Posted by jpluimers on 2019/07/12
Interesting project: [WayBack] WtRPM: A Web-based (Wt) suite to power up/down your computers – mupuf.org
It hooks a RaspberryPi to your ATX power supply.
Via: [WayBack] gpio – Use Raspberry Pi to control PC’s power switch – Raspberry Pi Stack Exchange
–jeroen
Posted in Development, Hardware Development, Hardware Interfacing, Raspberry Pi | Leave a Comment »
Posted by jpluimers on 2019/07/11
For my link archive: [WayBack] Tech Notes: TypeScript at Google.
A good discussion, also about alternatives (like Kotin, Scala, GTW) is at [WayBack] TypeScript at Google | Hacker News
Via [WayBack] TypeScript at Google https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17894764 #typescript #google #microsoft #javascript – Adrian Marius Popa – Google+
–jeroen
Posted in Development, JavaScript/ECMAScript, Scripting, Software Development, TypeScript | Leave a Comment »
Posted by jpluimers on 2019/07/11
As I always forgets this and fresh Visual Studio installations favour tabs over spaces, here is how to get it into sane mode:
Edit, Advanced, View White SpaceTools, Options, Text Editor, All Languages (or a specific language), Tabs, Insert Spaces (the internal variable is called InsertTabs)Related: [WayBack] Whitespace: The Silent Killer
–jeroen
Posted in .NET, Development, Software Development, Visual Studio 2012, Visual Studio 2013, Visual Studio 2014, Visual Studio 2015, Visual Studio and tools | Leave a Comment »
Posted by jpluimers on 2019/07/11
A while back, I needed to check Windows Update information on a few hosts, so I wanted to script it. Below are a few links that helped me solve this started.
Note: For Windows Update, you need the TiWorker.exe process, which can consume a lot of CPU. See DISM fix for Windows 8.1 high CPU usage of TiWorker.exe which is basically the same for all Windows versions since 8.0.
gcim)gwmi) which is similar to WMIC on the command-line.
gcim works for SCCMas well, except for hotfixes. I’m not sure it works for WSUS as well as I’ve not used that in a long while; this should work: [WayBack] powershell check windows update on a server – Server Fault).The infrastructure management on that site was ehm, a bit lacking, so PowerShell modules were out, heck even PowerShell itself was initially problematic (it needed running of unsigned sources.
Microsoft.Update.AutoUpdateThis gets the last date that anything was done (query, actual update, download) on Windows Updates, but does not guarantee the installation date; on some systems it does not even return a result:
$windowsUpdateObject = New-Object -ComObject Microsoft.Update.AutoUpdate
$windowsUpdateObject.Results
This one works better though:
$windowsUpdateObject = New-Object -ComObject Microsoft.Update.AutoUpdate
$windowsUpdateObject.Results.LastInstallationSuccessDate
Based on that, you can get the number of days like this:
(New-TimeSpan -Start $windowsUpdateObject.Results.LastInstallationSuccessDate.Date -End (Get-Date)).Days
Get-HotFixThough some people report that InstalledOn can be empty, I’ve hardly that happen with Get-HotFix. The easiest way to get around that is filtering with | Where-Object InstalledOn -ne $null
The cool thing with Get-HotFix is that you can filter on the kind of security update, so this gets the moment the last security update got installed:
(Get-HotFix -Description "Security Update" | Where-Object InstalledOn -ne $null | Sort-Object InstalledOn -Descending | Select-Object -First 1).InstalledOn
And this the number of days since the last security update got installed:
(New-TimeSpan -Start (Get-HotFix -Description "Security Update" | Where-Object InstalledOn -ne $null | Sort-Object InstalledOn -Descending | Select-Object -First 1).InstalledOn -End (Get-Date)).Days
Step by step:
Get-HotFix -Description "Security Update"Gets all the security updates.
| Where-Object InstalledOn -ne $nullFilter out entries having an empty
InstalledOn.
Sort-Object InstalledOn -DescendingGet the most recent on the top.
| Select-Object -First 1Select only the top entry.
(Get-HotFix -Description "Security Update"...).InstalledOnGet only the
InstalledOnproperty.
Get-DateGet the current timestamp consisting of date and time.
New-TimeSpan -Start (...).InstalledOn -End (Get-Date)Get a
TimeSpanover a start and end timestamp.
(New-TimeSpan ...).DaysGet the
Daysproperty of aTimeSpan.
