Archive for the ‘Power User’ Category
Posted by jpluimers on 2025/08/22
I got the below error when booting a Dell Optiplex 7060 Micro, a machine not just supporting supporting UEFI but preferring it, on which I had copied a backed-up disk image, then moved the hidden Recovery partition to the end of the physical disk (to make room to extend either the OS or DATA partitions).
Fixing it lead me to a trip that was on the boundary of software archaeology, so this blog post has a truckload of archived links to information that is still relevant, but for which the original links have long vanished due to link rot or (often worse) part of the historic information got lost because of migration to new tooling forgot to cover important additions (especially in comments).
One thing that I had to unlearn was MBR disk basics, for instance the fact that on GPT disks a partition can be active (they can only be on MBR disks, but despite UEFI supporting both MBT and GPT, GPT disks are way more common and required). The same holds for partitions having a boot flag: that too only applies to MBR disks. For the same reason, bootrec is only useful for MBR disks. More details towards the end of this blog post. CSM (Compatibility Support Module) booting is the UEFI way to simulate BIOS boot for operating systems that do no support UEFI.
Back to the error at hand:
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Posted in Development, History, link rot, Power User, Software Archeology, Software Development, Windows, Windows 10, Windows 11, Windows Server 2003, Windows Server 2008, Windows Vista, Windows XP, WWW - the World Wide Web of information | Tagged: 1 | Leave a Comment »
Posted by jpluimers on 2025/08/20
With the constant influx of JavaScript programmers, it keeps worth repeating that you should always run JavaScript in strict mode via "use strict"; (like in the past Visual Basic 6 developers should use option strict and option explicit) to forget risky JavaScript syntax like implicit ocal constants (which were removed from the documentation in the 2009 ECMAScript 5 specification for JavaScript), and every codeline should have a test code covering it, especially for comparisons involving non-strict behaviour like the use of leading zeros.
As of the succeeding 2015 standard (ECMAScript 6), octal numbers in JavaScript start with 0o or 0O followed by a series of octal digits.
Oh, and the history of octal in computing of course has to do with 6-bit systems and also lead to 6-six bit character codes including BCD character encoding..
My tweet back earlier this year: [WaybackSave/Archive] Jeroen Wiert Pluimers @wiert@mastodon.social on X: “@_ObomheseR Since JavaScript is in the group of curly based programming languages influenced by the B programming language, integer constants starting with zero are tried first in octal base. 017 octal is 15 decimal 018 octal is not possible, so becomes 18.”
Inhteritence:
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Posted in B, BASIC, C, Development, JavaScript/ECMAScript, MarkDown, Retrocomputing, Scripting, Software Development, VB6, Visual BASIC | Leave a Comment »
Posted by jpluimers on 2025/08/20
Sometimes Delphi cannot output the .exe file because it is locked. In even rarer times, Delphi itself keeps the .exe file locked (this has done it for decades and I think this is caused by a bug in the debugger).
A long time ago, I answered how to figure out where the lock comes from. A decade later a comment was added (thanks [Wayback/Archive] Server Overflow) with a command-line tool you can use for that too (but sometimes returns less results). Both are in [Wayback/Archive] compilation – Delphi does not generate any exe file – Stack Overflow Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Delphi, Development, Power User, Software Development, Windows, Windows 10, Windows 11, Windows 7, Windows 8, Windows 8.1, Windows Development | Leave a Comment »
Posted by jpluimers on 2025/08/15
I have been contemplating on pfSense hardware as there has been a large shortage on that market especially for having more than 2 ports (similar to for instance Mikrotik PoE router unavailability).
If by now I have not found any, I might want to revisit [Wayback/Archive] Gowin R86S mini PC offers 2.5GbE and 10GbE networking for $310 and up – CNX Software has 3 RJ45 ports and 2 SFP+ cages.
They found it via this 4 page review:
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Posted in Ethernet, Hardware, MikroTik, Network-and-equipment, pfSense, Power User, routers | Leave a Comment »
Posted by jpluimers on 2025/08/13
[Wayback/Archive] GS305E | Easy Smart Managed Essentials Switch | NETGEAR Support which can do many-to-one port mirroring.
This is a newer and cheaper hardware revision than the:
- GS105Ev2 (which is managed and can do port-mirroring, and is confusingly sold as GS105E-200) which in Germany already is end-of-life
- GS105Ev1 (which is unmanaged and cannot do port-mirroring and is confusingly sold as GS105E-100) which is end-of-life but still sold
Via [Wayback/Archive] Everyone Should Have One of These – EASY Packet Capture! – YouTube who explains very well why you need a switch that can do port-mirroring, then recommends the GS105E but forgets to mention:
- there are different revisions of the GS105E with the above drawbacks
- there is GS305E
Related:
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Posted in Blue team, Communications Development, Development, Ethernet, Hardware, Internet protocol suite, Network-and-equipment, Power User, Red team, Security, Software Development, TCP, UDP | Leave a Comment »
Posted by jpluimers on 2025/08/12
I missed this back then, so here is a reminder: [Wayback/Archive] Toru Iwatani shows his original drafts for Pac-Man : gaming
Of course these had a big red stamp on them marking them classified. The detailed game experience and sprite transformations in just a few pages really shows how great Toru Iwatani was.
Images were posted first on [Wayback/Archive] Toru Iwatani shows his original drafts for Pac-Man – Imgur:
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Posted in History, Retrocomputing | Leave a Comment »
Posted by jpluimers on 2025/08/12
Posted in .NET, Batch-Files, CommandLine, Development, Power User, PowerShell, PowerShell, Scripting, Software Development, Windows, Windows 10, Windows 11, Windows 8.1 | Leave a Comment »
Posted by jpluimers on 2025/08/11
I’m vintage, so I have some old machinery but also want to be able to run old software on newer hardware.
TL;DR: Since Apple Silicon (which is based on ARM) uses Intel Emulation for regular Mac binary programs, VMware Fusion# on Mac M* series cannot run Intel based operating systems, after some research there basically were these options:
- use VMware Fusion and run inside a Windows on ARM VM by using
- a dos emulator like DOSBox or DOSBox-X, since modern 64-bit Windows lacks the NTVDM:
Since virtual 8086 mode is not available on non-x86-based processors (more specifically, MIPS, DEC Alpha, and PowerPC) NTVDM is instead implemented as a full emulator in these versions of NT, using code licensed from Insignia’s SoftPC. Up to Windows NT 3.51, only 80286 emulation is available. With Windows NT 4.0, 486 emulation was added.
NTVDM is not included with 64-bit versions of Windows or ARM32 based versions such as Windows RT or Windows 10 IoT Core. The last version of Windows to include the component is Windows 10, as Windows 11 dropped support for 32-bit processors.
- an NTVDM replacement like NTVDMx64 or winevdm (sometimes calles otvdm)
- use a specific emulator like DOSBox-X directly on MacOS
- use a more generic emulator like QEMU based UTM
I have a VMware background on bare metal, Windows and MacOS, so I prefer it over Parallels
Links: Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in DOSBox, DOSBox emulator, Emulators, MS-DOS, Power User, Virtualization | Leave a Comment »
The Wiert Corner - irregular stream of stuff 