The Wiert Corner – irregular stream of stuff

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

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Archive for January, 2016

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Handy new tool: GitHub Contributions Archive based on the GitHub Archive providing your github history

Posted by jpluimers on 2016/01/05

The GitHub Contributions Archive is based on the GitHub Archive (see below) and provides insight in anyones contributions. I discovered through a recent post by Ilya Grigorik:

Handy new tool (built on top of githubarchive.org dataset!) that aggregates all of your GitHub activity: bit.ly/1mraQyT.Apparently I’ve contributed to… – Ilya Grigorik – Google+

The GitHub Archive is amazing as it provides way more history than Github does by itself:

GitHub Archive is a project to record the public GitHub timeline, archive it, and make it easily accessible for further analysis.

Researching that data can provide tons of information, for instance about behaviour. It is also available through Google BigQuery so you can write your own queries for it.

The GitHub Contributions Archive – built by Liam Bowen – provides one (very usable) kind of insight: contributions, but there is much much more as quite some research, visualizations and talks have shown.

Interesting stuff!

–jeroen

Posted in Development, DVCS - Distributed Version Control, git, GitHub, Power User, Software Development, Source Code Management | Leave a Comment »

finding and deleting Windows EFI partitions with wmic and diskpart

Posted by jpluimers on 2016/01/05

DiskMgmt.msc does not allow you to delete EFI partitions.

I tried with WMI first.

wmic has a nice assoc mode that allows you to find associated classes like the logical drive association to physical partitions.

But lets start simple: physical partitions and logical drives.

C:\temp>wmic partition get DeviceID, DiskIndex, Index, Type
DeviceID               DiskIndex  Index  Type
Disk #1, Partition #0  1          0      GPT: System
Disk #0, Partition #0  0          0      Installable File System

C:\temp>wmic logicaldisk get Caption, DriveType, FileSystem, ProviderName, VolumeName
Caption  DriveType  FileSystem  ProviderName  VolumeName
C:       3          NTFS
D:       5

These Associations:

They can be hard to use.

LogicalDisks are bound to a Partition, but a Partition does not need to have a Logical Disk.

I wanted the other way around: finding partitions not having a LogicalDisk association. But that does not seem to be possible with WMI at all.

Heck, detecting EFI partitions with WMI seems to be impossible.

DiskPart

Even though there needs to be a 15 second delay between DiskPart invocations:

you must allow at least 15 seconds between each script for a complete shutdown of the previous execution before running the DiskPart command again in successive scripts

it seems to be the only way to go.

But it is hard, as there seems to be no way to convert from volume (which lists the EFI partition as ESP), to disk+partition.

So a way to automate what How to delete a protected EFI disk partition with Windows 7 or 8 | WinAbility Software describes seems impossible.

Any thoughts on that?

This is what I have done so far

  1. diskpart
  2. list volume
    1. now note the volume that has ESP
  3. list disk
  4. for each disk
    1. select disk #
    2. list disk
      1. to confirm you selected the correct disk
    3. list partition
    4. select partiton #
    5. list partition
      1. to confirm you selected the correct partition
    6. list volume
      1. to confirm the partition indeeds corresponds to the EFI volume
    7. delete partition override
    8. list volume
    9. list partition
    10. for each partition coming after the EFI partition
      1. select partition #
      2. list partition
        1. to confirm
      3. delete partition
      4. list partition
        1. to confirm

Now you can create a new partition on the disk.

–jeroen

via:

Posted in Batch-Files, Development, Power User, Scripting, Software Development, Windows | Leave a Comment »

D-1541 with increased speed plus support for SR-IOV and DDR3 memory might end up in Supermicro SYS-5028D-TN4T somewhere in februari

Posted by jpluimers on 2016/01/04

I wrote about TinkerTry’s Xeon D-1540 fueled ESXi 6.0 home lab build begins LIVE! before as I think it is an amazing buy.

In the mean time, there are more some bundles of it available, even one shipping from The Netherlands:

Currently these machines (called SYS-5028D-TN4T) contain a Xeon D-1540 processor and use the X10SDV-TLN4F that also lists the Xeon D-1541 processor which will likekly be available on that board starting from about February. The Xeon D-1541 processor which adds new features: is about 5% faster and adds support for both SR-IOV (which can help with virtualisation, but isn’t supported by ESXi on these processors yet), DDR3 memory and Storage Performance Development Kit support for storage acceleration: Intel Xeon D-15×1 Storage Accelerated SKUs.

You have to choose, as they use the FCBGA 1667 which – like any other BGA – are soldered. So if you need these feaures and can wait 2 more months, then go for the Xeon D-1541. Otherwise, order now.

