The program looklink has received a minor update.
// Oliver
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Überraschende Post
Gestern bekam ich überraschend Post, oder besser gesagt Email, von "Kundensupport www.top-of-software.de"
Sehr geehrter Herr Peter Peter,
willkommen bei www.top-of-software.de!
Um Ihren Zugang frei zu schalten, öffnen Sie bitte folgende Internetadresse:
hxxp://www.top-of-software.de/freischalten.php?code=…
Jetzt nur noch Ihre Zugangsdaten
Benutzername: …
Passwort: … (Bitte auf Groß- und Kleinschreibung achten!)eingeben und Sie haben sofort Zugang zu den Inhalten.
Bewahren Sie Ihre Zugangsdaten an einem sicheren Ort auf.
Antworten Sie nicht auf diese E-Mail! Haben Sie Fragen zu unserem Angebot, nutzen Sie bitte das Kontaktformular auf der Seite hxxp://www.kontakt-anfrage.de/.
Sie benötigen hierzu Ihre Kundennummer T01234567. Über das Kontaktformular können wir Ihre Anfragen schnellstmöglich bearbeiten. Bitte haben Sie dafür Verständnis, dass
Anfragen direkt an die Mailadresse info@top-of-software-aktivierung.de nicht zugestellt werden können.Viel Spaß beim Stöbern!
Mit freundlichen Grüßen
www.top-of-software.de
Zunächst arglos, antwortete ich auf die Email:
Bitte loeschen Sie mich aus Ihrer Datenbank. Offenbar hat jemand meine Emailadresse missbraucht um sich bei Ihnen anzumelden.
Vielen Dank aus Island,
Oliver Schneider
Dumm gelaufen. Beim ersten Mal hatte ich natürlich nicht so gründlich gelesen, daß mir aufgefallen wäre, daß ich nicht auf diese Email antworten, sondern eine Antwortwebseite benutzen soll – eigentlich sogar muß. Die Email kam nämlich mit Zustellfehler zurück. Also nochmals die Email gelesen, Kontaktformular aufgesucht, “Kundennummer” und Kontaktdaten eingegeben und fertig.
Heute Morgen bekam ich dann eine Mail mit [Ticket#2010011920004224] in der Betreffzeile von Supportanfrage - Antassia GmbH
Sehr geehrte Kundin, sehr geehrter Kunde,
Ihren Widerruf haben wir erhalten und bedauern, dass Sie unseren Service nicht weiter nutzen möchten.
Sollten Sie zwischenzeitlich eine Rechnung erhalten haben, können Sie diese als gegenstandslos betrachten.
Kontakt:
Bitte haben Sie dafür Verständnis, dass aufgrund von Spam-Attacken eine Antwort oder Rückfrage nur über unser Kontaktformular auf der Seite http://www.kontakt-anfrage.de getätigt werden kann.
Sie brauchen dazu Ihre Emailadresse und Ihre Kunden- oder Rechnungsnummer.Mit freundlichen Grüßen
Ihr Support-Team
Antassia GmbH
Rhabanusstraße 10
55118 Mainz
(gefolgt von Bankdaten und so weiter)
Damit war die Sache fast für mich gegessen. Da die ursprüngliche Email nicht den kleinsten Hinweis auf eine “Antassia GmbH” enthielt, dachte ich mir, daß eine Websuche kaum schaden kann. Gedacht, getan. Und siehe da, es handelt sich um eine Abzockermasche. Mal sehen ob da trotzdem noch irgendwelche Rechnungen kommen. Wen’s interessiert, dem lege ich eine Websuche nach den Begriffen “Antassia GmbH” und/oder “top-of-software.de”. Spannend was man da so liest.
// Oliver
Just signed the petition myself
… please sign as well. The death penalty is government-sanctioned murder and this petition to Barack Obama, fellow Nobel Peace Prize winner (2009) with Amnesty International (1977), tries to save the life of one particular death-row inmate, but clearly mentions the numerous humans world-wide sharing his fate.
