Haha, that was so predictable …

Posted on 2010-11-13 by Oliver

Embarcadero is continuing to dig its own grave! The way Embarcadero treats legit customers is akin to the way the movie and music industries treat their legit customers. The paying customer sees the FBI warning (and isn’t allowed to skip it either) at the very beginning of the DVD playback – pirates don’t. Go figure!

Good luck with your stance, Embarcadero. The logical next step will be to sue people. I hope as many people as possible will turn their backs on you. Ever since Delphi 7 the tools were decaying and silly Marketingese such as “The Delphi Language” was used to distract from the real problems that remained largely unsolved. People such as Andreas, the author of DDevExtensions, have tried to mitigate some of that and are now being punished. Way to go, Embarcadero …

// Oliver

Update: why not comment there? Well, for one people criticizing their products are taunted trolls on the Embarcadero forums and secondly the “Add Comment” link gives an error. They’re probably running the forum on Delphi for PHP or so 😆
PS: it looks as if Embarcadero was in for a category 5 shitstorm. Seems like their Marketing dept. will have to do some overtime this weekend?! 😕 …

Posted in Delphi, EN, Programming | 7 Comments

AAAAAAARGH

Posted on 2010-11-12 by Oliver

As some of my readers know, I had bought an IREX Technologies iLiad eReader appliance about two years ago. The company apparently filed bankruptcy, so I’m screwed. 😯

Great way of wasting money actually.

The screen had developed one quirk which I had decided to complain about, but what can one do when the company is bankrupt? 😕

// Oliver

PS: I think the source code was never actually entirely published. Only bits and pieces. So much for the advantages of a Linux-based appliance.

Posted in EN | Leave a comment

Auf den Punkt gebracht

Posted on 2010-11-10 by Oliver

Walter Wesinger bringt in einer Karikatur den Mythos vom “arbeitenden Geld” wunderbar auf den Punkt:

Geldvermehrung
(gefunden hier und als gemeinfrei gekennzeichnet)

// Oliver

Posted in DE, Gedanken | Leave a comment

Slightly confusing – but only very slightly

Posted on 2010-11-09 by Oliver
MSDN documentation which came with Visual Studio 2005 (installed locally) says:
screenshot: /Zl - Removes default library name from .obj file (x64 only)
MSDN documentation for VS2005 online at the MSDN website says:
screenshot: /Zl - Removes default library name from .obj file (x86 only).
MSDN documentation for VS2003 online at the MSDN website says:
screenshot: /Zl - Removes default library name from .obj file
MSDN documentation for WinCE 5.0 online at the MSDN website says:
screenshot: /Zl - Remove Default-Library Name from Object File - Removes default-library names from object file.

😯

My brain hurts :mrgreen:

// Oliver

Posted in EN, Programming, Software | 8 Comments

How did they know?

Posted on 2010-11-09 by Oliver

One of my colleagues pointed me to this clip on from MADtv on Youtube. It’s antedating the Tea Party movement in the US by several years and yet so straight to the point. How did they know? :mrgreen:

// Oliver (who godwin’d the discussion just now :lol:)

Posted in EN, Thoughts | Leave a comment

“The system cannot execute the specified program.” #2

Posted on 2010-11-08 by Oliver

I did indeed solve the issue reported here. The problem must have been somewhere between my ears. Once you do it right, it works 😉

While sigcheck from Sysinternals is a very nice tool, it simply does not compare to signtool. In particular it lacks the ability to check for signing according to the rules of the Kernel Signing Policy. signtool does that easily.

signtool verify /kp ...

All that was needed was to add /ac and the file name of the root certificate from MS (details will be available at your code-signing certificate issuer). For me it was:

signtool sign ... /ac MSCV-VSClass3.cer ...

That solved it.

// Oliver

Posted in EN, IT Security, Programming | Tagged | Leave a comment

LG first impression

Posted on 2010-11-06 by Oliver

So my Mom bought herself a new cell phone. LG GS290. The phone is slick and all and pretty much offers a similar user experience as some smart phones, just without some of the bells and whistles.

The phone comes with a very slim printed quick start guide and no software CD or so. Obviously that means to turn to LG’s website. So we did. The download is some B2CAppSetup.exe, which quits, when started, after a few seconds with:

Screenshot of message box with text: The LG Mobile update program is running
(the crappy quality is due to the fact that I had to remote into her computer)

No matter how I tried to start the software (including the method with Internet Explorer, shown in a Flash video at the LG website), it would always bail out with aforementioned message. There seemed no way, so I decided to give it a whirl on my machine, here in Iceland 😉

Yay, that worked. It downloaded something and launched it, so a quick look in Task Manager gave away its location and in a few seconds the downloaded application was transferred to my Mom’s machine and launched there. Now it worked. So what failed in the “LGMLauncher” (aka B2CAppSetup.exe) was obviously the download. But the “warning” message was pretty obscure and not helpful at all …

// Oliver

PS: The installed software seems to work a bit better now.

