The Wiert Corner – irregular stream of stuff

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

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Senior Oops Engineer on Twitter <

Posted by jpluimers on 2017/12/31

A nice discussion followed on [WayBack] Senior Oops Engineer on Twitter: “what’s a blockchain?” It’s like git but for destroying the environment.

It basically comes down to: can alternatives like git together with a set of rules and contracts to facilitate upstream pushing to a global order of changes be sufficient alternative to the very resource intensive “calculate proof of work to achieve consensus”.

The discussion is at [WayBack] »”what’s a blockchain?” It’s like git but for destroying the environment.«  – Kristian Köhntopp – Google+

References:

–jeroen

Posted in Development, DVCS - Distributed Version Control, git, Software Development, Source Code Management | Leave a Comment »

Delphi FMX TBitmapCodecManager.LoadFromFile calls TImageTypeChecker.GetType that returns ONLY predefined image types

Posted by jpluimers on 2017/12/31

Bugs happen: [WayBack] Did I miss something ? I’ve tried to add a custom image loader for FMX … TBitmapCodecManager.LoadFromFile calls TImageTypeChecker.GetType that returns ONLY predefined image types ! (gif, bmp, png, tiff, jpg) … – Paul TOTH – Google+

I’m not so much surprised by bugs, but what scares the heck out of me is that since about halfway October 2017, there are 900+ Reported issues with status Unresolved (i.e. no change to the issue after it got reported).

Before switching to half-year product release cycles, the yearly ones had an issue triage cut-off date of about 3-6 months.

Now back on yearly cycles, I don’t expect that to be much different.

Expecting a new release in the halfway March 2018 till beginning May 2018 time frame, and assuming the past being a good indication of the future, the window of processing issues is closing soon.

I really hope I am wrong and wish 2018 turns out to he a great Delphi year.

–jeroen

Sorry this post became victim to the “Missed Schedule” issue (I finally found out there is a ridiculous limit of 100 scheduled posts over which scheduling becomes unreliable; this limit used to be much much larger in the past).

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Delphi, Development, Missed Schedule, Power User, Software Development, WordPress | Leave a Comment »

In case you are still curious on “It’s a German thing, you wouldn’t understand. ‘Dinner for one’ on New Year’s eve.”

Posted by jpluimers on 2017/12/31

Via: [WayBack] It’s a German thing, you wouldn’t understand. „Dinner for one“ am 31.12 … 12 mal… – Kristian Köhntopp – Google+

In case you are still interested (I think it is an hilarious sketch):

–jeroen

Sorry this post became victim to the “Missed Schedule” issue (I finally found out there is a ridiculous limit of 100 scheduled posts over which scheduling becomes unreliable; this limit used to be much much larger in the past).

[WayBack] Warning: Please do not schedule more than 100 posts. Any posts scheduled beyond that amount will not be published.

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Fun, Missed Schedule, Power User, WordPress | Leave a Comment »

Dutch daily weather data: KNMI – Daggegevens van het weer in Nederland

Posted by jpluimers on 2017/12/29

Cool data, in large parts suitable for statistical processing: [WayBack] KNMI – Daggegevens van het weer in Nederland

Thanks to Helga van Leur:

–jeroen

 

 

Posted in History, LifeHacker, Power User, science | Leave a Comment »

Consolidating NTFS free space

Posted by jpluimers on 2017/12/29

For shrinking VM disk images, it’s important to consolidate NTFS free space towards the end of the this.

I’ve tried many tools, starting with defrag C: /X (which tries, but doesn’t give good results) and found out these steps give the best results:

  1. Perform an Ultradefrag full optimisation,
  2. Perform a MyDefrag Consolidate free space script on the drive.

If shrinking still fails then:

  1. Try the Ultradefrag at boot time
  2. Verify what kind of file(s) prevent shrinking: they show up in red after the MyDefrag session:
    1. Zoom in them (they can initially as small as 1 red pixel) by clicking on or near them, repeating the zoom long enough so you can hover over with the mouse and the lower part of the screen shows a filename like  where you cannot find much information about “$badclus:$bad:$data” but appear to be clusters marked as bad on NTFS level using something like chkdsk /B.
    2. If it was a bad sector like above, then try to resolve it with [WayBack] ntfsfix which ships with GParted live boot:
      1. boot a [WayBack] GParted — Live CD/USB/PXE/HD drive,
      2. run GParted to see the drive path (for instance /dev/sda1)
      3. start a terminal
      4. run this command:
        ntfsfix -b /dev/sda1
        which will give output like this:

        Mounting volume... OK
Processing of $MFT and $MFTMirr completed successfully.
Checking the alternate boot sector... OK
NTFS volume version is 3.1.
Going to un-mark the bad clusters ($BadClus)... OK
NTFS partition /dev/sda1 was processed successfully.
      5. boot back into Windows
      6. on an administrative command prompt run this for the affected drive letter:
        chkdsk D: /B
        (reboot if needed)
  3. Shrink the drive using diskmgmt.msc

If you still cannot shrink, then try [WayBack] http://ftp.raxco.com/pub/download/pd14.0/pd14.0_pro.exe PerfectDisk by Raxco free trial.