You can do the same for regular updates by changing the -Description parameter:
(Get-HotFix -Description "Update" | Where-Object InstalledOn -ne $null | Sort-Object InstalledOn -Descending | Select-Object -First 1).InstalledOn
(New-TimeSpan -Start (Get-HotFix -Description "Update" | Where-Object InstalledOn -ne $null | Sort-Object InstalledOn -Descending | Select-Object -First 1).InstalledOn -End (Get-Date)).Days
The Description values I found are these:
PS C:\Users\Developer> Get-HotFix | Sort-Object -Unique Description | Select-Object Description
Description
-----------
Hotfix
Security Update
Update
Ironically, since the command is called Get-HotFix, the Hotfix entries on my various Windows systems have been a long long time ago:
(New-TimeSpan -Start (Get-HotFix -Description "Hotfix" | Where-Object InstalledOn -ne $null | Sort-Object InstalledOn -Descending | Select-Object -First 1).InstalledOn -End (Get-Date)).Days
When writing this in 2017, on Windows 8.1, this was more than 600 days, Windows 7 more than 400 days and Windows 10 did not have any Hotfix entries.
On PowerShell 2 and older, you get an error containing “Where-Object : Cannot bind parameter ‘FilterScript'”:
Where-Object : Cannot bind parameter 'FilterScript'. Cannot convert the "InstalledOn" value of type "System.String" to type "System.Management.Automation.ScriptBlock".
At line:1 char:48
+ (New-TimeSpan -Start (Get-HotFix | Where-Object <<<< InstalledOn -ne $null | Sort-Object InstalledOn -Descending | Select-Object -First 1).InstalledOn -End (Get-Date)).Days
+ CategoryInfo : InvalidArgument: (:) [Where-Object], ParameterBindingException
+ FullyQualifiedErrorId : CannotConvertArgumentNoMessage,Microsoft.PowerShell.Commands.WhereObjectCommand
You solve it like this:
(New-TimeSpan -Start (Get-HotFix | Where-Object { $_.InstalledOn -ne $null } | Sort-Object InstalledOn -Descending | Select-Object -First 1).InstalledOn -End (Get-Date)).Days
By now code has become almost unreadable, so you can split it using backtick ` characters:
( `
New-TimeSpan -Start `
( `
Get-HotFix | Where-Object { $_.InstalledOn -ne $null } `
| Sort-Object InstalledOn -Descending `
| Select-Object -First 1 `
).InstalledOn `
-End (Get-Date)`
).Days
On non-English Windows systems, the InstalledOn might actually be in the future, as you can view this happening by this simple command which I ran on 2017-11-02 :
Get-HotFix | Out-GridView
You solve it by adding a filter:
Get-HotFix | Where-Object InstalledOn -lt (Get-Date) | Out-GridView
If you run them from a script (like a batch file Get-HotFix ^| Out-GridView or ps1 file Get-HotFix | Out-GridView), then the grid-view will pop-up and immediately close because the PowerShell process ends. In that case, you need to change your scripts to add the -Wait parameter:
PowerShell Get-HotFix ^| Out-GridView -Wait
Powershell.exe -Command "Get-HotFix | Out-GridView -Wait"
Get-HotFix | Out-GridView -Wait
See:
If I ever want to do the same from C#, I need to figure out where to get the WUApiLib from; more on that library is at [WayBack] Use C# to interact with Windows Update – Stack Overflow and [WayBack] Searching, Downloading, and Installing Updates (Windows).
–jeroen
Posted in Development, Power User, PowerShell, Scripting, Software Development, Windows | Leave a Comment »
Posted by jpluimers on 2019/07/10
I think the alt-text is even better than the cartoon itself:
I started off with countless problems. But now I know, thanks to COUNT(), that I have “#REF! ERROR: Circular dependency detected” problems.
Source: [WayBack] XKCD 1906: I started the day with lots of problems. But now, after hours and hours of work, I have lots of problems in a spreadsheet.
–jeroen
Posted in Agile, Development, Fun, Quotes, Software Development | Leave a Comment »
Posted by jpluimers on 2019/07/10
I wrote about the PowerShell Set-ExecutionPolicy a few times before (links are below).
After writing those, I found out there is another value ByPass and that there are ways to perform this in the Registry not just for the local machine, but also for a user. In retrospect, that last observation is a bit obvious, but it can be really convenient if you want to change it for a different user than yourself.
For the machine and current user, these are the registry paths where Set-ExecutionPolicy will set the value of ExecutionPolicy to the desired enumeration string:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\PowerShell\1\ShellIds\Microsoft.PowerShellHKEY_CURRENT_USER\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\PowerShell\1\ShellIds\Microsoft.PowerShellThe trick is that you can set this for any user if you have their SID, which – for many known entities – you can get from [MS-DTYP]: Well-Known SID Structures via The mother lode of well-known SIDs – The Old New Thing.