Posted in EN, Software, Thoughts | 3 Comments

Erster Schnee in Reykjavík

Posted on 2010-11-03 by Oliver

Heute fiel der erste Schnee in Reykjavík. Vormittags noch so, daß man den Erdboden noch sehen konnte, aber am Abend dann deckend 😉

Mal sehen wie die Lage für Fußgänger dann ab morgen wird. Radfahrer und Fußgänger sind üblicherweise gelackmeiert in Island. Ihre Wege werden nicht geschoben – schlimmer noch, oftmals wird der Schnee und Dreck von der Straße als Barriere für Fußgänger und Radfahrer aufgetürmt.

// Oliver

Update:
Here a photo, courtesy of Friðrik (my boss), who made it this morning in the park that is approximately 500m from our workplace. And here a link to more photos from him.
Hier ein Foto, geschossen von Friðrik (meinem Chef), der es im Park etwa 500m von der Firma aufgenommen hat. Und hier ein Link zu anderen Fotos von ihm.

Winter in Reykjavík
Posted in /dev/null, DE, Island/Iceland/Ísland | 4 Comments

Hah, there we go

Posted on 2010-11-03 by Oliver

Some of you may remember that in my first post concerning the Quick Launch in Windows 7, I was complaining about it disappearing. Well, that got seemingly fixed after I solved the issue with the Quick Launch sticking to the right side of the taskbar instead of its rightful place next to the start button, it worked for quite some time without hassle. But since I hadn’t changed anything specific to its disappearance, I was sure this was just a problem waiting to return …

Just now, after I dared to use my laptop outside its standard environment (plugged into a docking station with another monitor connected), the Quick Launch has disappeared again.

That is annoying. Can we please have the functioning one back? Pretty please? Pretty please with sugar on top, Microsoft? Or at the very least, make it a standard citizen of the taskbar again, so it doesn’t appear next to the TNA by default, but instead next to the start button?!

// Oliver

Posted in EN, Software | Leave a comment

“The system cannot execute the specified program.”

Posted on 2010-11-02 by Oliver

There is a pretty interesting article over at winprogger.com about the problems connected with IMAGE_DLLCHARACTERISTICS_FORCE_INTEGRITY (set through /integritycheck ever since VS2005) and ERROR_INVALID_IMAGE_HASH (aka Win32 error code 577). Now, I’ve been fighting with this problem for two full days and still haven’t gotten any closer to the solution, it seems.

Microsoft requires some binaries to have this bit set if they are to communicate with certain system components. This is not limited to kernel mode drivers. In general I never had trouble with this bit until recently. Having this bit set and using /ph as a parameter to signtool in order to have page hashes enabled is the prerequisite for what I’m doing. However, even though sigcheck (from Sysinternals/Technet) finds the signature on the file valid, the PE loader disagrees. Brilliant, because now that I have ruled out some annoying other possibilities the only one left is to dig down into the code with debugger and disassembler in order to find out what they’re trying to enforce and why all signature-checking tools are quite okay with the file, but the loader is not.

To be continued … 😕

// Oliver (distressed)

Posted in EN, IT Security, Programming, Reversing, Software | Tagged , , , | 4 Comments

Painful lessons I had to learn again and again

Posted on 2010-11-02 by Oliver

Since this is something I’ve stumbled over several times now and since it is discussed in Microsoft’s documentation only as if there is only the option to import it into your store, i.e. within your user account. Now, I was going to have a designated signing machine with some other precautions in place, but users allowed into that machine would also be allowed to sign code. So how do I import the certificate so it can be used for code-signing regardless of the user account? The solution is remarkably trivial:

certutil -importPFX your.pfx

instead of the canonical

certutil -user -importPFX your.pfx

that Microsoft mentions all over its documentation. After that it should work to tell signtool

signtool sign ... /sm ... file

to pick a valid code-signing certificate from the machine store (/sm) with the latest expiry date. If you prefer to control which particular certificate gets picked, make sure to pass its hash or other traits that will help signtool to figure out what you want it to do.

