Cx_freeze, Teams, Wasabi, Bing, NTFS, GPU, Antennas, DNSSEC

• I love it when net is full of disinformation. Many claim that with cx_freeze you can use base="Win32GUI" to hide console window, when application is running. Well, sure, but that also totally breaks more important stuff, like interface with pythoncom and prevents registering com interface services. Duh! Anyway, you can use two versions, one with Win32GUI and one without. Just use the console version to register the application and then replace it with version which is built with Win32GUI and then you don't get the terminal window. But I think that's totally horrible hackery and honestly extremely annoying. Let's see if we can find a better solution than that. Why not just to hide the console window on demand when it's not needed. Also launching with pythonw.exe is just as bad advice. Also all other lame tricks how to launch the application without console window are as bad, because that won't work when the application is invoked via COM Dispatch call. FindWindow and ShowWindow with Minimize works well. But the hard part is knowing the name of the window. So much fun again. Using GetForegroundWindow works mostly well, as long as user won't interfere with the process. -> Job done. As bonus, if there are any errors or issues, those can be shown on the console, before it's hidden.

• Are we having fun yet? Microsoft Teams has crashed several times today. With excellent and detailed error message: "Something went wrong". Ha ha ha. Refresh now button restarts the program. It also seems that replace text with rules configured elsewhere in Microsoft Office do not apply to Teams. - Classic stuff.

• Tested Wasabi S3 compatible cloud storage with nice pricing. They're also opening EU data center. I'm really waiting for that. I've been waiting for BackBlaze / B2 to open EU data center, but who cares when Wasabi works well and is cheaper. Also this means that there's no point to use OVH / ScaleWay object storage services. With this pricing, I think it makes sense to actually to store data in cloud and avoid all the hazzle related to storage and server maintenance and so on.

• Bing Bot can't fetch sites using DNSSEC? What? My site indexing didn't work, until I disabled DNSSEC and now Bing is indexing it again. Bing just gave DNS error. This is way strange. BingBot + Namecheap = Fail. I don't know was it Microsoft or NameCheap that failed, but the end result was failure anyway. Note, this problem was before I moved my DNS to Cloudflare.

• It also seems that the Google Sites update broke my download links on my web-site, not unsurpising at all. Quality migrations. Sigh. Oh well, gotta fix those.

• NTFS and fragmentation, just extracted a few large files on drive. End result? Well, Average fragment size on those files is about 64 kilobytes. This is typical for NTFS. With ext4 I would assume it to be around tens of megabytes based on experience. That kind of massive fragmentation is a problem, even on SSD. Because it inflates IOP counts. Lots of small I/O. When this happens for a while, then the free space on drive is so totally fragmented, that any write will be forced to be totally fragmented. Some people claimed that my how fragmentation slows down the drive examples were "unreal" and out of "this world". But unfortunately, it's just how the things often are in production.

• GPU RAM image leakage sounds really classic leak vector and nothing new at all. It's so classic that data is passed from process to another crossing security boundaries, without clearing it up. This applies to disk space, system memory and of course also GPU RAM, that's quite obvious. That's why it's also often mitigated, because it's a well known and understood issue.

• Some tuning with DNSSEC and DS records for DNS. Had to go through all documentation again and verify how the process exactly works and which parties are involved. It seems that when the domain registrar and DNS hosting are on separate service providers you'll need to set DS records as glue between the registrar and DNS provider. No problem, it worked fine with Namecheap and Cloudflare. At some point I'll move my domain completely to CF including registrar features. I was planning to do this earlier, but CF registrar functions came available so slowly I couldn't wait.

• Something not so different: Wireless networking stuff: antenna diversity aka space diversity or spatial diversity and transmit diversity aka Adaptive Tx.

2020-03-15