The Wiert Corner – irregular stream of stuff

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

  • My badges

    Mastodon

  • Twitter Updates

  • My Flickr Stream

    20140508-Delphi-2007--Project-Options--Cannot-Edit-Application-Title-HelpFile-Icon-Theming20140430-Fiddler-Filter-Actions-Button-Run-Filterset-now20140424-VMware-Fusion-6.0.3.-no-reclaimable
    More Photos

  • Pages

  • All categories

  • Enter your email address to subscribe to this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email.

    Join 1,862 other subscribers

Archive for August, 2018

« Previous Entries
Next Entries »

A success story – kudos to ScaleMM, +André Mussche… – Ondrej Kelle – Google+

Posted by jpluimers on 2018/08/15

Though no maintenance for over 2 years, it ScaleMM seems among the fastest of Delphi memory managers: [WayBack] GitHub – andremussche/scalemm: Fast scaling memory manager for Delphi

Full story via [WayBack] A success story – kudos to ScaleMM, +André Mussche… – Ondrej Kelle – Google+ at [WayBack] just tried Scaled MM – cut the time for 100k down from 51 minutes to 40 minutes. That’s with 18 (9+9) cores allocated to the app and 2 to everything else. Wow, allocating 8 + 8 and the time drops even more… – Russell Weetch

Two lessons on multi-threading here:

  • use a memory manager that copes well with threads
  • do not allocate more busy threads than available (hyper-threaded) cores

Some history (as ScaleMM, TopMM and FastMM seem to be related):

  • Todd Hayden King
    A bit of history here: at the time we had the mm contest. Not many people had access to 8 cores+, we had…. Andre and Ivo were both colleagues of mine at that point, although working for different companies. We needed (stock trading, Ivo and me) something to scale and Ivo wrote topmm, which still performs better on multi-cores than fastmm and has less assembler code. Andre improved on Ivo’s concepts and yes, it really outperforms fastmm on multi-cores today.
    It also out-performs most C family provided mm’s. Note I was not massively involved, but both Ivo and Andre were. And both did a proper job. So KUDOS to them.
    Note these (fastmm and topmm) were written with multi-core in mind. The practical results at the time were often under-estimated, because few people had access to the real hardware. Most of us running two cores at most. Nice to see that the concept those two programmers pursued still pays dividend in 2018!
  • Todd Hayden King
    Read: ScaleMM and TopMM and FastMM… Keyboard left me..
    (I wrote COMMM as a joke..!).
  • [WayBack] TopMemory v3.55. High Performance. Fully Scalable. Free. Memory Manager. for. Delphi – PDF
  • [WayBack] FPC Anagrams

There are also some IntelTBB memory manager references at https://plus.google.com/+RussellWeetch/posts/W4EQgLme5ud [WayBack]

–jeroen

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

zlib win32/i386/x86 and win64/x64_86 builds for Windows

Posted by jpluimers on 2018/08/15

In the past, the DLL for zlib was called zlib.dll, but as of a few years back it is called zlib1.dll as it switched to static linking. There are may obscure download sites for zlib1.dll, but the master site is referenced from these documents:

–jeroen

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

THE OFFICIAL SCRUM HANDBOOK by JEFF SUTHERLAND : SSM : Free Download & Streaming : Internet Archive

Posted by jpluimers on 2018/08/15

The Internet Archive saves more than web sites:

A digital audio recording of the seminal Jeff Sutherland Scrum Handbook – with manual related figures in a distinct pdf Enjoy!

It comes with illustrations and book as PDF files in the downloads.

Source:

–jeroen

Posted in Agile, Development, Scrum, Software Development | 2 Comments »

Windows event entries – reminder to research how to respond on them

Posted by jpluimers on 2018/08/15

One of our sites every now and then throws an eventlog entry with ID 1000 (Application Error) for various processes.

This is a reminder to research what’s a good way (apart from keep an eye on a service like uptimerobot) to see if we can respond to these events sooner hopefully in a sort of automated way.

Some links that might help me with that:

–jeroen

Posted in Development, Software Development | Leave a Comment »

Delphi Build Groups: building all the Configuration/Target permutations of projects in your project group from inside the IDE

Posted by jpluimers on 2018/08/14

An automated build system for your Delphi applications is gold, and straightforward to setup using the Delphi support for msbuild.

Sometimes however, it is convenient to build any or all Configuration/Target permutations of all your projects from inside the Delphi IDE.

This has been possible since Delphi XE introduced the [Archive.is] Build Groups – RAD Studio XE. It is a really nifty feature which you can activate by clicking on the “people” icon in the project manager: .

Uwe Raabe has witten an excellent blog post on this a few years ago: [WayBack] Do you know Build Groups? | The Art of Delphi Programming

Since you can add multiple Build Groups, you can select which one contains what Configuration/Target permutations of any number of projects.

This for instance allows you to:

  • build all your server projects at once
  • only build debug versions of all projects

The Build Groups settings are saved as part of your groupproj settings and are a pretty stable feature.

