The Wiert Corner – irregular stream of stuff

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

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Chocolatey: vcredist 2005/2008/2010 updates failing as Microsoft rebuilt the installers multiple times causing new hashes each time

Posted by jpluimers on 2021/05/14

The Microsoft rebuilt move affects these Chocolatey Microsoft Visual C++ Redistributable packages, usually multiple times:

You get error messages like this:

ERROR: Checksum for 'C:\Users\saroot\AppData\Local\Temp\chocolatey\vcredist2010\10.0.40219.2\vcredist_x86.exe' did not meet '66B797B3B4F99488F53C2B676610DFE9868984C779536891A8D8F73EE214BC4B' for checksum type 'sha256'. Consider passing the actual checksums through with --checksum --checksum64 once you validate the checksums are appropriate. A less secure option is to pass --ignore-checksums if necessary

The cause is [Archive.is] vcredist-all fails to install due to broken checksum of vcredist2005, vcredist2008 and vcredist2010 · Issue #105 · jberezanski/ChocolateyPackages

jberezanskicommented

Great, Microsoft is apparently on an in-place installer update spree.

Actually, this is not a problem with vcredist-all, but rather with those specific packages and should be reported to maintainers of those packages. It so happens, however, that I’m also one of the maintainers of vcredist2008 and vcredist2010 (which live in https://github.com/chocolatey-community/chocolatey-coreteampackages/tree/master/manual). I’ve already prepared a fix for 2010 and I guess I’ll do 2008 tomorrow.

As for 2005, I can see that it has the same maintainer as vcredist2010 had until very recently – when we took over that package because the maintainer did not respond. So we probably should take over 2005, too.

Progress

The vcredist2010 package has been modified two times for this:

Hopefully the vcredist2008 and vcredist2005 packages will follow soon.

–jeroen

Posted in C++, Chocolatey, Development, Power User, Software Development, Visual Studio C++, Windows | Leave a Comment »

VMware Standalone Converter: more recent versions do not support older operating systems

Posted by jpluimers on 2021/05/14

It pays to keep several versions of VMware Standalone Converter at hand as newer supporters do support newer operating systems and ESXi versions, but do not support older operating systems.

Hopefully the free StarWind V2V converter that does also support P2V has a broader support for older versions.

Some relevant links:

–jeroen

[WayBack] Free Tools VMware VMware vSphere goodies and freebies. VMware Monitoring tools, backup. Those tools are Free to use in production environment, no time limit

[WayBack] Cool Free VPN Server Software SoftEther VPN | ESX Virtualization

Posted in Power User, Virtualization, VMware, VMware Converter, VMware ESXi | Leave a Comment »

NFS server on Windows

Posted by jpluimers on 2021/05/14

One way to access files from ESXi is over NFS shares.

Out of the box, Windows Server is the only edition that provides NFS server capability, but desktop editions only have an NFS client.

There are some commercial and open sources implementations though, of which [WayBack] GitHub – winnfsd/winnfsd seems the best maintained open source one.

In case I ever need NFS server support, I need to check out these links:

–jeroen

Posted in *nix, Power User, Virtualization, VMware, VMware ESXi, Windows | Leave a Comment »

How to calculate bitmap size? – Stack Overflow

Posted by jpluimers on 2021/05/13

A while ago I needed an estimate for [WayBack] How to calculate bitmap size? – Stack Overflow, which does an accurate calculation for the size of the pixel storage (i.e. without headers):

pixelStorageSize = (( width*bitsPerPixel + 31) / 32) * 4 * height

Here:

  • 4 is the number of bytes per quad-byte as bitmaps are stored with pixel lines aligned on quad-byte boundaries
  • 32 is the bits per quad-byte
  • 31 helps to round up to the quad-word boundary

It was derived from [WayBack] Capturing an Image – Windows applications | Microsoft Docs and shorthand for what is explained at [WayBack] BMP file format: Pixel storage – Wikipedia

The bits representing the bitmap pixels are packed in rows. The size of each row is rounded up to a multiple of 4 bytes (a 32-bit DWORD) by padding.

For images with height above 1, multiple padded rows are stored consecutively, forming a Pixel Array.

The total number of bytes necessary to store one row of pixels can be calculated as:

{\displaystyle {\text{RowSize}}=\left\lceil {\frac {{\text{BitsPerPixel}}\cdot {\text{ImageWidth}}}{32}}\right\rceil \cdot 4=\left\lfloor {\frac {{\text{BitsPerPixel}}\cdot {\text{ImageWidth}}+31}{32}}\right\rfloor \cdot 4,}
ImageWidth is expressed in pixels, note the special parentheses.