Note:

MyDefrag (formerly named JkDefrag) is not maintained any more but the 4.3.1 version in the WayBack machine still works very well as the underlying defragmentation APIs in Windows haven’t changed.

References:

For FAT32:

For GParted / ntfsfix:

PerfectDisk via:

–jeroen

Posted in Power User, Windows, Windows 10, Windows 7, Windows 8, Windows 8.1, Windows Server 2008, Windows Server 2008 R2, Windows Server 2012, Windows Server 2012 R2, Windows Server 2016, Windows Vista | Leave a Comment »

cyber- (prefix): (1) A linguistic cue informing the reader that the meaning of…

Posted by jpluimers on 2017/12/29

cyber- (prefix): (1) A linguistic cue informing the reader that the meaning of the word to follow should only be construed in the context of vaguely imminent threats and the need for more federal funding. (2) Something “computery.”

via: [WayBack] cyber- (prefix): (1) A linguistic cue informing the reader that the meaning of…

Many more words are here:

The New Devil’s Dictionary: 249 words for the end of the world

[WayBack] The New Devil’s Dictionary

–jeroen

Posted in Fun, History, Quotes | Leave a Comment »

Time to Grow Up: Counterproductive Security Behaviors That Must End // Speaker Deck

Posted by jpluimers on 2017/12/29

Good end-of-year re-reading (hopefully there is a video link by now) by Chris Eng (@chriseng) [WayBack] Time to Grow Up: Counterproductive Security Behaviors That Must End // Speaker Deck

via: [WayBack] Thats a decent keynote – G+ Kristian Köhntopp.

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Development, Infrastructure, Security, Software Development | Leave a Comment »

C# – All About Span: Exploring a New .NET Mainstay

Posted by jpluimers on 2017/12/28

Interesting new .NET feature already available for .NET 4.5, but much faster in future .NET versions: [WayBack] C# – All About Span: Exploring a New .NET Mainstay

Documentation (only quoted first paragraph):

Span<T> is a new type we are adding to the platform to represent contiguous regions of arbitrary memory, with performance characteristics on par with T[]. Its APIs are similar to the array, but unlike arrays, it can point to either managed or native memory, or to memory allocated on the stack.

Further on in that document are the Design specifications.

Via:

–jeroen

Posted in .NET, C#, Development, Software Development | Leave a Comment »

Delphi: it is better to use ifndef rather than ifdef to keep the IDE working properly…

Posted by jpluimers on 2017/12/28

[WayBack] Dear diary, today I learned that it is better to use ifndef rather than ifdef if I want the IDE to keep working properly. I had a uses clause with an i… – Stefan Glienke – Google+

I promised to remind myself, so here it is (:

–jeroen

 

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

Idera / Embarcadero at least fixed some of their security issues…

Posted by jpluimers on 2017/12/27

Some security improvements

A long while ago I quoted [WayBack] Ideara / Embaracdero is flushing away user trust in their ability to do secure computing… – Jeroen Wiert Pluimers – Google+.

Since then they have fixed some of the issues:

  • EDN password reset email messages do not contain the plain text password any more
  • The https sites now have much better security certificates

Still, parts of their infrastructure run over http or use other insecure patterns.

Infrastructure and DevOps are hard, but an integral aspect of any company.

Hopefully, their most important new-years resolution is to improve on that.

AppAnalytics still down

I don’t hold my breath as [Archive.is] https://appanalytics.embarcadero.com/ for more than a month now has been showing

503 Service Unavailable

No server is available to handle this request.

On the other hand: they have improved, so let’s keep our fingers crossed, and it had been running since 2015: [WayBack]Embarcadero Introduces AppAnalytics, the First Usage Analytics Service for Desktop, Mobile, and Wearable Applications

Disabling AppAnalytics in Delphi

There are three ways to disable AppAnalytics in the Delphi IDE to phone home (this is for Delphi XE8, change the version numbers accordingly):

That should at least get rid of the 30 second shut-down timeout in some Delphi versions while they try to post the usage data to AppAnalytics (thanks Uwe Raabe for this great tip!)

–jeroen

Related:

Posted in Delphi, Development, Power User, Security, Software Development | 5 Comments »

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