Archive for 2014
Posted by jpluimers on 2014/10/02
It is always cool to see some mashups: apart from great examples, they also make for some good research material.
–jeroen
Posted in Development, Google, GoogleMaps, Power User, Software Development, Web Development | Leave a Comment »
Posted by jpluimers on 2014/10/01
I’ve been experimenting with the Delphi hinting directives lately to make it easier to migrate some libraries to newer versions of Delphi and newer platforms.
Hinting directives (deprecated, experimental, library and platform) were – like the $MESSAGE directive – added to Delphi 6.
Up to Delphi 5 you didn’t have any means to declare code obsolete. You had to find clever ways around it.
Warnings for hinting directives
When referring to identifiers marked with a hinting directive, you can get various warning messages that depend on the kind of identifier: unit, or other symbol. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Apple Pascal, Borland Pascal, DEC Pascal, Delphi, Delphi 2005, Delphi 2006, Delphi 2007, Delphi 2009, Delphi 2010, Delphi 6, Delphi 7, Delphi 8, Delphi XE, Delphi XE2, Delphi XE3, Delphi XE4, Development, Encoding, FreePascal, ISO-8859, ISO8859, Java, Lazarus, MQ Message Queueing/Queuing, QC, Reflection, Software Development, Sybase, Unicode, UTF-8, UTF8 | 2 Comments »
Posted by jpluimers on 2014/09/30
I recently bumped into the NTCore website by Daniel Pisti.
At a client without my own VMs, I wanted to create a DebugBreak like function in Delphi, which I remembered from my Turbo Pascal days to be something like Inline($CC). So searching for both Delphi and INT 3, I found an EXE injection page at NTCore.
In Delphi, you can do this with a procedure like this, which cannot be inlined because it has an asm block:
procedure DebugBreak();
asm
int 3
end;
(Reminder to self: sort out what to do here to break on an iOS device; Xcode has an alternative)
The site has information about system internals and software security posted as articles until 2009, when he switched to blog posts. Besides that, he has written a bunch of interesting articles at CodeProject. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Delphi, Development, Pascal, Power User, Software Development, Turbo Pascal, Windows, xCode/Mac/iPad/iPhone/iOS/cocoa | 3 Comments »
Posted by jpluimers on 2014/09/29
Funny to discover these two articles today:
–jeroen
Posted in https, Power User, Security | Leave a Comment »
Posted by jpluimers on 2014/09/29
Every once in a while you’re looking for a solution to a problem, and slap yourself to the head that you’ve been overlooking a real obvious solution.
This case: finding duplicate files on Mac OS X.
pendlewitch had this great tip: use the Finder!
You can do this in Finder for free, it’s a bit time consuming but if you’ll get them all eventually.
- Open a new Finder window
- In the search field, enter the wild card asterisk symbol *
- Arrange by Size
I find it best in List view.
Prepare to be gobsmacked at how much duplication you do have.
I totally agree with his last sentence (:
–jeroen
via: Best Free Duplicate File Finder Program – Mac-Forums Discussions for Apple Products & Services.
Posted in Apple, Mac, Mac OS X / OS X / MacOS, Mac OS X 10.7 Lion, MacBook, MacBook Retina, MacBook-Air, MacBook-Pro, OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion, Power User | 4 Comments »
Posted by jpluimers on 2014/09/26
Thanks to the wonderful people at the opensuse forums (especially Knurpht and wolfi323) for helping me out with opensuse 12.2: yast “System Services (Runlevel): Services” very slow: how to investigate.
The solution is to install openldap2, then reboot.
The easiest way is to perform this under sudo:
zypper install openldap2
Somehow in opensuse 12.2 yast, sendmail and apache depend on it (though the yast/zypper software installer don’t recognize the dependency).
Without the reboot, yast was still slow. Not sure why yet.
I will need to check this out in the most current opensuse release.
–jeroen
via: opensuse 12.2: yast “System Services (Runlevel): Services” very slow: how to investigate.
Posted in *nix, Linux, openSuSE, Power User, SuSE Linux | Leave a Comment »
Posted by jpluimers on 2014/09/25
Unpatched bash allows for remote code execution.
Patch as soon as you can and be aware that the current patches might not be complete.
Many vendors (including Debian, Red Hat, SuSE, Ubuntu) already have patches available: CERT/NIST reveal level 10 bash alert today, 24 September 2014.
This is a long article which explains the why/how/… and has an easy check to see if you are vulnerable: What is the CVE-2014-6271 bash vulnerability and, how do I fix it.
It looks like the current patches aren’t complete yet, but do plug big parts of the hole.
Watch bash CVEs in Ubuntu and CVE-2014-7169 in Ubuntu (and maybe for other nx varieties as well).
Update:
Quote from the article:
Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in *nix, *nix-tools, bash, Development, Power User, Scripting, Software Development | Leave a Comment »
Posted by jpluimers on 2014/09/25
If you are going to do test driven development and unit testing, you should watch these videos and slide decks, most of them by Miško Hevery:
- Not a video, but a good starter: Guide: Writing Testable Code (or read the PDF version).
- 0:32:07 ▶ “The Clean Code Talks — Unit Testing” – YouTube.
- 0:37:56 ▶ The Clean Code Talks – Don’t Look For Things! – YouTube. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in .NET, Agile, C#, Delphi, Development, Java, Java Platform, JavaScript/ECMAScript, Pascal, Scripting, Software Development, Unit Testing, VB.NET | 2 Comments »
Posted by jpluimers on 2014/09/24
A while ago, I had a client with an exception on a workstation.
There was no permission to run a debugger on their system, or use something like MadExcept or Exceptional Magic in their code base.
The exception looked like this:
---------------------------
Application Error
---------------------------
Exception EInOutError in module MyApplication.exe at 001656B1.File access denied.
---------------------------
OK
---------------------------
These are the steps to get at the source line in an x86 Delphi program (I still have to try the x64, but presume it works similarly): Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Delphi, Delphi 2005, Delphi 2006, Delphi 2007, Delphi 2009, Delphi 2010, Delphi 7, Delphi XE, Delphi XE2, Delphi XE3, Delphi XE4, Development, Software Development | 3 Comments »
Posted by jpluimers on 2014/09/23
Almost 4 years ago, I compared XSD.EXE to some on-line tools. Time for a follow-up.
From the old post:
XML Utilities has since then moved to a new domain: www.xmlutilities.net; the other 2 are still at their original locations.
New on-line generators I got pointed at by Mark O’Connor’s stackoverflow answer:
- Free Online XSD/XML Schema Generator From XML – FreeFormatter.com.
- XML to XSD Generater Online – xmlGrid.net.
Neither of them can generate the XML types separately like XmlForAsp XML Schema Generator does.
But the first one does get attributes right, whereas all the others often skip some or all of the attributes.
–jeroen
via Generate XSD from XML – XSD.EXE versus on-line tools « The Wiert Corner – irregular stream of stuff.
Posted in Development, Software Development, XML, XML/XSD, XSD | 4 Comments »
The Wiert Corner - irregular stream of stuff 