Wie schon vor einigen Tagen gemeldet, gibt es bei Debian, Ubuntu, Knoppix und eben allen Debian-basierten Distros einen Fehler in der OpenSSL-Bibliothek, die das Erraten von Schlüsseln erleichtern soll. Aus diesem Grund sollte man mindestens ein
apt-get update && apt-get dist-upgrade
machen und danach mit ssh-vulnkey -a als Superuser überprüfen, ob kompromittierte Schlüssel auf dem System existieren.
Peter Herzog, Betreiber von Spotlight.de, hat heute bekanntgegeben, daß er Spotlight als Projekt einstellt. Worte des Bedauerns, aber kein Wort darüber was mit den Benutzerdaten passieren soll. Aber was soll es denn auch - spätestens seit er als Forenbetreiber beschloß, daß es okay sei das Forum nachts in einen Wartungsmodus zu schalten, war das Ding für mich gestorben. Leute wie ich oder Nico waren meistens in den Nachtstunden unterwegs, so daß es durchaus einschneidend war. Irgendwann verabschiedeten wir uns dann mehr oder weniger nach mehreren Jahren von Spotlight (bei mir gab es selten auch mal Ausflüge zurück), weil es einfach langweilig geworden war. Ich schwankte damals dann zwischen verschiedenen Delphiforen, und landete schließlich in der Delphi-PRAXiS (DP), die ich aber heute nur noch gelegentlich besuche. Der Grund dafür ist einfach: erstens habe ich kaum noch mit Delphi zu tun (was allerdings dem Wissen in Sachen Win32 API keinen Abbruch tut) und zweitens verkamen mit dem Erscheinen von Google (und anderen Suchmaschinen) viele Delphianer zu Copy&Paste-”Programmierern” (da rollen sich mir die Fußnägel auf, sowas Programmierer zu nennen) und die Foren zu sowas wie “Hausaufgabenforen”. Die DP sticht aus den Delphiforen aber dadurch hervor, daß sie gerade diesen Trend nicht fördert, was der Qualität meines Erachtens nach zuträglich ist. Leider kommt es natürlich partiell weiterhin zu diesen Erscheinungen und die ansäßigen Forengurus sind auch nicht immer so qualifiziert wie sie sich geben …
Aber wer auf der Suche nach einem Ersatzforum ist, dem kann ich die
Today the news of the purchase of CodeGear by Embarcadero Technologies transpired. I am wondering what this brings us (the developers), given the interesting past of Borland.
First it was “Borland” with products like “Borland Pascal” (and “Turbo Pascal”) and at the end of the 1990s it called itself suddenly “Inprise” and we could buy “Inprise Delphi” … wow. After a short interlude under this changed name, we landed back at “Borland” until the point when they “forked” and created a subsidiary responsible for the developer tools, called “CodeGear” and fully owned by them, after failing to sell the branch. Now Embarcadero Technologies was obviously willing to purchase this subsidiary and this will in my opinion be a defining moment for Delphi and C++ Builder.
It felt a bit like these tools all landed in an orphanage called “CodeGear”, rather than a subsidiary fully committed to the development of these formerly great products. I have bought BDS 2006 (which includes Delphi 2006 and C++ Builder 2006) in May 2006 and was very much disappointed. The product is creeping slow. I cannot override any of the prerequisites when installing it and I am even forced to install the .NET SDK 1.x, although I am not at all interested in any of the .NET “personalities” offered by BDS 2006. Hint, Visual Studio 2003 offers the ability to override the prerequisite requirements for those who are anyway not interested in the parts of the product suite that require those.
Now that they have released BDS 2007, and the future version - codenamed Tiburon - is on the doorstep, I have lost all my trust in that company and find the upgrade prices from the failed product BDS 2006 to the newer versions is ridiculous, given that I might just get another failed product. Borland/Inprise/Borland/CodeGear isn’t known to provide trial versions that allow you to actually try all aspects of their products. For example the command line compiler is known to be missing or crippled. So what am I supposed to do? Believe some of the pro-Delphi zealots once again to get disappointed once again?
Waiting for input …,
// Oliver
PS: I’ll certainly observe the developments in these products, but it’s getting a bit more scary at the moment, rather than exciting or at least reassuring.
Update: looking at this, “Commodore” seems to be the one I am waiting for, not Tiburon.