// Oliver

Posted in EN, IT Security, Programming, Software | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

Selbstbeschiß mit der Arbeitslosenstatistik

Posted on 2010-11-02 by Oliver

Während Leute so wenig verdienen, daß sie beim Amt zusätzliche Gelder beantragen müssen und die sogenannten prekären Arbeitsverhältnisse insgesamt auf dem Vormarsch sind, stellt sich die Laien-Uschi auf die Bühne und zieht einen vom Leder vonwegen Arbeitslosenzahlen so gering wie seit 1992 nicht mehr. Das traurige ist, daß das Volk nichts von sich hören läßt.

// Oliver

Posted in DE, Gedanken | 3 Comments

Ein Schelm …

Posted on 2010-11-02 by Oliver

… wer dabei böses denkt. Frau Slomka meinte also gestern im heute-Journal, daß die USA die Möglichkeit eines militärischen Vorgehens gegen Jemen prüfen.

// Oliver

Posted in DE, Gedanken | Leave a comment

Womanizer

Posted on 2010-11-01 by Oliver

Youtube video :mrgreen:

Reminded me of this one, too …

Posted in /dev/null, EN | Leave a comment

Fighting with Windows 7 SDK

Posted on 2010-11-01 by Oliver

I’ve been fighting with the Windows 7 SDK which kept complaining that I have no Visual Studio 2005 or 2008 installed. Well, I don’t have 2008 installed, but I do have 2005. Problem, however, was that most posts on the web point to a (long-fixed) bug in the Vista SDKs, which was completely irrelevant to my case. After some digging I found this post though, which sheds some light on the problem. It “only” affects everyone but “US (English)” systems but is rather trivial to resolve once you know the trick.

Solution 1 does not work for me at all. It tells me:
The Windows SDK Configuration Tool has successfully set Windows SDK version v7.0 as the current version for Visual Studio 2008.
… but did I mention I don’t have VS2008 installed? 😉 … and sure enough VS2005 has no clue about the SDK after this “integration” 😉

Oh well, so on to solution 2. That’s setting my locale settings to “US (English)” in the control panel and then trying the integration tool again. Et voila, it works (no logoff/logon needed). Only one catch, now I get LNK1103, but help is on its way in KB 949009 (download here).

// Oliver

PS: That’s right, it seems to fail because in German we write 7,0 instead of 7.0 😉

Posted in EN, Programming, Software | Tagged , | Leave a comment

Money makes the world go round

Posted on 2010-10-31 by Oliver

Given the situation in the US elections this year, one is only left to wonder who will place the winning bid 😐

// Oliver

Posted in EN, Thoughts | Leave a comment

What also disappeared

Posted on 2010-10-31 by Oliver

Back to the topic of the Windows 7 task bar, I noticed that MS decided to strip yet another useful function: the system menu. On older Windows versions right-clicking the task bar button for a running program would show the same menu that you get by focusing the window and then pressing Alt+Space. This may not seem like a big deal – until you have a window that opens outside of the visible desktop area in which case in former times one could move it back by selecting the proper menu entry from the program’s system menu. Nowadays you won’t even get to see the system menu, because – well – it opens where the upper left corner of the program window is … outside of the screen.

// Oliver

Christian pointed out in a comment to this post:

This is not quite right. Hover with the mouse over an app button on the taskbar then this preview windows pops up, where you can hit the right mouse button on it to show the task menu.

Even better so. Thanks for the advice!

Posted in EN, Software | 2 Comments

1 Woche/week

Posted on 2010-10-31 by Oliver

Außer den Fotos von Max, habe ich seit einer Woche keinen Beitrag veröffentlicht. Ich habe allerdings einige geschrieben, deren Veröffentlichung nach und nach automatisch passiert.
Except for the photos of Max, I haven’t published a post for one week. I have, however, written some that will be published automatically one by one.

// Oliver

Posted in /dev/null, DE, EN | Leave a comment

Another favorite

Posted on 2010-10-30 by Oliver

Max often started to yawn when being petted for a while 😉

Max, our budgie
(Click image for English version of the gallery)

// Oliver

Posted in /dev/null, EN | Tagged | Leave a comment

Max: Bilder hinzugefügt / added pictures

Posted on 2010-10-26 by Oliver

Ich habe ein paar weitere Bilder von 2009 hochgeladen und in Max’ Seite eingefügt.
I’ve uploaded several more images of 2009 and added them to Max’ page.

Max, unser Wellensittich
(Bild anklicken für die deutsche Version der Gallerie)

Max, our budgie
(Click image for English version of the gallery)

// Oliver

Posted in /dev/null, DE, EN | Tagged | Leave a comment