The total amount of bytes necessary to store an array of pixels in an n bits per pixel (bpp) image, with 2ncolors, can be calculated by accounting for the effect of rounding up the size of each row to a multiple of 4 bytes, as follows:

PixelArraySize = RowSize · |ImageHeight|
ImageHeight is expressed in pixels. The absolute value is necessary because ImageHeight can be negative.

I think I needed this to estimate how many bitmaps would fit in

[WayBack] Virtual address space – Wikipedia, which on 32-bit Windows by default is limited to 2 GiB, and can be extended to 3 GIB by enabling the IMAGE_FILE_LARGE_ADDRESS_AWARE executable header flag.

This flag imposes the risk of many libraries and DLLs to fail because they do not get the pointer math right. You often do not have control of future versions of DLLs being loaded in your process space and their risks, so do not ever use that flag.

–jeroen

Posted in Algorithms, Development, Software Development | 1 Comment »

Chocolatey: installing Oracle SQL Developer and updating the chocolatey package

Posted by jpluimers on 2021/05/13

Sometimes an install is not just as simple as C:\>choco install --yes oracle-sql-developer.

Edit 20210514:

Note that most of the below pain will be moot in the future as per [Archive.is] Jeff Smith 🍻 on Twitter: “we’re working on removing the SSO requirement, it’s already done for @oraclesqlcl – see here … “ referring to [Wayback] SQLcl now under the Oracle Free Use Terms and Conditions license | Oracle Database Insider Blog

SQLcl, the modern command-line interface for the Oracle Database, can now be downloaded directly from the web without any click-through license agreement.

It means the Oracle acount restriction will be lifted, and downloads will be a lot simpler.

I started with the below failing command, tried a lot of things, then finally almost gave up: Oracle stuff does not want to be automated, which means I should try to less of their stuff.

First of all you need an Oracle account (I dislike companies doing that for free product installs; I’m looking at Embarcadero too) by going to profile.oracle.com:

[WayBack] Chocolatey Gallery | Oracle SQL Developer 18.4.0 (also: gist.github.com/search?l=XML&q=oracle-sql-developer)

Notes

  • This version supports both 32bit and 64bit and subsequently does not have a JDK bundled with it. It has a
    dependency on the jdk8 package to meet the application’s JDK requirement.
  • An Oracle account is required to download this package. See the “Package Parameters” section below for
    details on how to provide your Oracle credentials to the installer. If you don’t have an existing account, you can
    create one for free here: https://profile.oracle.com/myprofile/account/create-account.jspx

Package Parameters

The following package parameters are required:

* /Username: – Oracle username
* /Password: – Oracle password

(e.g. choco install oracle-sql-developer --params "'/Username:MyUsername /Password:MyPassword'")

To have choco remember parameters on upgrade, be sure to set choco feature enable -n=useRememberedArgumentsForUpgrades.

Then the installation failed fail again: ERROR: The response content cannot be parsed because the Internet Explorer engine is not available, or Internet Explorer's first-launch configuration is not complete. Specify the UseBasicParsing parameter and try again.

The trick is to RUN IEXPLORE.EXE AS ADMINISTRATOR ONCE BEFORE INSTALLING FROM CHOCOLATEY. Who would believe that.

The reason is that the package uses Invoke-WebRequest which requires Internet Explorer and PowerShell 3. Chocolatey packages however need to be able to run on just PowerShell 2 without Invoke-WebRequest.

Maybe using cURL can remedy that; adding a dependency to is is possible, as cURL can be installed via chocolatey: [WayBack] How to Install cURL on Windows – I Don’t Know, Read The Manual. Another alternative might be [WayBack] Replace Invoke-RestMethod in PowerShell 2.0 to use [WayBack] WebRequest Class (System.Net) | Microsoft Docs.

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in CertUtil, Chocolatey, CommandLine, Database Development, Development, DVCS - Distributed Version Control, git, Hashing, OracleDB, Power User, PowerShell, Security, SHA, SHA-1, Software Development, Source Code Management, Windows, XML, XML/XSD | Leave a Comment »

Notities over corona vaccinatie, gele vaccinatieboekje en vaccinatieboekje app

Posted by jpluimers on 2021/05/13

In het internationaal erkende gele vaccinatieboekje (ook wel vaccinatiepaspoort) kun je je corona vaccinatie laten bijschrijven. Dit kan ter plekke na de vaccinatie of op een later moment (maar op een later moment is het veel lastiger).

