Hacking – Page 8 – doncho.net

Category: Hacking
Computer, technical and life hacks!

Programmer’s Personality Test at Doolwind’s Game Coding Site

Posted on 6/2/20096/2/2009 by Doncho

Today I did the Programmer’s Personality Test at Doolwind’s Game Coding Site. It’s quick (and dirty 🙂 ), but it quite correctly evaluated one of my closest friend’s personality, and (I think) mine too:

Your programmer personality type is:
DHTB

You’re a Doer.
You are very quick at getting tasks done. You believe the outcome is the most important part of a task and the faster you can reach that outcome the better. After all, time is money.
You like coding at a High level.
The world is made up of objects and components, you should create your programs in the same way.
You work best in a Team.
A good group is better than the sum of it’s parts. The only thing better than a genius programmer is a cohesive group of genius programmers.
You are a liBeral programmer.
Programming is a complex task and you should use white space and comments as freely as possible to help simplify the task. We’re not writing on paper anymore so we can take up as much room as we need.

It was fun and quick.

So, what’re your Developer’s Personality Results 🙂 ?

Visual Studio Debug Error: Unable to Start Debugging

Posted on 5/27/20095/27/2009 by Doncho

These days I was striking with very annoying issue. Each time when I try to start debugging any Windows solution, my Visual Studio 2008 Professional was giving me the annoying error “Error while trying to run project: Unable to start debugging. The system cannot find the file specified”:

To my impression, this started happening after installing and reviewing (and then uninstalling) one of the internal Technical Previews of Visual Studio 2010 (and .NET framework 4.0). After that, even reinstalling the frameword and Visual Studio 2008 did not help – the error was (and still is) showing each time after I do Debug. The application was running fine when started with Run.

Web searches showed nothing.

I was almost ready to give up (and reinstall completely my Windows 7 RC!) when a good friend of mine (and brilliant developer himself) advised me to try researching the issue with Process Monitor.

The Process Monitor showed me that VS is trying to create a lot of stuff in places, where it should not (like Program files, for example). Weird, because it’s with last current SP, it should respect that. Obviously something screwed up the logic and now it was doing the wrong things again.

At that point I “remembered” that maybe “Run as administrator” might help. It was helping a lot before releasing of the SP, which made VS compatible with Vista.

I tried “Run as administrator” and… suddenly all went fine. I was able to debug.

Since this workaround resolves my current problem (and I’m almost sure the whole thing is because of screw up from beta version), I will not research more. I wrote this note in case someone strikes with similar issue and (the same as me) forgets to try the “Run as administrator” magic 🙂 .

Работа за програмист на C в Пловдив

Posted on 5/25/20095/27/2009 by Doncho

Update: Позицията не е налична вече.

Правя услуга на много близък до мен човек, публикувайки тук една кратичка обява.

Търси се програмист на С за работа в Пловдив. Постоянно работно място, добро заплащане в зависимост от уменията ви. Ако имате интерес, моля да изпратите на public НА doncho ТОЧКА net едно CV, за да го препратя към този, който търси човека.

Искам да уточня, че аз лично нямам нищо общо с обявата, освен че лично познавам човекът, който си търси хора.

Искам да помоля и тези, които познават човекът и фирмата, да не коментират детайли.

WP-Mobile

Posted on 5/22/2009 by Doncho

От днес имам настроен WordPress Mobile Edition плъгин и тема.

Проверих го как работи с моя Windows Mobile 6.1, изглежда наред. Предварително благодаря на всички, които имат мобилен апарат и достъп, пробват и да пуснат един ред дали работи или не.

🙂

IE8 RTM

Posted on 3/19/20093/19/2009 by Doncho

Интересен ден е днес. Internet Explorer 8 е готов. Всеки може да го свали веднага от неговата официална страница.

Като казах всеки… излъгах. Ако сте с Windows 7 Beta, ще трябва да почакате. Версия за Windows 7 beta обещават да има, но по-късно и доставена през Windows Update.

Подхождам със смесени чувства засега. IE8 определено е качествен скок. Според мен разликите са повече дори отколкото бяха между 7ма и 6та версия. Но тепърва хората ще кажат успех ли ще бъде ИЕ8 или не.