A just cause. I’d like to ask you, my readers, to sign the petition as well if you’re against the death penalty. And of course feel free to comment here in the blog, whether you are against or for capital punishment.
// Oliver
Lazarus seems to become what Delphi used to be …
A few years back I turned away from Delphi. This was specifically because it is harder to express some things in Delphi than it is in other languages, but mostly due to how bloated, slow and unusable Delphi had become. Having had the chance to look at the latest version only the slowdown issue seems to have been resolved really.
Today I was forced to look into an older Delphi project of a friend. The project was written in Delphi 5 originally. I started out with Delphi 4 after some experiences with Turbo and Borland Pascal. At some point I decided to upgrade to BDS 2006 (Borland Developer Studio) and still regret it. Not only does it contain an abundance of components that I would and will never use, no it also insists on using a particular version of the .NET SDK even though I have explicitly deselected the “.NET personality” as it used to be called back then. This caan be quite annoying if you use this BDS version on a x64 version of Windows Vista (which comes with a newer .NET runtime pre-installed). Note: why would I need an SDK if I have deselected the .NET personality and thus explicitly don’t want to develop for .NET, especially if the built-in .NET runtime should suffice to run the BDS version.
Now, since I didn’t want to install the old Delphi 4 on my Vista or inside a VM and didn’t want to use some other version either (including the dreaded BDS 2006 license I own), I remembered that some years back I had tried Lazarus, an IDE to FreePascal. Back then I considered it almost unusable, especially in direct comparison to Delphi 4 and 5 (which I used at work). Now I downloaded it again and I’m excited about the way it took. It just looks great – simple and concise. No bloat. The look and feel is close to what I was used to in those old Delphi versions, while Borland/Inprise/Borland/Codegear/Embarcadero was trying to put “more” into it.
But it doesn’t end there. The debugger backend is GDB, one of my newly found favorites. Since my first serious debugging session using GDB on a Linux on PowerPC, I consider it a very powerful debugger. Usually I prefer to use graphical tools, but GDB works fine both in line-oriented mode and in TUI-mode. The only thing I haven’t figured out yet is whether it is possible to cross-compile on the Win64 version for Win32 as well.
All in all Lazarus leaves a very nice impression and I’ll see how it goes with the project I’m working on. Perhaps it will lead me to use Pascal more often again. In general I like to use the tools that aid the solution of the problem, but usability plays a role there.
So to the FreePascal and Lazarus developers: well done! Nice job!
// Oliver
Lesson learned
Today I was trying to treat an SVN dump file with sed in order to modify a few of the Node-path values. After finding out that GNU sed has no problem with binary files, I went on to formulate the problem … first on the command line:
sed '/^Node-/s/match/replacement/p' inputfile
The intent should be clear: testing my expressions, i.e. for lines that start with “Node-” replace match with replacement and print it out. From that, however, I got my terminal all garbled since it printed some control characters. Only after re-reading the respective part in the “sed & awk” book from O’Reilly I noticed that it should have been:
sed -n '/^Node-/s/match/replacement/p' inputfile
This way only lines that I tell it to print will make it to the terminal and nothing go garbled anymore.
// Oliver
svndumptool … propname for transform-prop
$ svndumptool.py transform-prop --help Usage: svndumptool.py transform-prop propname regex replace source dest
I couldn’t find the possible properties detailed, so I used grep:
Node-action Node-copyfrom-path Node-copyfrom-rev Node-kind Node-path
… for the Node-kind and Node-action I found the following values:
Node-action: add Node-action: change Node-action: delete Node-kind: dir Node-kind: file
// Oliver
PS: http://svn.collab.net/repos/svn/trunk/notes/dump-load-format.txt
The Icelandic deposit insurance
Yesterday I wrote about the veto of the Icelandic president concerning the reimbursement of IceSave depositors. After the Icelandic (and global) banksters privatized the profits, the societies of countries like Iceland are left with the – now socialized – losses. Apparently it hasn’t been enough to cause real riots in the Western societies. The feeble protests so far have been laughable and the creeping death of civil rights in those societies will soon have the last protesters silenced …
However, the fact that Iceland, a rather small economy, is now supposed to act as the lender of last resort for the failure of a clique of banksters is an intriguing prospect in many ways. Perhaps, though, Icelanders don’t consider it intriguing at all – perhaps I as tax-payer in Iceland shouldn’t either. Still, most Icelanders I talked to want to pay back the debts, the opinions just diverge when it comes to the time frame and the other conditions.