Some articles to help you decide:

On a different topic: if you want to cool the processor better, consider re-applying cooling paste: Socket FCBGA 1667 aftermarket cooling?? | Page 2 | ServeTheHome and ServeThe.Biz Forums.

And finally two more things:

  1. There is a D-1548 too which compared to the D-1540 has the CPU speed, but adds SR-IOV and DDR3 memory support.
  2. There will be 12-core and 16-cores varieties in the Xeon-D series later this  year: Intels Server-Prozessor Xeon D-1500: 16-Kern-Version tritt 2016 gegen ARM-SoCs an | heise online.
    According to the current SuperMicro Xeon-D information these will be available in boards that seem to fit in the SYS-5028D-TN4T system:

    1. X10SDV-12C-TLN4F.
    2. X10SDV-16C+-TLN4F.

Anyway: I think with either processor, you have a great deal!

–jeroen

Posted in ECC memory, Hardware, Memory, Power User, Virtualization, VMware, VMware ESXi | 1 Comment »

TaskMgr gripes

Posted by jpluimers on 2016/01/04

Bad bad TaskMgr: showing less information than before.

Bad bad TaskMgr: showing less information than before.

Many people regard the task manager introduced in Windows 8 not as a big success. Of course there is Process Explorer, but you need to download that and it’s quite heavy.

A long thread with a lot of complaints is at The new Task Manager is stressing me like crazy, so if you miss something, look there if it is covered.

The thread also mentions where the TaskMgr stores its settings. Which is important as TaskMgr destroys its in-memory settings when windows auto-update restarts your system. Which it does very often. This is the scenario:

  1. TaskMgr starts
    1. Reads settings from registry
    2. Erases settings from registry
  2. TaskMgr runs
  3. Windows-updates reboots automagically

What Microsoft expects to be the normal scenario is this:

  1. TaskMgr starts
    1. Reads settings from registry
    2. Erases settings from registry
  2. TaskMgr runs
  3. User stops all applications before updating
  4. TaskMgr quits
    1. TaskMgr saves settings to registry
  5. Windows-updates reboots

This also happens in many other scenarios (for instance when logging off, Windows only waits a short while for all applications to stop voluntarily, then just kills them).

This queries the content:

reg query HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\TaskManager

This saves the settings once:

reg export HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\TaskManager "%APPDATA%\TaskMgr8.settings"

This imports when needed:

reg import "%APPDATA%\TaskMgr8.settings"

Note that the files is a traditional .reg file, but I use a different extension to you cannot accidentally import them.

If you really want, you can install the Windows 7 TaskMgr and have it act as Debugger over the new one (this doesn’t overwrite it, just replace the behaviour) with a registry script. See How to restore the good old Task Manager in Windows 8

–jeroen

Posted in Power User, Windows, Windows 8, Windows 8.1, Windows 9 | Leave a Comment »

How too many vCPUs can negatively affect performance | Gabes Virtual World

Posted by jpluimers on 2016/01/03

Interesting:

Think twice before you give VMs extra vCPUs which they don’t really need. You can negatively impact the performance of your environment since the vmkernel has to try and find a time slot in which it can give all vCPUs access to the physical cores.

Source: How too many vCPUs can negatively affect performance | Gabes Virtual World

Related:

–jeroen

Posted in ESXi5, ESXi5.1, ESXi5.5, Power User, Virtualization, VMware, VMware ESXi | Leave a Comment »

How do I scroll in tmux? – Super User

Posted by jpluimers on 2016/01/02

Ctrl-b then [ then you can use your normal navigation keys to scroll around (eg. Up Arrow or PgDn). Press q to quit scroll mode.

Source: How do I scroll in tmux? – Super User

Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a Comment »

From my paper archives: early QuickReport materials and BDE network installation tips

Posted by jpluimers on 2016/01/01

[WayBack] While cleaning up my “attic”, I came across some old QuickReport 1.0 documents and BDE installation tips so I scanned them.

I think the first document is by this Lars Søndergaard.

The last is by Dave Robinson, then working at Amber Computer Systems Inc, but I could not find on-line activity of him If you know him, please let me know his on-line contact info.

–jeroen

Posted in Delphi, Delphi 1, Development, History, Software Development | 2 Comments »

Hack the Remote Desktop .RDP file

Posted by jpluimers on 2016/01/01

Glad I found out about the string to add to a .RDP file to make it connect to the administrative console whenever your remote supports that:

connect to console:i:1

–jeroen

via: Hack the Remote Desktop .RDP file.

Posted in Power User, Remote Desktop Protocol/MSTSC/Terminal Services, Windows | 1 Comment »

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