Редица проучвания сочат IE8 наравно с Firefox 3 откъм средна производителност. Някои фаворизират IE, други – FF. Но едно е ясно, IE8 определено е скок в производителността, а предвид колко много бизнес приложения разчитат на IE, като цяло тази версия ще подобри значително опитът на хората, ползващи IE.

Яд ме е, че не мога да инвестирам достатъчно време в разучаването на IE8 add-on модела. Казват, че бих читав. Но като няма време – няма.

Засега оставам да чакам с нетърпение обещания update към IE8 RTM за потребителите на Windows 7. След това – ще видим, ще пишем и т.н.

Infonotary електронни подписи и под Windows 7

Posted on 1/21/20099/24/2009 by Doncho

Едно от последните изпитания, които новата операционна система трябваше да мине, за да мога да бъда 100% “както преди”, беше инсталацията на драйверите и софтуерът, който обслужва е-подписите на InfoNotary.

За целта използвах собствения ми архив с драйвери и софтуер, вместо публичните такива. Направих това, понеже след комуникация с InfoNotary навремето получих не-поддържана версия на драйвера, която обаче “виртуализира” наличието на смарт-карта, което прави осъществимо “hot-plug” на четецът и смарт-картата.

Инсталацията мина изключително безболезнено. За да подкарам подписът, инсталирах следните компоненти и драйвери:

Поставяне на четецът и картата и оставяне на Windows 7 да си открие и инсталира драйверите, които идват готови
Инсталиране на Драйвер CardMan3x21_V1_1_2_4.exe
~~Инсталиране на Hot Plug Enabler for CardMan 6121 V1_0_3_0~~. Както посочват по-долу в коментарите, това чудо по някаква причина не работи след Win7 beta
Инсталиране на Siemens CardOS (x32) драйверите

И всичко си тръгна от раз. Мисля, че има нужда от рестарт (все пак драйверите са стари), но при мен подписът тръгна и преди да рестартирам.

Благодаря много на Zdravko Totkov, който изясни проблем с материала след Windows 7 beta.

Windows 7 SQM Issue During Visual Studio 2008 Setup

Posted on 1/20/20091/20/2009 by Doncho

It came time for another Windows 7 posting. It was very close to be a negative posting, sharing some Installer 5 pains. However, with the help of Windows 7 Core teams, that got resolved, so I’d like to share with you my experience and solution, since it could be of someone else’s help.

It all started when I tried to install Visual Studio 2008 Professional. After Setup starts and passes the privilege elevation prompt, it did some verification, and during the parse of Installer data (as it seems to me), it came with this very nasty error message: “A problem has been encountered while leading the setup components. Cancelling setup".

Initially I thought this comes from my setup files, which somehow got corrupted. I retried from our products’ web (where the stuff is verified frequently), but the result was the same. Then I tried my own Visual Studio 2008 Professional installation DVD, and the result was the same. Then I tried evaluations of Visual Studio (C# Express), and the result was the same.

I almost given up. I have already found a similar issue in the Internet, without any encouraging advice.

My last resort was our internal resources. I sent a mail to a principal product manager, who already helped a couple of times, then I crossed my fingers and waited. I knew these guys are very busy, so getting an answer from them was only on their own good will and helpfulness.

Fortunately for me, Steve was extremely helpful again and forwarded my question to the right person. Just few hours later I had the answer in my inbox:

Please try renaming the following registry key:
HKLM\Software\Microsoft\SQMClient\Windows\DisabledSessions

Thanks, Peres! Once I did that, the issue disappeared.

From the registry I’m getting the impression this is an issue with the “Software Quality Management” module. But you can never be sure, of course. That’s why it’s beta software, ain’t it? I’m having the feeling that the error is not connected with Visual Studio setup, but may also be seen with other products’ setup. Also, I heard that in x64 it might not be resolved that easy.

Finally I’d like to share two very interesting links, which I found these days:

Windows FireStarter Live Meeting Recordings NOW AVAILABLE!, from Veni, Vidi, Velcro blog
The Bumper List of Windows 7 Secrets, from Tim Sneath’s blog, which led me to the very useful tip how to get my Quick Launch toolbar back
Windows 7 Beta Hotkey Cheat Sheet, from Brandon Paddock’s Blog

Happy hacking!