The IMF has approved 2.1 billion USD under certain conditions. According to the IMF itself, that deal is not tied to the IceSave issue. Those of us who know the kind of conditions IMF and World Bank have put on economies in exchange for aids in the past will share a certain skepticism with me. Conditions connected to past funds have always been abused to exercise control over those economies in a manner that was usually not beneficial to the economy. The obligations of Iceland are approximately 6 billion USD, which means it cannot at all be covered by the emergency aid approved by the IMF but instead have to be paid off over a longer period of time. And common Icelanders are – understandably – upset about the prospect of having to pay off debts not caused by them, yet most seem to be willing to do so.
But why should the Icelandic people pay those debts? Because the Icelandic deposit insurance (Tryggingarsjóður) couldn’t possibly handle the collapse of all three Icelandic banks? Well, how does that look for other economies then? Even though a lot of secrecy surrounds this kind of institution, the German counterpart to Tryggingarsjóður would most likely not survive the collapse of a single big German bank like the “Deutsche Bank” either. The securities offered by these institutions and the assurances you hear from politicians are nothing but snake oil. The comical aspect becomes more apparent once you realize that you as the tax payer in your country are the one who has to pay for these so-called “guarantees”. There is no more lucrative debtor for a bank than a country with its tax payers as collateral. Banks, by the way, which have helped to privatize profits and socialize losses.
In that light I totally agree that the Icelanders, the people who are supposed to share the burden of paying off debts they haven’t caused, should decide about the issue themselves in a plebiscite.
Unfortunately Iceland is in a somewhat delicate situation. Most of the products sold here have to be imported. Being a “bad” debtor has certain implications in such a scenario. Unlike the US which simply will print more dollars and thereby dilute the own currency (which hurts the US much less than its creditors) or emit more government bonds (and apparently “buy” them using the printed dollars to fake demand, as seemed to be the case for 2009), Iceland’s currency is weak and its collapse wouldn’t have much of an impact on the global economy.
I wonder, though, whether in years to come the Icelanders will be glad their president vetoed the resolution and thereby gave them the opportunity to decide their own future, although right now Ólafur Ragnar Grímsson looks like a spineless politician to many Icelanders …
In general the old principle of divide et impera seems to work out pretty well for those who caused the debacle. Instead of the victims uniting against the actual culprits (politicians, banksters), they will gladly sacrifice each other as scape goats on the altar of the religion of money. To recycle an old quote from Karl Marx and adapt it for our so-called “post-modern times” and globalized world: Citizens of the world, unite!
// Oliver
Posted in EN, Island/Iceland/Ísland, Thoughts
Tagged democracy, Iceland, IceSave, Island/Iceland/Ísland, Tryggingarsjóður
5 Comments
Plebiscite in Iceland
The decision of Icelandic president Ólafur Ragnar Grímsson to veto an updated resolution of the Alþingi to reimburse IceSave depositors has sparked a bit of a controversy here on Iceland. Strangely enough the majority of Icelanders I talked to would have preferred if the president had approved the updated resolution, although the new version of the bill removes the limits existent in the original version. Polls, however, suggest that the public vote is against the reimbursement under the new conditions.
What’s more interesting, though, is that the veto causes a plebiscite to take place on the topic of the reimbursement and its conditions. Since the polls indicate that the majority of Icelanders opposes the new version of the bill, the reactions from the UK and the Netherlands have been stern (see the article of the Wall Street Journal linked above).
