Mon, Feb 17, 2020
My inner security expert turned on the BIOS password on an HP laptop (EliteBook 840 G1), right after I bought it, around 6 years ago. Of course I forgot what the password was after a while, since I did not have a reason to change any of the settings, but this changed recently. I really wanted to play with WSL2 (Windows subtype for Linux) and Docker for Windows, and one of the prerequisites for both is to enable Hyper-V which is a setting in BIOS.
Is there a way I can remove the BIOS password? This blog post describes my attempts which have finally resulted in success.
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Thu, Jun 1, 2017
This post describes a daring way to attempt to deploy a single Solr node to an Azure App Service. I say daring because I could not find a copy paste solution on Stack Overflow. I saw some light at the end of the tunnel after reading the Upload a custom Java web app to Azure article on Azure documentation which mentions Jetty and since Solr is running in a Jetty Servlet container by default I guessed I should at least give it a try.
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Sun, Nov 16, 2014
Because working with files is such a common and potentially expensive operation, every operating system introduces numerous levels of indirection when serving I/O requests. This is necessary in order to execute I/O operations in a reasonable time frame. But managing complexity through abstraction of various hardware and software layers that interact during file operations also has its disadvantages: you get a false impression that you don’t need to know what is really going on under the hood :)
I needed to optimize a part of my code that was writing data to random locations in a binary file. After realizing that FileOptions.RandomAccess does not automagically do the trick and make seeks (in a loop!) run noticeably faster, I started to dig into the FileOptions Enumeration. A couple of days later, bursting with knowledge on internal working of Windows Cache Manager and speeding up random writes using Memory-Mapped Files I decided to write a two part blog post about it.
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Mon, May 19, 2014
I have been using Mercurial revision control system as a weapon of choice for quite some time now. For controlling changes made to source code, as for backing up to a private repository hosted at Bitbucket I used the basic commands for committing, adding, pushing and pulling files to/from the local /remote repository on a daily basis. And that was sufficient for my needs….until recently. I stumbled upon an interesting blog post titled “Segregate your commits into tiny topical changes” that made me think of how my current revision history on a project looks like…
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Wed, Feb 5, 2014
A couple of months back I’ve got a task of implementing a protocol for an embedded device sending/receiving streams of data through serial communication. Together with this task I also inherited a Windows Forms C# application that already did some of the previous but in a different protocol with a different device. The more I struggled to understand and reuse some of the existing infrastructure, the more I wanted to rewrite the whole thing (sounds familiar?).
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