Author Archives: smike19

Astra Linux on Oracle Virtual Box

Astra Linux is Russian made Debian based operating system, mainly developed military needs. It is complete commercial product with 2 main releases: “Orel” (general purpose common edition) and “Smolenk” (special edition for government utilization including Russian army forces and intelligence agencies). The Astra Linux was developed by by Russian company RusBITech in 2008. The product… Read More »

Yum Repositories Control or “No package … available”

If you want to install something using yum for example abracadabra tool but get message “No package abracadabra available” it could mean that abracadabra tool does not exist at all, appropriate repository is not presented on your machine or repository is presented but not enabled. The first problem could not be fixed unless it is… Read More »

CAPTCHA or enough is enough

Got sick of multiple silly comments and decided to rid of them. Yesterday I added “Simple Google reCAPTCHA” plugin, so currently comment posting comment are protected by Google reCAPTCHA, Contact page is not secure yet. but I will implement some protection there also. I investigated with Wireshark how HTTP POST request of adding new comment… Read More »

Create Catalina Macintosh VM on Oracle Virtual Box

Installation of Mac VM on Oracle Virtual box happened not so easy for me and took more time than with VM for other operating systems. Below I describe my experience of Catalina OS X on Oracle Virtual Box, version 5.0.20. I did not find Catalina ISO file, so I downloaded “macOS Catalina PBeta3 by Geekrar.vmdk”… Read More »

C++ Calling Convention with naked functions

Calling conventions are a standardized methods for c++ compilers how to pass parameters to called function. MS Visual Studio gives possibility to use four of them: cdecl, fastcall, stdcall and vectorcall. The specific of every calling convention is hidden in function prolog and not visible for high level language programmer. This article makes an attempt… Read More »

Configuring Mac Gatekeeper through terminal

Gatekeeper is a great thing that protects not advanced user from installation and launching unwanted and potentially dangerous applications which are not from Apple Store or not signed with a certificate issued by Apple. Previously it was easier than now to avoid this restriction disabling gatekeeper using GUI System Preferences interface, however latest Mac OSX… Read More »

CPU usage programmatically

Do you know what does it mean when some tool shows percentage of CPU usage, for example 60%? Basically this indicates that during some timing interval 60% of time processor spent on execution of some software code and 40% did nothing or was in idle state. Usually CPU timing is divided into 3 main categories:… Read More »

How to Increase CPU Usage

The title of this post looks ridiculous, usually high CPU usage is a problem that slows down your computer and people are fighting to reduce CPU usage. However in my particular case I was working on CPU monitoring code and I need some tool that makes CPU consumption higher. So I created simple C# console… Read More »

Custom Protocol Handler (CPH)

Microsoft Windows supports registered custom protocols additionally to the common ones such as http, https, ftp, mailto and so on. To register an application to handle a particular URI scheme, new key, along with the appropriate subkeys and values should be added to the Windows registry. The new key The may be added to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Classes… Read More »

Old hardware with new OS

Or how to use peripheral devices that are not supported by latest Windows. There are two opposing opinions about old stuff: throw them away mercilessly or preserve and restore. Definitely you can not keep everything. Sometime continuing to use junk, you may slow down your own development, however in the same time its utilization in… Read More »