The fascinating side of the issue is, that this literally could mean a standoff of the Icelandic public vote against other so-called “Western democracies”. Which begs the question how the British and Dutch are going to treat the Icelandic public vote once it’s final. After all plebiscite is an instrument of direct democracy that many EU-citizens have been deprived of by the political elite in their respective countries. Think about the introduction of the Euro or the Treaty of Lisbon – consider especially the treatment of the Irish public vote after the first referendum in which the Irish rejected the treaty.
// Oliver
Posted in Island/Iceland/Ísland, Thoughts
Tagged democracy, direct democracy, Iceland, IceSave, Island/Iceland/Ísland, Ólafur Grímsson, plebiscite
2 Comments
Aufbau West
Hatte gestern eine wunderbare Geschäftsidee. Da man sich in den alten Bundesländern mittlerweile – zu Recht – darüber beschwert, daß die Straßen verkommen während sie in den neuen Bundesländern mit dem Soli bis ultimo verschönert werden (wir lassen Forst-Keune mal raus aus der Betrachtung), könnte der Soli doch in ein gesamtdeutsches Projekt umgewandelt werden. Es ist landläufig bekannt, daß nur die Einwohner der alten Bundesländer den Soli tragen mußten, weshalb nun endlich auch die neuen Bundesländern zu ihrer gesamtdeutschen Verantwortung gezogen werden sollten.
Ein erster Schritt könnte sein, wenn die in ostdeutschen Städten und Gemeinden nutzlos an Kreuzungen herumliegenden Gebrauchtkreisverkehre quasi als Spenden in die alten Bundesländer umgesiedelt würden. Damit würden die alten Bundesländer den infrastrukturellen Impuls bekommen, um sich endlich auch in ähnlich blühende Landschaften zu verwandeln wie es die neuen Bundesländer bereits geworden sind. Natürlich nicht im Winter, aber wer zwischen Frühling und Herbst ostdeutsche Industriegebiete besucht, kann blühende Landschaften vom feinsten erleben. Allein die Zahl der verschiedenen Kräuter und Gräser dürfte wohl jeden Westdeutschen ob ihrer Pracht erblassen lassen. Wer, wie die Westdeutschen, nur graue und zubetonierte Industriegebiete kennt, könnte gar versucht sein in den Erholungsoasen die die ostdeutschen Industriegebiete nunmal sind, sein Zelt aufzuschlagen und Urlaub zu machen …
Sollten die Kreisverkehre in ihrer derzeitigen Form nicht gebraucht werden, so könnte man sie auch begradigen und noch immer hunderttausende Kilometer Straße in den alten Bundesländern damit asphaltieren. Von den Vorzügen für die Umwelt nicht zu reden …
Was denkt ihr, könnte so ein Geschäftsmodell Erfolg haben?
Posted in DE, Ich, der Zyniker
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Ой, какой был слон, какой был слон …
Jaja, die bösen Deutschen wieder. Der “Ausländer” mit dem Hocker … 😉
“Gut gut, ja ja […] Слон плохой! Справка хороший!” 
Kurze Erklärung für die deutschen Leser. Der Ausländer mit dem Hocker (инностранец с табуреткой) versucht in dieser Kurzserie einen Elefanten aus einem sowjetischen Zoo zu stehlen. Um eine scheinbare Legitimation zu erhalten, geht er in einen Laden in dem Keramikelefanten verkauft werden und läßt sich einen “großen Elefanten” zeigen, welchen er für gut befindet. Danach läßt er sich eine Bescheinigung (справка) geben, daß der Elefant ihm gehört und – als diese fertig ist – reißt sie dem Verkäufer aus der Hand und läßt den Keramikelefanten fallen. Daraufhin ruft der Verkäufer zweimal “Was war das für ein (schöner) Elefant” (какой был слон, какой был слон …), worauf der Ausländer triumphierend (und mit Akzent) die Bescheinigung schwingt und ausruft: “Слон плохой! Справка хороший!” (Elefant [ist] schlecht! Bescheinigung [ist] gut!).
