As you may heard, the API’s returning the Operating System version have changed, started with Windows 8.1 and Server 2012 R2.

The reason for this change is Application Compatibility but let’s take a little closer look into this why.

As an application developer there may be a need to check the version of the OS you’re running on. A typical example is when you are using an API that only works on a specific Windows version (and up). Or the other round, you’re not supporting an older version of Windows (say Windows XP as an example).

A common error in such version checks is to check for a specific Windows version but forget to take new (not yet released) versions into account.

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I recently (well today really) started playing with the Citrix Linux VDA. I took Ubuntu to test because I happen to like Ubuntu.

I didn’t get it to work correctly right away though and during troubleshooting I wanted to know where the VDA is storing it’s settings.

I found the following file /etc/xdl/ctx-vda.confwith the following contents:

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Even though I try not to visit the forbes.com site anymore due to their heavy usages of ads, anti adblocker and overwhelming number of cookies they’re trying to push, sometimes however I accidentally follow a tweet that leads to forbes.com and just notice it to late.

Besides wasting your bandwidth, mobile data and especially time there have been a few occasions were the forbes.com page was actually serving malware from their adfeeds.

It annoys me bigtime so let’s “fix” this:

First thing that happens upon visiting the forbes site is that you get a blurred background with a random ad or quote of the day and you need to press Continue to article:

If you open the Developer console in Chrome (Application tab) you can see that Forbes uses a cookie that expires in 24 hours. This cookie make sure that you don’t see the “welcome” ad for 24 hours:

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I will explain why in a seperate post, but on my MacBook Pro I wanted to use the Intel Thunderbolt driver under BootCamp instead of the ones supplied by Apple.

The Thunderbolt control program however refused with the following error message:

It’s really beyond me why Intel would deliberately block their Thunderbolt software on Apple hardware (under Windows). Believing this was just a simple hardcoded hardware check rather than any hardware issue that would prevent the drivers to work I proceeded into finding where the check takes place.

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Recently I stumbled upon an executable that appeared to be a PowerShell script converted into an executable.

I was curious to the actual script so I decided to have a look and see how I could convert the executable back into PowerShell.

Having seen similar techniques to turn vb scripts and java jar’s into executables I first looked if this particular executable was simply carrying the payload in the resource section.

I opened the executable with Resource Hacker and saw 2 resources (note that I am using a simple HelloWorld executable here in the screenshots). The first resource, named 1, is clearly a Unicode string with the title:

Resource Hacker – HelloWorld.exe

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Just a very quick post (more like a note to self) but I wanted to split a string with the $ sign in PowerShell:

Took me a little while to realize that this doesn’t work as the split operator in Windows PowerShell uses a regular expression in the delimiter, rather than a simple character.

The easy fix is to Escape the $ sign with a backslash:

Or alternatively use the SimpleMatch option:

The 0 represents the “return all” value of the Max-substrings parameter. You can use options, such as SimpleMatch, only when the Max-substrings value is specified.

Both Google Earth and Google Earth Enterprise do not work correctly for multiple users on shared Hosted Shared Desktops (I still prefer to call it Server Based Computing but that’s likely because I’m an oldtimer).

Problem summary
So let’s look at the actual issue: the first user on a server is able to launch Google Earth but for any subsequent users on the same server Google Earth fails silently.

Problem details
Google Earth uses various synchronization objects such as Events and Mutexes but registers those in the \Global namespace instead of the \Local namespace.

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Recently I switched over my blog from a hoster to a self hosted VM. In my setup I am using Citrix NetScaler as a reverse proxy.

Simular to when you’re using a 3rd party reverse proxy such as CloudFlare you will see the IP address from the reverse proxy instead of the actual Client IP Address on your webserver.

This means that your logging will all show the same, internal, IP address and that IP Based Access Rules will not work.

Fortunately this is easy to solve by having NetScaler add the Client IP Address in the headers and rewriting the address on your webserver.

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When I started this blog in 2007 (wow that’s almost 10 years ago) I went for a cheap web hoster with a reasonable performance to host it.

In the beginning performance was acceptable but over the years it has degraded and of course user experience standards have changed.

I decided it was time to do something about it so I’ve moved the blog from a shared platform to my own server.

This server is running on optimized flash storage  where most writes are DeDuplicated and never actually hits the flash disks:

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