Windows 7 on Thinkpad T61p

Posted on 1/14/20091/14/2009 by Doncho

After installing Windows 7 beta on one of my home machines, I decided to go on and put it on my company T61p.

Since I had Bitlocker enabled, I decided to do clean install there too. I won’t go through details again, but in short: all went smooth and nice and about 30 min after I started I had working Windows 7.

I’d like to share here some tricks, which I had with my notebook. Win 7 is still a beta and I already encountered the first glitch I had. It was connected with my Thinkpad’s sound.

The issue was very annoying: I had my audio drivers installed and Windows was reporting them working OK. However, no sound was coming out from my speakers and/or headphones. You know the small green bar, which shows the level of the sound, right? That bar was also moving, indicating that sound should come out, but alas… silence!

I did some mad searches and nothing. Tried to replace the drivers (no need, by the way, out of the box drivers work just fine), and still nothing.

I phoned a colleague, who shared that he was experiencing the same issue, but “the sound magically came out after some time”. Good to hear, but still not an option.

So I stared to dig in the issue. After like 1h I already had it resolved.

The issue was simple (once you resolved it), and quite dumb 🙂 . The main problem comes from the fact that:

Thinkpad has additional volume buttons on the keyboard
We’re very used to them and we expect they work seamlessly every time
However, in Windows 7 beta regarding this issue the things are still.. beta!

As I already said, the issue was stupid. If you mute your audio with audio mute button, the audio gets muted, but Windows does not catch that event. So the icon remains visible as “non-muted” and Windows (software) does not care to “unmute” the audio, if you move the slider. No matter what do you. Restart does not help.

The only thing, which will help you in this case, is to press “volume up” or “volume down” buttons, the ones just right the “volume mute” button. Once you do that, the Thinkpad enables the sound back, and then you’re just fine.

I’m sure that will be fixed for the RTM (I already reported the issue, and I’m sure it’s not only me). However, that was the first “struggle” with Win 7. I’m sure there will be more (it’s beta after all!), but that’s the risk of installing and using beta software 🙂 .

Happy hacking!

Книги и LBook eReader V3

Posted on 1/11/2009 by Doncho

Владо е виновен. Той използва скромната ми личност всеки път, когато има топки за прехвърляне. И понеже този път няма изисквания от вида "да се посочи изначалния източник", реших да се вържа и аз.

Последните 5 книги, считано от днешната късна дата, са:

"10 години по-късно – виконт дьо Бражелон"
"20 години по-късно"
"Тримата мускетари"
"Introducing Microsoft LINQ" (тази май не трябва да се брои, защото само я преглеждах, чудейки се дали да я препоръчам или не. Но все пак я разлистих доста подробно)
"Дългът на костите", пролог към 11 том от поредицата "Мечът на Истината"

Както виждате – пълна скука.

Интересната част тук е, че всичко това (а и много друго) вече го чета на моята електронна книга, LBok eReader V3. Някъде февруари или март миналата година си я закупих с голям кеф от българския им представител, и от тогава тя не ме напуска. Веси също я чете през деня, ако ѝ е достъпна (т.е, ако не съм някъде в командировка).

В момента в книгата се намират около 400 MB текстове, много от тях в бинарни формати (PDF/CHM/DOC), но много и в TXT. Мисля, че обемът страници надвишава 20,000. Практически няма изчитане, аз съм си я подготвил така, че да имам какво да чета дълго време.

Книжлето се зарежда през стандартно USB. Любопитното е, че трябва да избираш – или го зареждаш, или работиш с книгите в него. Ако не щеш така, винаги може да му извадиш SD картата и да си я сложиш директно в четеца на компютъра, и така да работиш със знанието, което е записано на нея.

Разчитайки на ePaper технологията, устройството пресъздава невероятно добре истинския изглед на книга. Понеже липсва задна подсветка, очите не се уморяват така, както когато се чете от ноутбука например. Друго невероятно предимство на тази е-хартия е това, че не изисква електричество, за да се поддържа изображението на екрана. Това, преведено на български значи, че батерията му трае между 3 и 5 седмици, преди да поиска да се зарежда. Дефакто аз никога не изключвам екрана, защото няма никакъв смисъл да го правя (даже, изключвайки го, ще консумирам повече енергия, защото чрез енергия екранът ще трябва да се "изтрие").