Indecisive climate summit …
Sorry fellows, you’re laughable. No actual steps have been formulated … BIG SUCCESS!!! Celebrate yourself, world elite!
Posted in /dev/null
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Beim Tippen des letzten Beitrags …
… fiel mir etwas auf. Auf der von mir derzeit benutzten US-englischen Tastatur – für das Programmieren ist sie einfach bequemer – gibt es keine Taste für “§”. Was sagt das über uns Deutsche aus?
// Oliver
Update: dänische Tastaturen haben dieses Zeichen über der Tab-Taste.
Am deutschen Wesen soll die Welt genesen
Wie Mathias schon vor einigen Tagen berichtete, hat ein Hamburger Geschäftsmann in Forst sein blaues Wunder erleben dürfen, da an der Scheibe oberhalb seiner blauen, rechteckigen, mit einem P markierten, jedoch etwas kleineren italienischen Parkscheibe ein Knöllchen angebracht war.
Laut Artikel “Forst ist nicht Palermo” in der LR (mit Bildvergleich der Parkscheiben) hat er sogar die Politesse noch erwischt, die ihm das Knöllchen verpaßt hatte. Die Scheibe sei eben ungültig. Laut §13 der StVO ist das Zeichen 318, die Abbildung einer Parkscheibe mit Bemaßung, maßgeblich. Dort angegeben sind 15×11 Zentimeter, was laut Wikipedia in einer Verwaltungsvorschrift geregelt ist. Der Hamburger beruft sich darauf, daß seit fünf Jahren niemand diese Parkscheibe beanstandet habe. Tja, Unwissen schützt eben vor Strafe nicht.
Der Politesse, die vermutlich mal schlechte Erfahrungen mit stereotypisch kleinwüchsigen und schmierigen Italienern gemacht haben muß, darf man mit auf den Weg geben, daß sie die öffentliche Ordnung und deutsches Recht in Forst tapfer mit toitscherrr Orrrdentlichkeit gegen den kleinen italienischen Parkscheibenzeiger verteidigt hat, was ihr sicher noch gedankt wird.
Allen anderen sei empfohlen sich schonmal einen dicken Sammelordner mit Parkscheiben für das Parken in anderen Ländern anzulegen. Vielleicht sind andere Länder da ähnlich penibel.
// Oliver
PS: zu den Mustern auf Sitzbezügen in Autos habe ich leider keine Vorschrift gefunden, weshalb ich denke, daß da dringender Regelungsbedarf besteht.
Software auf der Straße
Letztens fuhr ich ganz gemütlich auf der A3 und sah plötzlich eine Windows-Fehlermeldung “Exception: failed to allocate memory […]” auf dem Navi (Becker Traffic Assist Highspeed 7934). Nach dem Anklicken des OK-Knopfes war der Fehler wieder weg. Später, immernoch auf der A3, kam dann der gleiche Fehler nochmals und ich mußte etwa ein dutzend Male auf OK klicken. Nachdem das erledigt war, war das Navigationsprogramm verschwunden (i.e. abgestürzt).
Normalerweise bin ich von solcherlei Fehlern ja fasziniert. Aber bei Geschwindigkeiten über hundert ist es eine Ablenkung die nicht sein müßte.
// Oliver
Posted in DE, Software
2 Comments
Dangerous ideas
The developing countries state that the developed countries have to cut back on carbon dioxide emissions, saying that the industrialized world is responsible for the current situation. In my opinion they’re right.
