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, 2018

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Anonymise of data is hard, not just for now, but especially preventing future de-anonymisation

Posted by jpluimers on 2018/01/09

Two very interesting videos showing some background information as it is extremely hard to anonymise data. Not just for now, but especially against future de-anonymisation efforts.

–jeroen

Posted in Development, Software Development | Leave a Comment »

Some FastMM scenarios require NeverUninstall because the System unit finalizes things innitialised in other units

Posted by jpluimers on 2018/01/09

You always have to be careful  with Delphi finalization sections cleaning up things that might have not created inside the corresponding initialization section. This is especially true for the System unit.

That one actually contains this little piece of code that is being called after FinalizeUnits is called which also fianalises external memory managers like FastMM:

finalization
{$IFDEF WEAKREF}
  InstHashMap.Finalize;
{$ENDIF}...
{$IFDEF MSWINDOWS}
 FinalizeLocaleDate;
 if PreferredLanguagesOverride <> nil then
 FreeMem(PreferredLanguagesOverride);
...

Which means that you will have to enable the NeverUninstall conditional define as soon as the InstHashMap has been used.

Most often that’s the case with FMX applications that heavily relies on weak references.

The same holds for PreferredLanguagesOverride which is used by SetLocaleOverride and can be worked around by performing this right at the end of the .dpr:

SetLocaleOverride('');

–jeroen

via:

Posted in Delphi, Development, Software Development | Leave a Comment »

Some KlikAanKlikUit links – it runs at 433 Mhz is insecure, but for lights should work fine

Posted by jpluimers on 2018/01/09

Since I’ve an old TPC-200 lying around…

–jeroen

Posted in Development, Hardware Development | Leave a Comment »

Zabbix: better “Disk space usage” graphs for Windows systems

Posted by jpluimers on 2018/01/09

The default [WayBack] Zabbix Disk space usage graph (named Disk space usage {#FSNAME}) for Windows looks like this:

Total disk space on C:

Total disk space on C:

What I want is a graph over time. Based on that, I can start working on different triggers than the default “less than 20% free space available“, for instance:

So I want graphs similar to the CPU load (in the graph itself called Processor load) graph which looks like this:

CPU load (a.k.a. Processor load) is actually graphed

CPU load (a.k.a. Processor load) is actually graphed “over time”

It is part of the Graph prototypes for the Template OS Windows discovery list Mounted filesystem discovery:

For now I’ve added this graph prototype as Line chart with 95th percentile:

If that work, I can start working on the triggers:

–jeroen

Posted in *nix, Monitoring, Power User, Zabbix | 2 Comments »

How did this shit ever work? – The Isoblog.

Posted by jpluimers on 2018/01/09

Though I like Python, I can feel the pain when maintaining in other’s code: [WayBack] How did this shit ever work? – The Isoblog reporting [WayBack] network.py does not handle interface resets properly · Issue #663 · python-diamond/Diamond.

Via: [WayBack] How did this shit ever work? – Kristian Köhntopp – Google+

Image from Reddit: parodies on O RLY Books: [WayBack] imgur.com/qErVcwA: Life on an Ops team…

–jeroen

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Posted in Development, Python, Scripting, Software Development | Leave a Comment »

Bol.com E-waste: recycling old electronics

Posted by jpluimers on 2018/01/08

I know Dutch electronics companies are obliged to provides this service, but bol.com makes it really easy:

Lever je oude apparaat kosteloos in bij bol.com en wij verwerken het op een milieuvriendelijke manier. Zorg ervoor dat het klein elektrisch apparaat geen vloeistoffen en vetten meer bevat. Verpak het tot een stevig pakket en vermeld het bestelnummer van je nieuwe artikel in de linkerbovenhoek en onderstaand adres:

Bol.com E-waste
Antwoordnummer 2002
2130 RH Hoofddorp

–jeroen

Posted in LifeHacker, Power User | Leave a Comment »

Chrome on Mac OS X keeps all old versions it ever installed…

Posted by jpluimers on 2018/01/08

Like many, I’m a digital packrat. Somehow all your storage space somehow becomes full over time. But sometimes that’s not because just you are a digital packrat. Applications can be digital packrats too.

Chrome is such an example as on Mac OS X it will keep every prior version filed under /Applications/Google Chrome.app/Contents/Versions. In my case GrandPerspective showed it as one big blob of close 20 gigabyte. Which is odd as the download itself is was slightly short of 20 gigabyte of Chrome versions.

There are various ways to clean up this by script, but I find the easiest to do this in Finder:

  1. From Grand Perspective, right click the entry, then choose “Reveal in Finder”
  2. In Finder, right click the entry, then choose “Show Package Contents”
  3. In Finder, with the expanded “Contents” folder, browse to the “Versions” folder and expand it.
  4. From Finder, delete unwanted versions.

–jeroen

References:

Posted in Apple, Power User | Leave a Comment »

1984 and (IT) (in)security – lots of Spectre / Meltdown links

Posted by jpluimers on 2018/01/07

Over the last few days I’ve collected a lot of Meltdown and Spectre links at 1984 and (IT) (in)security – Google+.

Most of them provide links to what happened this, year, but a few are also on the path leading to these vulnerabilities. In the links you will also find the affected architectures and patches by various vendors which I have tried to summarise below.

In the link collection, I’ve tried to keep the number of hops to the actual sources as short as possible (as many have re-shared original) links but still attribute to the first one I got the link from.

Since the WordPress “Press-This” functionality is limited, even after all these years, so for now it will be a one-time link dump; filling in more of the archival WayBack and Archive.is links and adding more context will hopefully come later.

I will try to keep links roughly in chronological order (please post a comment where I goofed up) and I hope to find some time to have a “most important” or “summary” list eventually.

A few notes first

Remember:

  • There are 2 hard problems in computer science: cache invalidation, naming things, and off-by-1 errors.

    via: [WayBack] TwoHardThings There are only two hard things in Computer Science: cache invalidation and naming things — Phil Karlton (bonus variations on the page)

  • Caching is the root of all evil.

List

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Posted in Power User, Security | Leave a Comment »

Private keys in software from Blizzard, Electronic Arts, Microsoft, and the German Federal Bar (Bulletproof TLS Newsletter Issue #36)

Posted by jpluimers on 2018/01/07

In the blast of Spectre and Meltdown, don’t forget that humans still goof up: [WayBack] Private keys in software from Blizzard, Electronic Arts, Microsoft, and the German Federal Bar (Bulletproof TLS Newsletter Issue #36).

Luckily enough people keep an eye on these too.

Via:

–jeroen

Posted in Power User, Security | Leave a Comment »

Animation problems in Delphi Tokyo 10.2 update 2? Check bug RSP-19525

Posted by jpluimers on 2018/01/07

If you run into animation problems in Delphi Tokyo 10.2 update 2, then read [WayBack] … In particular I cannot use the use the animation to change the tab in a TabControl… – Raffaele Miola – Google+.

It is likely that  RSP-19525 (10.2 Tokyo Release 2 breaks Animation under Android – App hangs).

Some temporary fixes that might help you are here:

I think that for cross platform and especially mobile development means you need to use tools from vendors that live and breathe that, by constantly showing they master these subjects for instance having good apps in the app stores and examples that are regularly updated to the ever changing field.

I really wonder what the rest of the Delphi community thinks about that.

–jeroen

Posted in Delphi, Development, FireMonkey, Software Development | 1 Comment »

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