Разбира се, ePaper-ът има и доста недостатъци. Най-важният от тях е скалата на сивото, която той има. Цвят, все още, няма (има вече прототипирана е-хартия, която е цветна, но тя е далеч от масовите, евтини устройства). Всичко ми е сиво/бяло, но така са и повечето книги на пазара, нали? Друг недостатък на е-хартията е сравнително неравномерната гранулация, която тя има. Иска сериозно смятане и доста скъпа подложка, за да се постигне точността на точката. Поради това повечето евтини устройства (като моето) не разчитат на това, а по-скоро разчитат на ефекта "размазани точки", за да постигнат четим образ. И се справят удивително добре – показват ми PDF със ситен шрифт, който обаче се чете, макар и с усилие. Ако все пак се наложи, разбира се че има и уголемяване на шрифта, но въпросът е че даже с този по подразбиране пак се чете. Не съм сигурен, че компютърен екран би се справил така добре, просто това си е правено да е хартия. Подсветката при компютърът може да даде контраст, но яркостта ще замаже финните линийки и ще ги слее с фона. Трети, и последен недостатък е това, че дисплеят не е чувствителен на допир. Устройствата, чувствителни на допир, са два пъти по-скъпи.

Устройството се предлага в България от “ДБС Дизайн” ЕООД, в тяхната книжарница “Котета”. Блогът им може да намерите на http://dbs-books.net. Когато реших да си го купя, аз се обадих лично, получих специално, персонално отношение и само след ден-два бях много доволен собственик на е-книжката.

Блогът им е “жив”, и макар да разказва за потреблението на е-книжката, все пак си е търговски блог. Търговски, но с повече нови материали от моя 🙂 . Интересно е да се следи, особено ако имате интерес по принцип към електронните книги.

Любопитна подробност е, че операционната система отдолу е някакъв Линукс. Не съм си играл да му пускам терминал (не че с тия 8 бутона ще постигна главозамайващ успех с него). Не съм си играл и да го търся remote. Знам, че китайците които го произвеждат със сигурност са оставили някакъв USB интерфейс за работа на ниско ниво, но наистина не ми се занимава. На 2-3 пъти устройството много красиво заби, типично по Линукс стил (който е получавал kernel panick в Gnome знае как изглежда това 🙂 ). Явно има още бъгове, но съм сигурен че непрекъснато го подобряват.

Поддръжката на кирилицата (и на българския език) се осигурява от братския украински народ :). Добре, че са те, та да имаме кирилица.

Вече използваме книжката интензивно почти една година. Корпусът е вече леко позахабен, но предвид че се чете поне 2-3 часа на ден, от мен и от Веси, и че ни придружава навсякъде, смятам че това е повече от добре. Горещо се надявам да изкара дълго време.

И така, ако искате да имате цяла библиотека в чантата/раницата си, прежалете тези 600 лв и си вземете този, или друг подобен eReader. Зарибявката е голяма, и като че ли е за цял живот.

Windows 7 beta on Toshiba Qosmio F20

Posted on 1/9/2009 by Doncho

Today I finally obtained Windows 7 32 bit Beta bootable ISO (build 7000). Last night I tried to install the non-bootable bits, but it seems something went wrong when we were downloading them from the internal mirror, so I had to wait for today. Today I grabbed the ISO from a colleague and burned it. I was ready for the evening.

My plan was to install tonight Windows 7 beta 32 bits on my old Toshiba Qosmio F20 notebook. We used this notebook in Denmark, it was Vessi’s primary work machine before she got her MacBook, and it also was my primary gaming machine after that 🙂 . Since the notebook is quite old-fashion, I wanted to see how the process would go.

I decided to go on clean install, wiping out the old (and very crap-full) setup.

The basic install went trouble-free and after 25 minutes I had working machine with Windows 7. On first look, I was missing these drivers:

Mass Storage Controller (WTF?)
Audio
Video
Network (Wireless). My wired network was correctly recognized and setup

I started looking for drivers. Simple search led me to the page at Drivers Collection, containing Toshiba Qosmio F20 Windows XP drivers.