However, the foundation of this statement is that every human being should have the same right to use the natural resources and that the industrialized countries are already over their quota. If, however, every human has the same right to use natural resources, this has certain implications for the justification of national states and so on. Obviously resources are not limited to our atmosphere or the oceans, but also include the raw materials in the Earth’s shell. Now, if every human being has the same right to these resources, this automatically questions the established nations, because some have scarce resources while they exist in abundance in other countries. One doesn’t have to be a genius to understand that any objection implies ultimately very dangerous ideas regarding the status quo.
Capitalism is based on growth – and on exploitation of natural resources to achieve this growth. Since the natural resources are limited, so is the growth. Nevertheless Western politicians preach “growth” as the way out of “the crisis”. No need to be Einstein to understand that infinite growth is impossible, so a breakdown of the system is inherent to the capitalistic system. No need to be Marx or Lenin, communist, fascist, capitalist or libertarian, or in other words particular to any ideology, to simply comprehend this fact.
If natural resources are limited, this should mean that they are precious in some way. But they aren’t, are they? Natural resources don’t have a price tag – at least most don’t. Crude oil, metals and minerals – sure – but air and fresh water? However, if there is a price tag attached, it is the price of the work it took to pump up, dig out or refine the raw material plus some margin as profit.
Let’s take a gold mining company, for example. The company has to pay a more or less arbitrary amount to the country in which it is located in order to be granted the right to mine the gold. So you would think that the company has paid all the involved costs, right? Wrong! No one has put a price tag on the water the company is going to pollute during Gold cyanidation, so the company doesn’t pay for it. So who pays for it? Well you and me, or more specifically the people living nearby the river that got polluted and so on. Either they pay for the means to purify the water and undo the damage (if at all possible), which means that the purification costs are being socialized, or they pay with their health. In either case the company owner who may be located in another country isn’t directly affected, yet he gains disproportionately more from the “deal” than the inhabitants of the affected area. As we can see, not only is the use of resources disproportionate but also the gain from them.
Adding price tags – the emission certificates are a feeble attempt to implement something like that – makes sense and provides a different angle when people tell you: “well, solar energy costs a lot more despite the subsidies”. Oh really? But has the calculation for the nuclear power-plant considered the costs that will arise from having to safeguard the depleted fuel elements for the next hundred thousand years? If you dig deeper you will see that it hasn’t. The same holds for the fossil energy creation. The loan is always on the following generations.
It’s time to calculate the costs more consequently. But most of all it is time to put a cost on the pollution of air, the pollution of water and pollution and/or exploitation of all natural resources. Capitalists like to calculate their figures in amounts of money … let them!
In my opinion just like Communism has to fail unless implemented globally 1. No surprises there, I guess. But Capitalism has to fail as well, because there can’t be infinite growth nor can it be sustainable if its principles aren’t applied to every facet of life. Put a price tag on everything and you still can’t grow infinitely. The closest we could get would be to become war-mongering species that conquers other planets in order to exploit their resources … in Hollywood movies those are usually the bad guys, though 😉
// Oliver
- Please don’t let yourself be fooled by some people stating that it has already failed. No one on Earth has even tried Communism the way it was thought by Marx and Engels. The closest (and cruelest) implementation yet was Lenin’s “War Communism” in the 1920s.[↩]
De-registered сніжок.net
As already pointed out last year, the treatment of IDNs in Internet Explorer and Firefox is flawed, so that I decided to cancel the domain сніжок.net. However, apparently a few other domains have a privileged stance with respect to the anti-spoofing measures implemented in Firefox. I recently discovered that a name with the German umlaut “ö” (or “o with diaresis”) is not put to the same harsh treatment of showing the IDN in its encoded form and therefore spoiling the whole (aesthetic) point of registering an IDN in the first place. Interestingly “ö” is considered different enough from “o” to allow the users not to be fooled into thinking it’s an “o”. Well then, dear Firefox developers, please explain to me with what the cyrillic characters “н” and, more obviously, “ж” can be confused to allow a spoofing attack? Maybe “н” with “H”? Well, perhaps you should try to type an uppercase domain name into your browser’s address bar and observe …? But while the confusion of “н” for “H” may have a certain foundation, there is no latin letter like “ж” … no, “x” looks nothing alike!!!
