Posted by jpluimers on 2024/08/23
At ages 55 and 53, this was the first time ever we saw the Northern Light [Wayback/Archive] 20240511 – 20240512 – Noorderlicht – Northern Light – Aurora Borealis – Google Photos.
It was a quiet night right after the R171 of the better half broke after I had been using it. We were both frustrated and vented of by driving to the coast in my car with no expectations seeing the Northern Light. Oh, how wrong we were. It was great in real life and even better on camera.
All photos were taken by hand with my smartphone (OnePlus Nord2 5G) at Nederzandt Beach which is both a 15 minute drive from the broken down car and 15 minutes from our home.
I like the ones below the signature most.
In the same weekend, I got pointed to this [Wayback/Archive] “Colors of Aurora” Poster for Sale by Leo the Alien | Redbubble from his [Wayback/Archive] alienyrox shop | Redbubble.
Via (the first tweets did not attribute the author by cutting top and bottom of the picture, which I think is a shame for professional social media users):
--jeroen
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Posted in About, Personal | Leave a Comment »
Posted by jpluimers on 2024/08/23
A few years back there was a great thread on Twitter starting with [Wayback/Archive] David Perell on Twitter: “What’s causing all these logos to look the same?”
The trend wasn’t just about logos. Architecture was looking more and more the same too and society at large was affected as well.
I wonder if by now the trend has changed.
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Posted in Awareness | Leave a Comment »
Posted by jpluimers on 2024/08/22
A while ago, I found the “creëer” mojibake in a Dutch page on the IKEA site.
They were not alone to make this mistake which is easily explained using [Wayback/Archive] ftfy:
>>> ftfy.fix_and_explain("creëer")
ExplainedText(text='creëer', explanation=[('encode', 'latin-1'), ('decode', 'utf-8')])
(you can run this on-line at [Wayback/Archive] Welcome to Python.org: interactive shell, see my post The things I didn’t notice during cancer survival: ftfy 6.0 and more versions got released during my recovery on how to do this)
So the text is easily fixed:
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Posted in Development, Encoding, ftfy, ISO-8859, ISO8859, Software Development, Unicode, UTF-8, UTF8, Web Development | Leave a Comment »
Posted by jpluimers on 2024/08/21
While researching how to allocate space for empty Windows files, I bumped into this: [Wayback/Archive] windows – What does SetFileValidData doing ? what is the difference with SetEndOfFile? – Stack Overflow.
Interesting but dangerous: SetFileValidData allows setting the end of the “valid” file data to a point into the file without Windows pretending the content was zero-filled.
The big important thing here (a drawback for security, a blessing for adversaries): the file will incorporate data that was on disk before it got incorporated into the file, potentially leaking deleted data.
That’s why the SetFileValidData required at least the SE_MANAGE_VOLUME_NAME privilege.
QA content and salvaged/archived related links:
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Posted in Development, Software Development, Windows Development | Leave a Comment »
Posted by jpluimers on 2024/08/20
About a month from International CrowdStruck Day, just a few thoughts, more likely to follow:
- How well does your infrastructure behave when none of your Windows machines can boot?
- How well is your out-of-band management?
- How well is your CMDB doing key management, for instance for BitLocker encryption?
- Is checkbox compliance more important than a single point of failure?
- Can you ensure all updates from your supply chain are staggered/staged/phased with a kill switch when things get out of hand?
- Are the worst case scenarios in your disaster recovery plans really the worst?
- Do you understand the human factor of large scale outages (both of the people that – often indirectly – triggered them – hello #HupOps – and the ones that cannot work because of them)?
- Do you value your people – especially the ones that pulled you out of this situation – enough, and did you rename your Human Resource department into something that is more friendly to your people?
- Do you realise this could have happened on any of the platforms you use, including Linux and MacOS?
- If you were mentioned in the media by not recovering well, do you have any idea how much a target you will be from adversaries?
- Did CrowdStrike finally show some real postmortem instead of the half-hearted communications they did mostly after the weekend following the debacle?
- How does your organisation perform dates of critical files?
- Would other platforms be less or more risky? If so: why?
- Will eBPF solve most of this, or at least centralise the issues and what consequences would that have?
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Posted in Configuration Management, DevOps, HugOps, Infrastructure, Power User, Windows | Leave a Comment »
Posted by jpluimers on 2024/08/19
Usually I work at high resolution monitors and sometimes I got error 0x112F when doing Remote Desktop.
After a reboot of the target machine, that error always goes away, but I wanted to know the underlying reason.
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Posted in Power User, Remote Desktop Protocol/MSTSC/Terminal Services, Windows | Leave a Comment »
The Wiert Corner - irregular stream of stuff 