I’m moving this site to WordPress because Drupal became too messy to administer in some spare time. The fact the database in Drupal 8 became just a storage for application-produced “BLOBs” was the nail in the coffin. Any mis-configuration required too much time to fix, while modules often couldn’t keep pace with the new faster […]
Draytek Stat Processor
DrayTek routers have some advanced configuration capabilities, but their web UI is not one of the best ones around. Especially, it doesn’t display many useful data about VDSL connections which are actually available, but only accessible via telnet/ssh. Moreover they are displayed in a text format only, which makes some of them not very useful. […]
DrayTek Vigor 165 QoS setup
It looks the DrayTek Vigor 165 xDSL modem/router supports some QoS features, despite the fact the datasheet does not mention them. They are available from the CLI, and partially in the web UI via a bug in the firewall filter setup page. The CLI gives access to the qos setup, qos class and qos […]
This post is in Italian because moslty useful for Italian readers only. Mi è capitato di dover configurare recentemente un ATA Cisco SPA 112 (uscito di produzione pochi mesi fa) per funzionare con il VoIP di WindTre. WindTre è molto parca di informazioni quando si richiedono le configurazioni VoIP per utilizzare un modem non WindTre, […]
Over and over, people ask the case .. of statement to be expanded to allow strings, i.e. Looks nice, doesn’t it? Sure, but the devil is in the details. Strings are complex data types, and comparing strings is not a straightforward tasks. If you use just a single, simple encoding, and a simple language like […]
Mom, a modal loop ate my service messages!
A colleague of mine was using the “modernized” service implementation I wrote about some time ago. His services needs to be notified when a user logs on/off or locks/unlocks the machine. Everything was fine for a while, until he started to complain it worked for a while, but then, “randomly”, notifications weren’t triggered any longer. Debugging, he […]
No, the title of this blog post is not a mistake. Delphi, including XE7, only implements services using NT APIs obsoleted since Windows 2000. Windows NT was EOLed in 2004, 2000 in 2010, and XP last year, yet Delphi still doesn’t take advantage of the new APIs. What are the advantages? Well, using the “extended” […]
Since the introduction of Windows Vista and the new security model for applications, application running under User Account Control (UAC) should adopt a “least privilege” model, running as an “unprivileged” user almost all the time, and requesting higher privileges only when needed, even if the user has those privileges. Requesting higher privileges is called “elevation”. […]
Sandon Utensileria 75th anniversary
On April 10th, 2011, Sandon Utensileria, the company established by my grandfather, Francesco Sandon, and his brother Luigi (later joined by the other two brothers, Felice and Fausto), celebrates its 75th anniversary of uninterrupted activity, even when WWII swept across Milano the warehouse was moved in a hayloft outside the city, and orders were dispatched […]
An InnoSetup 5.x library to control services. It gives access to the Service Control Manager functions to query/start/stop/install/uninstall services, and implements some higher level functions (simpleXXXX) to perform standard tasks easily. ANSI version Unicode version Zip file with both versions NB: ANSI version won’t work with the Unicode version of Inno Setup. I didn’t test […]