So what the heck are they thinking? Is it because English native speakers or “Westerners” in general don’t feel the need to give other people with other letters (and character sets) the aesthetic pleasure of using their own words without transliteration into some latinized form? This treatment is certainly killing a great idea … but it’s great at that, at least.
// Oliver
Posted in EN, IT Security, Programming, Thoughts
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DDKWizard 1.3.0a released
This is a maintenance release that just adds one change to the driver template (thanks Jan!) and several changes in the documentation. Nothing in the code has changed, it will identify as version 1.3.0.
You can download it as usual from here:
– Direct download
– Project website
Enjoy the new version,
// Oliver
PS: Let me know if you run into any problems.
Posted in /dev/null
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Wie wird man Volksvertreter
Wer nix wird, wird Wirt.
Wer gar nix wird, wird Betriebswirt.
Und wem dieses nicht gelungen, handelt mit Versicherungen.
Ist die Bude trotzdem kalt, wirst du eben Rechtsanwalt.
Kommst du damit keinen Meter, werde einfach Volkszertreter
(Quelle: Benutzer “cassiel”, hier.)
Posted in /dev/null, DE
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DDKWizard 1.3.0 released
Hereby I announce the release of version 1.3.0 of DDKWizard which introduces support for the Windows 7/2008 Server R2 WDKs and drops support for the Windows 2000 DDKs. You can download it as usual from here:
– Direct download
– Project website
I strongly recommend that you update your configuration (INI) file in order to remove the old settings for the Windows 2000 DDKs and add the new settings for the Windows 7/2008 Server R2 WDKs. Both of these changes are optional, but I recommend you make these changes or alternatively back up the old INI file and then have the setup overwrite it and later merge them yourself.
Enjoy the new version,
// Oliver
PS: Let me know if you run into any problems.
Posted in DDKWizard/DDKBUILD, EN, Programming, Software
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No reliable method, it seems
With DDKBUILD I do have to tackle NT scripting issues every now and then. Now, most people don’t even recognize that NT scripting is not the same as Batch scripting. But the functionality of NT scripting is very limiting as well at times, although it goes well beyond the good old Batch scripting.
The reason I had to scrap revision 58 last night was that the detection of whether execution of a binary succeeded or failed is hard to do, if at all possible. Bad luck.
There should be several methods that all depend on the exit code of the executed program. They are all variations of each other. So let’s say you want to execute a program (not a builtin of the interpreter) named program (sorry, couldn’t come up with anything better – it’s late here ;)). Now we assume that program will be happy to answer how to use it, so that:
program /?
returns an exit code of 0 and thus ERRORLEVEL is being set to 0 after the call.
program /? > NUL 2>&1
would do the same but suppress the help output as well as any errors. So far so good. One easy way to check the ERRORLEVEL value on the same line is well known from Unix shells. But don’t let this similarity fool you – NT scripting is much more limited than any of the Unix shells I’ve worked with.
program some parameters > NUL 2>&1 && echo Success program some parameters > NUL 2>&1 || echo Failure
The only problem is that if program does not exist (e.g. because it isn’t in the PATH) the ERRORLEVEL still won’t be set to any non-zero value. So there doesn’t seem to be any primitive to allow this check, which is done in many Unix shells like this:
[ -x program ] && echo "Success"
# Bash also allows:
[ -x program ] && {echo "Success";} || {echo "Failure";}
reliably and easy to remember …
Well, it just means that the DDKBUILD users will have to live with the fact that some errors are beyond what the script can possibly catch. I’m always trying to give the best error output possible, because an error means a nuisance already, but having to dig down to the cause is highly annoying. But here’s a limit I haven’t found any solution to just yet. Let me know if you happen to know one …
// Oliver
Posted in DDKWizard/DDKBUILD, EN, Programming, Software
7 Comments