[Wayback] Je vaccinatie tegen corona mag in je vaccinatiepaspoort, maar je moet er wel zelf om vragen – EenVandaag

Het ministerie van Volksgezondheid Welzijn en Sport zegt in een reactie dat je als je wil, je een geel boekje kan gebruiken wanneer je wordt gevaccineerd. Maar dat het ze zelf geen boekjes aanbieden en dat er zéker geen verplichting is.

[Wayback] Gele vaccinatieboekje | Sdu

vaccinatieboekje: het internationale bewijs van inenting waar vaccinaties voor bijvoorbeeld gele koorts, dtp, hepatitis A en B in geregistreerd worden. Hier kan de coronavaccinatie (Covid-19) eenvoudig aan toegevoegd worden.

De [Wayback] Vaccinatieboekje app lijkt niet rechtsgeldig, maar wel handig voor reminders.

Registreer je (rijks) vaccinaties online en download de app: Vaccinatieboekje. Lees welke vaccinaties als je op reis gaat en leer meer over infectie-ziekten.

Gerelateerd:

Via:

––jeroen

 

Posted in About, Health, LifeHacker, Personal, Power User, Vaccinations | Leave a Comment »

Het hopelijk tijdelijke afscheid door Haagse Insider🕵🏻‍♂️ (@HaagseInsider) | Twitter

Posted by jpluimers on 2021/05/13

Gisteren was er een (hopelijk tijdelijk) afscheid door [Archive.is] Haagse Insider🕵🏻‍♂️ (@HaagseInsider) | Twitter.

De indrukwekkende draad is helaas niet beschikbaar op Archive.is, maar wel beschikbaar op het web archief.

Sowieso wens ik meer rust en afstand voor HaagseInsider. Daarnaast duim ik dat het een weerzien wordt.

—jeroen

Posted in Power User, SocialMedia, Twitter | Leave a Comment »

Delphi: EInvalidOp exception, might just mean you have a use-after free scenario, or an out-of-bounds value

Posted by jpluimers on 2021/05/13

Quite some time ago, I was researching spurious exceptions in a Delphi application, then finally replicated them in a unit test suite.

One of them was occurring almost all of the time: EInvalidOp.

It is one of the floating point exceptions (incidentally exampled at [WayBack] Exceptions: Declaring Exception Types) all inheriting from the [WayBack] EMathError Class:

EMathError is the base class for floating-point math exception classes. EMathError itself is never raised.

The following exceptions descend from EMathError:

[WayBack] Exception
Meaning
[WayBack] EInvalidArgument
Parameter out of range
[WayBack] EInvalidOp
Processor encountered an undefined instruction
[WayBack] EOverflow
Floating-point operation produced result too large to store
[WayBack] EUnderflow
Floating-point operation produced result with no precision
[WayBack] EZeroDivide
Attempt to divide by zero

Run-time exception information is saved in fields provided by [WayBack] EExternal.

Use-after-free

In my first case (which I described in delphi – Invalid floating point operation calling Trunc()), not all input scenarios had been tested in a certain scenario. In a production environment, one of the inputs was really high.

In a later case, the actual cause was not a floating point problem at all, but a use-after-free scenario that overwrite a floating point value with something not so compatible also causing a simple Trunc statement to fail in the same way.

In that case, the production data could never reach the big numbers that failed, so no new tests were needed.

–jeroen

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

Golang written: nefertiti-tradebot.com

Posted by jpluimers on 2021/05/12

[WayBack] dutchdelphidude on Twitter: “ik doe nu dit ermee nefertiti-tradebot.com … “

nefertiti-tradebot.com

–jeroen

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Development, Go (golang), Software Development | Leave a Comment »

Reminder to self: check if @NS_online finally accepts email addresses having a plus sign in them

Posted by jpluimers on 2021/05/12

Quite a while back, @NS_Online (Dutch railroads) did not accept plus signs in email addresses. I verified a few times over the years and not much progress.

This is a reminder to myself to re-check.

Edit 20230418: it has started working, see further below.

Below the fold the Twitter thread that started with [WayBack] Jeroen Pluimers on Twitter: “Toch jammer dat @NS_online valide email adressen met een plus-teken erin weigert.… “

Hopefully by now they retraced themselves from the bad company of many other parties failing to adhere to clear and long existing internet standards: [WayBack] User:Me at work/plushaters | Mozilla Community | FANDOM powered by Wikia.

Their web care team and their developers made some very inexcusable assumptions there:

  • questioning the use of a + in email addresses
  • questioning the email address used
  • diminishing the popularity of using a + inside email addresses
  • when you never heard of something, it does not exist
  • you can validate an email address without actually trying to deliver it

Some links on email addresses and their validity:

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Development, Power User, Software Development, Web Development | Leave a Comment »

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