Silviu-Marius Ardelean's Blog

Ubuntu – How to fix update errors for a server behind of a proxy

Silviu Ardelean — Mon, 26 Mar 2012 17:34:38 +0000

If you're behind of a proxy server and the IP address has changed (or proxy it's a new node in your network topology) then probably when you're trying to update your binaries then you'll get a list of errors.

W: Failed to fetch http://security.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/dists/oneiric-security/multiverse/i18n/Translation-en_US  Unable to connect to 192.168.120.240:3128:
W: Failed to fetch http://security.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/dists/oneiric-security/multiverse/i18n/Translation-en  Unable to connect to 192.168.120.240:3128:

This happens because you're unable to connect to Ubuntu mirrors. In order to fix this issue you have to edit apt.conf file settings.

root@my-server:~# vi /etc/apt/apt.conf
Acquire::http::Proxy "http://192.168.230.99:3128";

Happy Birthday, Romania!

Silviu Ardelean — Thu, 01 Dec 2011 17:41:04 +0000

Today it's the Nation Day of my country! La Mulţi Ani, România! Happy Birthday, Romania! Joyeux Anniversaire, Roumanie! Alles Gute zum Geburtstag, Rumänien!

Fun IT – 2011 Collection

Silviu Ardelean — Mon, 14 Nov 2011 20:36:30 +0000

Here it is a collection of funny topics that I met this year in my daily activities. In case I will get new info, the topic will be updated! Nobody is perfect and especially the software! :) But it's nice to immortalize funny things.

Simple Pictures Unifier 1.1 application is up!

Silviu Ardelean — Tue, 27 Sep 2011 10:32:49 +0000

At the beginning of this year I launched an application that helps you to organize the pictures of your important moments. The application helps you specially if you have photos from different sources (different cameras of friends) and you want to have a fluent images story. From the moment I have launched the first release until now I made up to 12GB pictures (3200+ pictures of 10 MB) and honestly I never found time in order to organize the pictures. Always I rescheduled the application improvements and finally I found time to implement export by date time folders and so on. Simple Pictures Unifier 1.1 allows merging and exporting pictures in one folder or in date time folders. Simple Pictures Unifier 1.1 comes with a better user friendly experience and few internal improvements.

Adventures with _chkstk

Silviu Ardelean — Thu, 14 Jul 2011 16:06:18 +0000

Called by the compiler when you have more than one page of local variables in your function. _chkstk Routine is a helper routine for the C compiler. For x86 compilers, _chkstk Routine is called when the local variables exceed 4K bytes; for x64 compilers it is 8K. That’s all that you get from _chkstk()’s msdn web page. Nothing more…

pre vs. post increment operator – benchmark

Silviu Ardelean — Wed, 20 Apr 2011 20:21:37 +0000

A recent Visual C++ team’s comment on twitter.com reminded me a hot topic that exists in C++ programming world: there is a long discussion of using pre versus post increment operators, specially, for iterators. Even me I was witness to a discussion like this. The discussion started from a FAQ written by me on www.codexpert.ro. Base on that VC++ team’s tweet related to viva64.com’s research I decided to create my own benchmark base on single and multicore architectures. For those that don’t know Viva64 is a company specialized on Static Code Analysis. Starting from their project I extended the tested for other STL containers: std::vector, std::list, std::map, and std::unordered_map (VC++ 2010 hash table implementation). For parallel core tests I used Microsoft's new technology called Parallel Pattern Library. continue...

Numeric type conversion to std::string and vice versa

Silviu Ardelean — Sat, 15 Jan 2011 16:25:40 +0000

In our real applications we have to convert from strings to integer or to real variables and vice versa (double/float/int variable to std::string). We can realize these conversions using C style CRT function or we can try C++ approach via STL. continue...

Flexible changes for product version properties – Visual C++ binaries

Silviu Ardelean — Sun, 09 Jan 2011 14:40:31 +0000

Manually editing of binaries version in the resource editor of Visual Studio IDE is not a viable solution. If we have dozens of projects in our solution, then for each kit building we should need manual resources file edit. Otherwise, we can use a special tool that does this thing for us. Unfortunately this approach is not the most flexible and could fail. For our flexible binaries properties changes and in order to avoid manual edit for each rebuild we can create and include a header file (version.h) that contains some constants of product version and file version of our project (.rc files). We have to include only these constants into this file (version.h): #define PRODUCT_VERSION 4.3.2.198 #define PRODUCT_VERSION_STR "4.3.2.198" Then, for each .rc file wherever we have FileVersion and ProductVersion we have to use this constants. When we will build a new kit, we have to change only these constants and then to start the kit building process. Everything is fine until we add new controls in our projects resource files. Then, because of Visual Studio IDE automation we can get an unlikely surprise: the FileVersion and the ProductVersion properties could be reset to 1.0.0.0. In order to avoid this issue and edit the version only in a single place I propose the following workaround.

Simple Pictures Unifier – first version

Silviu Ardelean — Tue, 04 Jan 2011 08:40:21 +0000

Have you just returned from vacation and you have a lot of pictures? You just downloaded your taken pictures and you got your friends pictures, too? Then, probably, the pictures are scattered, with a random order in your computer. Would you like seeing pictures from all sources in order of events happening? If so, try to sort your photos using Simple Pictures Unifier tool! :) Please, feel free to add comments, suggestions or bugs reports to this application. Any constructive feedback is sincerely appreciated. Thanks you!

File size fast detection

Silviu Ardelean — Tue, 23 Nov 2010 22:52:50 +0000

Many times in our job, we need to work with files and need to know file properties. One of the most important properties is file size. Of course, there are a lot of API that allows finding this property, but most of them needs additional file operations: open file, find file size and close file. continue...