are also direct http downloads of the EXE and README, and direct ftp downloads for the EXE and README.

If you don’t trust ExtPart, there is always the GParted way as explained by BleepingComputer.com.

–jeroen

via: 

Posted in ESXi4, ESXi5, ESXi5.1, Power User, VMware, VMware ESXi | 2 Comments »

Technet / MSDN Subscriber Downloads: downloading the Office Language Pack for your specific languages

Posted by jpluimers on 2011/06/10

In the past the Office 2003 Proofing Tools contained the proofing and grammar tools for many languages.

Not so any more since Office 2007 and up.

So when needing the non-English proofing and grammar tools for a particular VM, I trapped into the same pit I fell in before: downloading the Office Language Pack 2010, I only got the English proofing and grammar tools instead of the tools for many languages.

Downloading them from Technet or MSDN for a particular language is of course easy: for each language you need:

  1. in the “Languages” combobox, select your language
  2. download the Office Language Pack for that language

Duh :)

After that, be sure to switch back the language to your default preferred language ;-)

–jeroen

Posted in Power User | Leave a Comment »

SVN tree to source code of Marco Cantu’s Delphi Books

Posted by jpluimers on 2011/06/09

If you love the Delphi books by Marco Cantu as much as I do, then you certainly will love that Marco has created a public SVN repository at code.marcocantu.com containing all the samples of his Delphi 6, 7, 2007, 2009, 2010 and XE books.

Way to go Marco!

–jeroen

Posted in Delphi, Development, Software Development | 2 Comments »

GExperts version 1.35 was released on June 5th, 2011

Posted by jpluimers on 2011/06/08

Earlier this week, the new GExperts 1.35 Release got published: a free set of expert extensions supporting Delphi 6 through XE.

It is an incremental release has a few new features of which I like the new subgroup support in the Grep Search extensions most.

Now hopefully, Thomas Müller will release an experimental GExperts build of version 1.35 soon: his experimental builds integrate a source code formatter that works across many Delphi versions and often formats better than the one included in Delphi 2010 and up.

–jeroen

Posted in Delphi, Development, Software Development | 4 Comments »

Delphi sorcery – great new blog by Stefan Glienke: DataBinding, MEF, Lamda Expressions and more

Posted by jpluimers on 2011/06/07

I just came across the great new Delphi sorcery blog by Stefan Glienke from Soest, NRW, Germany.

He uses some cool new features recently introduced into Delphi for new ways of DataBinding, Yield-Return, Delphi Lambda Expressions, Delphi Dependency Injection with MEF and more.

Sample code is at his Delphi Sorcery Google Project.

I hoped that somebody would do all that, as this shows the real power of what Delphi can do.

Now it’s there for

–jeroen

Posted in Delphi, Development, Software Development | 2 Comments »

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