… for the Eurovision Song Contest 2008 from “Euroband”. This is, as far as I was told, really the official video that was sent in for Iceland. It’s really hilarious in my opinion, although for example my boss wasn’t as amused as anticipated
Joel Goldsmith has written a song that was performed by Rachel Lutrell, alias Teyla Emmagan (i.e. the name of the character), in the episode “Critical Mass”, that I really liked the first time I heard it. I was lucky enough to find it as downloadable video now, although I’d prefer a FLAC or even (”only”) MP3 for the occasional appearance in my playlist.
Find it at this site: Beyond the Night. I really wanted to share that, as it is so beautiful.
Kudos to Joel Goldsmith for this work. I’ve only heard so far, that the soundtrack for the SG-1 DVD movies is supposedly similarly ethereal. Won’t order it from here on Iceland, though.
// Oliver
PS: The site is the site of the author, i.e. Joel Goldsmith, so no worries. This wouldn’t be an illegal download.
Just wanted the readers of my blog to know, that we released version 6.0.9.0 of F-PROT Antivirus for Windows. This will be a staged release, as we currently have only released the English and Icelandic 32bit versions of the “Internet Update” and the - long awaited - “LAN Update”. The 64bit versions will follow shortly - most likely next Monday.
This version fixes several of the nuisances that have been reported for 6.0.8.0 and, of course, in case of the “LAN version”, for 6.0.7.1. Apart from that, several more languages will be supported and released in stages. This includes Czech, French, Italian, Polish. Two of these need still a finishing touch, but these are cosmetics and don’t change the actual program logic. And last, but not least, the engine has seen some major improvements, although the jump for the SC edition is of course considerably bigger than for the HC edition.
Windows Vista and 2008 Server are now fully supported, including - of course - SP1 on Vista.
I am told the trial versions of 6.0.9.0 will be available shortly. For now, only the files in the customer zone have been updated.
In the scope of WinDirStat I had to take the little hurdle of branching in the past. Now, supposedly I could have simply opened a support request to the staff, but then I thought of it again, since I had done it locally on a Linux machine before. There was a problem, though: I wasn’t able to establish a shell connection to the CVS server. So the only thing left was to go the “classic” way. As mentioned before, I had done similar things before on a Linux machine, but that was at the same time the CVS server. So no fiddling around with protocols, establishing connections and so on.
This time it was a bit trickier, although not too tricky. But in order to save me (and perhaps others) from searching the command line options again and again, here it is for archival and for those who may face the same problem in future. This assumes that you have CVS access with your SF.net-username:
set CVS_RSH=plink.exe
cvs -z6 -d:ext:username@project.cvs.sourceforge.net:/cvsroot/project ↵
tag -b -f -R -D yyyy-mm-ddBranchNameModuleName
The green parts are the variable parts. “ModuleName” can also be a “.” (dot), which means all modules.
Hereby I announce the release of DDKBUILD.CMD 7.2. This release fixes one issue with errors not being properly extracted from the respective file. Consequently Visual Studio would not show the errors and you wouldn’t be able to double-click the item in the task list in order to jump to the code in question.
Apart from that, this release introduces one new configuration and aliases for existing ones, which make this version more compatible with the DDKBUILD script from Hollistech. The support goes even as far as understanding the XPBASE environment variable for the respective DDKs, which differs - or rather differed - in name from both OSR flavors before. Continue reading ‘DDKBUILD.CMD 7.2 released (updated)’
Wow, look at that Quality Central article. Now look at the reply. Now look closer at the affected version and the date when it was reported.
It’s unbelievable, but now - after working a while with Borland C++ Builder 6 (BCB6) - I found out by accident, that a huge portion of the final size of the executables created by BCB6 is made up of exports. And I am not talking about DLLs here, for which it is normal to export functions - I am talking about ordinary programs which under normal circumstances don’t even have an export table. What the heck were the Borland engineers thinking and why the heck wasn’t this fixed with one of the updates? This ignorance is amazing. Apart from the threat of crackers or other reverse engineers who just get half the job done by Borland kindly exporting my symbols and with name for them, there are other concerns. How about the garbage in my executable? Shouldn’t this alone be convincing enough to rid us users off this “feature”? Also I have serious doubt that the so-called “smart-linking” is totally unaffected by this, since exported symbols cannot be subject to optimization. They’re needed, because they are exported. This may not reflect the actual necessity of the symbol to remain in the binary, but now that it is exported, it has to be left in the binary.
From experience I can only tell that Delphi doesn’t build so huge binaries for similarly sized projects. But then, Delphi also doesn’t export hundreds and hundreds of garbage symbols.