First, of course, I needed the wireless driver. I had to use USB stick to transfer it (phew, no worries with the drivers for the stick, though). The wireless driver, of course, did not work “directly”. When I ran it, the setup asked for authorization, and after that just ended 🙂 . Hmmm, let’s try the compatibility wizard? The wizard asked me a couple of questions, I told him that it worked before on Windows XP, Next, Next and then it started and completed successfully. The driver, however, did not fire immediately, so I had to restart. After the restart, of course, it did not work as well :).

I saw that there’s another version of this driver, this time for Intel-based wireless adapters. I downloaded it, and retried the procedure. However, this time there was no setup, just selected “Update driver”, pointed to it and then it started doing “stuff” for about 5+ minutes. Then it timed out.

I retried the process. Same thing. After that I noticed there’s an installation file there (IMDinst) and decided to start it. The first run complained that it’s not supported on this operating system. But I was very pushy and selected after that “Use recommended settings”. Then it started and… timed out after the same amount of time as before, but did not show any error. The last resort was rebooting and retrying.

Suddenly, I noticed that… my wireless switch (the hardware one), is set to… OFF! Damn! DAMN! How stupid is that?

Turned on the wireless switch, and retried. The same thing!

Last resort: restart and retry! And nothing.

My next step was to find the “Intel ® PRO/Wireless network driver” on the net. That hit on the Intel site, which ended up to a 188MB (!!) zip file, containing all drivers (or so they claimed). I just had to download the whole thing (impressive 1221KB/sec speed, thanks Megalan!), and then move it with the same USB stick I was using before. Now I had the VISTA version of the driver as well, so I was a bit more hopeful.

This time I decided to restart and run the package on a clean system. Then I tried the standard setup. And it failed. Now I started to get a bit angry, because I was close to my very last resort: manual install.

This huge, 200MB structure, had 4 set of drivers: 32 bit, 64 bit for both Vista and XP. Since I had 32 bit OS, my choice was only for these. I tried with VISTA driver first and I got a failure! Almost desperate, I tried the XP driver and… oh miracle! It worked.

So, in short, if you want to install the Wireless drivers for this Toshiba Quosmio F20:

Download the drivers from Intel, nothing else.
Unpack the driver, you have to see a structure like X:\FV 12.2.0.0_Gen_SW_155293\XP\x32. There are the drivers.
Manually update the driver. In Device Manager, right click the unknown network driver, and manually point to this directory. Otherwise it will chose the wrong driver and it won’t work.
And, FFS, turn off your wireless adapter before that!

Now, since my wireless card was already working, it was time for the rest.

The first thing you should know after installing a new Windows setup is: Windows Update! Windows Update helps both for fixing critical security glitches and also it installs the latest drivers’ versions, even some which are not included on the distribution image.

However, before running Windows Update, I decided to install AVG Antivirus. This is great antivirus for personal use, since it’s free for home user and it provides excellent protection and features in the free package. The download and installation took me only like 2 minutes. No restart was necessary, so I was ready to continue with Windows Update.

Windows update showed 4 important updates, all of them were drivers, which I needed in order to get all yellow exclamation marks away from my Device Manager:

TV Tuner Driver
Video controller driver
Audio controller driver
(Optional) LAN controller driver (not the wireless), which was already working but obviously there was update available

All 4 drivers were successfully installed and after the restart I got it all working and in excellent shape.

Windows 7 boots up in about 25 seconds (from right after BIOS until the login prompt). This is pretty quick, but of course the system is not yet loaded with stuff. We’ll see how it will go after a couple of months usage.

Then I saw that I still have one yellow (!) in the Device manager. This was Mass Storage Device, most probably my card reader. I downloaded the CardBus driver from DriversCollection and tried it. It worked like a charm, but again with manual (Update Driver from Device Manager) installation, I even did not try the standard setup.

My conclusion is that Windows 7 Setup was the best Windows setup I’ve ever experienced in years. Yes, it had its challenges, but none of them were unavoidable. And considering this is the most modern Windows operating system on an old hardware, and considering that all hardware at the end is working as it should, I account this as a definitive success.

I’d encourage every one, who is computer geek, to give Windows 7 beta a try. It will be available soon on the main Windows 7 site. I do not remember when was the official release date for it, but it should be really soon.

Happy hacking!