Two extra tips:

–jeroen

Related:

Posted in Conference Topics, Conferences, Delphi, Development, Event, Software Development | Leave a Comment »

bash: generating random passwords on Mac OS X / MacOS or what Apple calls their operating system by now

Posted by jpluimers on 2018/08/14

After some fiddling, I put this function in ~/bash_profile on my MacBook:

# https://www.cyberciti.biz/tips/linux-unix-bsd-openssh-server-best-practices.html
# pass # digits as first argument; defaults to 20
generate_password() {
  local l=$1
  [ "$l" == "" ] && l=20
  env LC_CTYPE=C LC_ALL=C tr -dc A-Za-z0-9_ < /dev/urandom | head -c ${l} | xargs
}

The fiddling was working around this error:

tr: Illegal byte sequence

The cause is that Mac OS is not Linux, where tr happily accepts any byte sequence from /dev/urandom: it requires the C locale.

Originally, I started with the below function from [WayBack] Top 20 OpenSSH Server Best Security Practices – nixCraft (thanks +Joe C Hecht) which I undid from mixed tab/spaces:

genpasswd() {
  local l=$1
  [ "$l" == "" ] && l=20
  tr -dc A-Za-z0-9_ < /dev/urandom | head -c ${l} | xargs
}

Via: [WayBack] Joe C. Hecht – Google+ who mentions:

I might add that if you do move the SSH port, try to keep it in within the first 1024 ports for a tad bit more protection on some systems.

Background reading on Apple hating binary input:

Background reading on the language setting:

–jeroen

Posted in bash, Development, Scripting, Software Development | 2 Comments »

Optimized Pascal compilation time | Fredrik Haglund’s blog

Posted by jpluimers on 2018/08/14

Long uses lists especially of units circularly referencing each other are killing for compiler performance both in CPU and memory consumption.

To solve it:

Ingredients

  • ICARUS – a free tool from the maker of Pascal Analyzer. [WayBack] http://www.peganza.com/products.htm. Icarus parses Delphi or Borland Pascal source code and generates a Uses Report. This report will help you remove unneeded units from your uses lists. You will also know which units that can be moved from the interface uses list to the implementation uses list.
  • Uses Cleanup Tool – by Oleg Zhukov [WayBack] http://cc.borland.com/Item.aspx?id=23199.

Step-by-step

  1. Run ICARUS on your delphi project to get a report of which units depends on each other.
  2. Input this report in the Uses Cleanup tool to automatically update all uses-clauses in your source code.
  3. Delete all DCU-files and recompile.

Source: [WayBack] Optimized Pascal compilation time | Fredrik Haglund’s blog

Edit

Bit-rot galore!: Since Fredrik published his article, some links have vanished, so they are invalid in the above quote as well:

Uwe Raabe was the first to notice on [WayBack] G+ Long uses lists especially of units circularly referencing each other are killing for compiler performance both in CPU and memory consumption… – Jeroen Wiert Pluimers – Google+ that the Uses Cleanup Tool by Oleg Zhukov can now be downloaded from [WayBack] Files as [WayBack] UsesCleanupceaf.zip.

Several people suggest using cnPack in the above G+ thread, but [WayBack] their Delphi parser is far behind [WayBack] Delphi AST.

Cleaning uses lists is a tough thing, it very much depends in getting the dependencies really right, then interpreting them correctly.

–jeroen

Posted in Delphi, Development, Software Development | 7 Comments »

Hack The Box :: Penetration Testing Labs

Posted by jpluimers on 2018/08/13

Cool playground:

An online platform to test and advance your skills in penetration testing and cyber security.

Source: Hack The Box :: Penetration Testing Labs

Via [WayBack] hackthebox – Penetration testing labs This is an amazing platform – super addictive! Hack The Box is an online platform al… – Jürgen Christoffel – Google+

–jeroen

Posted in LifeHacker, Power User, Security | Leave a Comment »

Canon MF8200C default password…

Posted by jpluimers on 2018/08/13

I needed to figure out what was wrong with a Canon MF8200C UFRII LT XPS.

Luckily, this still worked for administrator access [WayBack] Default admin password for Canon Multifunction Printers:

Put in admin id 7654321 pw 7654321

–jeroen

Posted in Power User, Printer drivers, Windows | Leave a Comment »

Not just the Agile Manifesto – there is also one on Craftsmanship

Posted by jpluimers on 2018/08/13

Today it’s 17.5 years ago the gathering leading up to the Agile Manifesto ended.

It’s a great description on the way you want to develop software:

  • Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
  • Working software over comprehensive documentation
  • Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
  • Responding to change over following a plan

I found out that I’ve been trying to that for my whole career – even before I knew about the Agile Manifesto – despite my actual nature being a bit on the autistic side that makes the “human” thing a bit harder for me, but not impossible.

In my day to day work, I try to encourage people to develop in the same way and to also broaden their perspective.

So while writing this, I remembered that doing so (both developing and encouraging) isn’t always easy and requires a lot of craftsmanship. This then reminded me of another manifesto I had seen a while ago, but had forgotten about.

After some digging, I found it back: the “Manifesto for Software Craftsmanship” from 2009 which is subtitled “Raising the bar”

Later I even found back who referred me to it: [WayBack] Great companion to the Agile ManifestoManifesto for Software Craftsmanship – Marjan Venema – Google+

I like it because it defines Craftsmanship as an enhancement of Agile by going a level deeper on all the points of the Agile Manifesto:

  • Not only working software,
    but also well-crafted software
  • Not only responding to change,
    but also steadily adding value
  • Not only individuals and interactions,
    but also a community of professionals
  • Not only customer collaboration,
    but also productive partnerships

–jeroen

References:

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

« Previous Entries
Next Entries »