So for instance, below are the users, keys and statements for the users under which most services run, so after executing the one for your target service, it can run PowerShell scripts:
LOCAL_SYSTEM : HKEY_USERS\S-1-5-18\Software\Microsoft\PowerShell\1\ShellIds\Microsoft.PowerShellLOCAL_SERVICE : HKEY_USERS\S-1-5-19\Software\Microsoft\PowerShell\1\ShellIds\Microsoft.PowerShellNETWORK_SERVICE : HKEY_USERS\S-1-5-20\Software\Microsoft\PowerShell\1\ShellIds\Microsoft.PowerShellA command to set the value of ExecutionPolicy there to RemoteSigned is this:
::LOCAL_SYSTEM
reg add "HKEY_USERS\S-1-5-18\Software\Microsoft\PowerShell\1\ShellIds\Microsoft.PowerShell" /v "ExecutionPolicy" /t REG_SZ /d "RemoteSigned" /f
::LOCAL_SERVICE
reg add "HKEY_USERS\S-1-5-19\Software\Microsoft\PowerShell\1\ShellIds\Microsoft.PowerShell" /v "ExecutionPolicy" /t REG_SZ /d "RemoteSigned" /f
::NETWORK_SERVICE
reg add "HKEY_USERS\S-1-5-20\Software\Microsoft\PowerShell\1\ShellIds\Microsoft.PowerShell" /v "ExecutionPolicy" /t REG_SZ /d "RemoteSigned" /f
Related:
–jeroen
Posted in Development, PowerShell, Scripting, Software Development | Leave a Comment »
Posted by jpluimers on 2019/07/09
This thread about [WayBack] DCEF3 memory leak in Delphi XE2 – Alberto Paganini – Google+ taught me that madExcept has a much more elaborate memory leak checking than FastMM4: it checks any Windows memory heap allocation, handle leaks, etc, not just the Delphi code induced memory allocations.
Thanks David Heffernan for commenting this part:
The madExcept leak tracking tools are much more comprehensive than those of FastMM because have much greater coverage. FastMM’s leak tracking tools are great, but only track native Delphi allocations. With the madExcept tooling you get all heap allocations (including non-native ones), handle leaks etc.
That is not to belittle the FastMM tooling at all…
Time to again look at [WayBack] madshi.net – madExcept description
–jeroen
Posted in Delphi, Development, Software Development | 2 Comments »
Posted by jpluimers on 2019/07/09
[WayBack] David A. Koontz @davidakoontz More Software – so many options
via: [WayBack] Weekend Reader 2017.42 – reality-loop
Oldest I could find: [WayBack] No free lunch – Free Agile! Community
–jeroen
Posted in Development, Software Development | Leave a Comment »
Posted by jpluimers on 2019/07/08
Cool: Windows 10 allows ANSI/VT100 terminal escape codes without extra tooling. [WayBack] Colored text output in PowerShell console using ANSI / VT100 codes – Stack Overflow.
It is off by default (can be modified through the registry), can be turned on by either using an API call, or by piping through PowerShell.
For older versions, read [WayBack] Windows console with ANSI colors handling – Super User, of which this is a small quote:
For Windows version below 10, the Windows command console doesn’t support output coloring by default. You could install either Cmder, ConEmu, ANSICON or Mintty (used by default in GitBash and Cygwin) to add coloring support to your Windows command console.
Via [WayBack] Did you know that you can enable VT100 terminal emulation in PowerShell as well as the Cmd window? This will allow you to do adb shell to your Android … – Lars Fosdal – Google+
–jeroen
Posted in Color (software development), CommandLine, Development, Power User, PowerShell, PowerShell, Scripting, Software Development, Windows | Leave a Comment »
Posted by jpluimers on 2019/07/04
Summary of [WayBack] A COM Object Collection (IEnumVARIANT) – Delphi Tips – CJC Delphi (Cool Delphi Tips)
Question: How to implements object collection that support Visual Basic’s For Each construct ?
Answer:
In order to implements an object collection your object has to returnIEnumVariantpointer from a special property named_NewEnum.
Via: [WayBack] What interface to I need to implement to allow ForEach in VBA on a COM object written in delphi? – Stack Overflow
–jeroen
Posted in COM/DCOM/COM+, Delphi, Development, Software Development, Windows Development | Leave a Comment »
The Wiert Corner - irregular stream of stuff 