At least there are people in the Delphi community who have solved some of the common usability and speed issues you have had for about a decade now with Borlands Win32 products. Andreas Hausladen is one of them and he offers such nice tools as DDevExtensions and DelphiSpeedup. Both also work, despite the name, on Borland’s C++ products. And even better, Andreas has provided a tool which offers a partial solution to the above discussed problem: LibExportRemover. This tool literally comments out those export declarations in the LIB (OMF) files of the package LIBs. In the case I am facing, about 1000 exports - and even many Windows system DLLs have less exports than the resulting EXE in my case - can be attributed to the excellent Virtual Treeview component. Don’t mistake it: I am not blaming the component, but the compiler and the linker and the rest of those tools behaving so silly.
Like this, for example. Description of the neighbor:
Total, absolute jerk. Irresponsible. Lets his velociraptors roam freely around the neighbourhood. They ate two of my children, but thank goodness I have more or there’d be no one to put to work in the coal mines. Animal control won’t do a thing about it, and every time I call the police the raptors are back behind the electric fences by the time they arrive. Just the other day an elderly woman three doors down was eaten as she went for the morning paper. I don’t know what to do. Thinking of joining the township council and pushing through an ordinance banning the keeping of dromaeosaurids as pets. Any suggestions?
This would not have happened without genetical research. Surely not!
… waste system resources all the time? Did you notice that, although computers are nominally a few hundred times faster than 15 years ago, software still tends to run sluggish and is overloaded with features?
How comes we’re so careless about resources on the user’s system? Not that I am against a little overhead that allows to make the software safer, but why for example use the .NET framework and put even more of a burden on the user’s system? Or why load DLLs that are not even used under some circumstances and could be dynamically loaded for the single case where it is relevant? Is it laziness or simply carelessness or maybe something completely different?
At the end of March, and it seems this is not a April fool’s joke, a Swedish newspaper reported on their website about the fastest residential internet connection in the world. However, the 75-year old woman didn’t appreciate the connection as much as we would have. Instead of using it for downloads, uploads or serving content, she used it for drying her laundry. Quote:
It was a big bit of gear and it got pretty warm.
I have regularly wet laundry too … could I please get such a nice thing as well?!
Although the manual is still perfectly valid for version 1.2.0a of DDKWizard and covers also older versions, I took the time to completely revise it. This means that it contains some updated information, some additional information and some corrections.
If you are using DDKWizard or DDKBUILD.CMD you may want to have another look into it. As usual, the latest version can be found here.
Have a look at RunEl and don’t miss out when Chris presents the implementation of his newest idea. An UAC implementation which works on XP and Vista but is more user-friendly.
// Oliver
PS: I understand it’s still April, but as far as I can tell this is not a joke
An interesting article in English on a Chinese website shows how Western mainstream media bends truth. I have no doubt that Chinese government media does similar things, but we Westerners should be ashamed if the freedom of speech is (ab)used by the media to spread lies in such a way. Especially if we use our media to stay “informed”.
One issue was reported by Vladimir Zinin in the article about DDKBUILD on OSR Online already back in October 2007. However, since I hadn’t actually built any x64 code with the newer 6001.* WDK, and since Vladimir had mentioned that he used the WNETAMD64 configuration I had basically discarded his comment as a mixup of the wrong WDK/DDK with the respective configuration. Sorry about that, Vladimir. Your comment was right, although the configuration you used was obviously WLHNETX64.
Anyway, the fix proved not to be as easy as anticipated. The problem is, that the WDK team at Microsoft changed the setenv.bat in a way that breaks compatibility between the Vista WDK (6000) and the Windows 2008 Server WDK (6001.18000). Instead of adding the flag x64 for x64 builds, the flag AMD64 was replaced by x64. This makes it a bit tricky. I solved it by introducing a detection of the string “Windows Server Longhorn” inside setenv.bat. Since this file has to be in the ./bin folder inside the base directory of the used WDK, this should be pretty safe. Also, since it has been released now as “Windows 2008 Server” it is unlikely to change back to “Windows Server Longhorn” (at least I hope this!). This brings me to a little rant. The WDK team could easily ignore the base directory parameter and detect it from the location of setenv.bat … but well … (rant over) Continue reading ‘DDKBUILD.CMD 7.1 released’
Jaap de Hoop Scheffer recently said that there can’t be a NATO where some members emphasize on the humanitarian aspects, while others emphasize on the combat aspect. This was mainly targetted at Germany’s role in Northern Afghanistan. Germany has sent in troops to protect efforts to rebuild the country. As skeptical as one may be about this, did Mr. de Hoop Scheffer actually check the list of NATO member countries before he made that statement? Continue reading ‘Wait a minute …’
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