Having trouble with turning on Memory Integrity in Windows 11? One simple trick that helps!

I was having this issue too, and being security minded, I wanted to turn it on. Preventing malicious code from getting at core processes on your computer seems like a good thing.

If you have that warning, click on it, and it will open up the Core Isolation and Memory Integrity settings. Click on the review link. It will have a list of sys drivers that are causing issues. In my case, I had a lot of old insecure drivers. Click on the down arrow, which will tell you what driver it is tied to. This information would have saved me a lot of effort! And now, if you are reading this saving you some time.

Keep the Memory Integrity window open and open the device manager. Go to view in the Device Manager and select Devices by Driver. Scroll down to each driver in the Device manager that matches the driver in the Memory Integrity window, and right-click and select remove driver.

Hit the back arrow in the Memory Integrity window, and it will take you to the overall settings again. Click on the scan/re-scan button, and if everything is good, you can turn on Memory Integrity!

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Upgrading Licensed Chocolatey – 403 Unauthorized Error

I got the 403 unauthorized message when trying to upgrade to 0.11.1 from 0.10.15. I got an idea when reading the SETUP / HOW TO INSTALL LICENSED EDITION on Chocolatey.org’s site. The trick is to upgrade chocolatey.extension and not chocolatey directly. It will upgrade chocolatey as a dependency for the extension.

Enjoy the rest of your day and hit the like if this helped you!

Become Faster at Editing with these Programmer Tricks

Written By: John Glasgow

8/15/2021

The other day I was doing some work, writing a document in Word when my wife noticed that I was editing the documents much faster than she did without taking my hands off the keyboard. I figured if it helped her that it will help others. In about five minutes, I showed her tricks that I use all the time when I’m writing code that are universally applicable to using computers.  These are some tricks and habits that I have learned to use a long time ago and save me so much time over the years.

It’s all about your keyboard

First, in most cases, the mouse is slower than your keyboard.  Think about it, if you are typing, you must take one hand off the keyboard to make an edit. Then you must move the mouse to highlight the text, right-click, move the mouse again, then click something else. There is much movement which equals more time.

Photo by Tima Miroshnichenko on Pexels.com

The arrow keys are handy

Using the arrow keys, you can move around (navigate) in the text of what you are working on (whether it’s a field in a website or Word or a Google Doc).  Just using these keys by themselves allows you to move up, down, left, or right by one character. If you make a typo close to where you already are, instead of using the backspace to delete everything you just wrote, remove it by using the arrow keys to where you need to go and fix the error; this will save you from having to retype.

Introducing the CTRL key

The control (CTRL) key gives you superpowers on your computer.  Not only does it save a ton of time copy and pasting (CTRL + C and CTRL + V, respectively), it can be used for navigating as well.  The CTRL key will allow you to move whole words while using it with the left/right keys.  Using the CTRL key with the up and down arrows will allow you to jump to the beginning or end of a paragraph.

• CTRL + C = Copy
• CTRL + X = Cut
• CTRL + V = Paste
• CTRL + Left or Right = Move the cursor to the left or right one word
• CTRL + Up or Down = Move the cursor to the beginning or end of a paragraph

Introducing the Home, End, Pg Up, Pg Dn keys

The home and end keys will take you to the beginning of the line or the end of the line, respectively. Using these keys with the CTRL key kicks them up a notch by taking you to the document’s beginning or the end.

The Pg keys will allow you to move up or down the document a page at a time, perfect for quickly scanning large documents to get an overview of it.

• Home = beginning of the line
• End = end of the line
• Pg Up = Move up a page
• Pg Dn = Move down a page
• CTRL + Home = Beginning of the document
• CTRL + End = End of the document

Introducing the Shift key

The shift key allows you to highlight text, which you can then replace simply by typing or cut/copy the text to put someplace else.  It is worth mentioning that you can combine this with the CTRL key to highlight things faster.

• CTRL + Shift + Left = Highlight the previous word
• CTRL + Shift + Right = Highlight the next word
• CTRL + Shift + Home = Highlight to the beginning of the document
• CTRL + Shift + End = Highlight to the end of the document
• CTRL + Shift + Pg Up or Pg Dn = Highlight a page of text of the document

Conclusion

These are some of the most frequently used actions that I perform on the keyboard. As a programmer, I use them all the time. I hope they are helpful for you, whether you are writing some code or just writing an email. By adding these shortcuts, you will save yourself some time.

If you have a favorite combination, please feel free to leave a comment!

I’m writing again! Where have I been?

Written By: John Glasgow

For those of you following my blog, I have not written in some time.  This is because, like many things, time has significantly changed my priorities. I find it fitting that this blog is titled RefactoringSelf, because I have been heavily involved in changing my career and my goals. I recently finished my MBA and got a Business Architecture certification. My family has also expanded to four children, which provide me with much joy.

Photo by Pixabay on Pexels.com

I am still a die-hard fan and participant in software development and programming, but I also am starting to focus on the wider needs of the industry and focusing more on the business end of things.

What does this mean for RefactoringSelf?

I am still committed to providing good content that can help developers, but I will expand my topics to other areas that can improve your role where you work as I delve into different concepts that will round out you as a software developer. After all, you might be the most technically brilliant person in the room, but what good is it if you can’t relate to or understand the problems the business is facing?

New content you say?

Yes, it is my intention to provide content on new subjects such as:

• business topics
• soft skills (writing, communication, team building, strategy)
• enterprise architecture
• business architecture

I am continuously having experiences and challenges. My hope is that I can provide you with new interesting content that will save you a few steps (or a few missteps).

I am looking forward to continuing to share my journey and with you and hopefully get some great interactions with you in the future.

Black Screen Installing CentOS 7 on VirtualBox

I noticed something that was irritating me this morning.  The screen would go black after I chose to install CentOS 7 on VirtualBox.  What you can do is choose Troubleshooting in the startup of the installer. Then choose Basic graphical install, this seems to get around the problem.

Hope this helps somebody!

SQL Server – Deleting Duplicate Rows

Oh what a tangled web we weave when we don’t use unique constraints or primary keys…

Using some clever rules about deleting from a view (also applies to a common table expression).  You can delete from a view if the view only references one table.

WITH    cte(b, r)
AS (SELECT    Field1,
ROW_NUMBER() OVER (PARTITION BY Field1 ORDER BY Field1)
FROM      dbo.Table1
WHERE     Field1 IN (SELECT   Field1
FROM     dbo.Table1
GROUP BY Field1
HAVING   COUNT(*)>1))
DELETE FROM cte WHERE r > 1;

Part of the trick is to use Row_Number to make a distinction between the rows.  You can then delete anything that has a row number greater than 1 (a dupe)

Great Primer for Threading Basics in .Net

I stumbled across this article from one of my LinkedIn friends,  Threads in C#

It answered one of my questions about thread pooling in a very concise, easy to understand fashion.  It is a short article, but he then goes into the Task Parallel Library, something that I really enjoy.

If you are asking why should I care about this, I use the magic of Async/Await.  These are the fundamental technologies and techniques that they are built upon.

Keep in mind that not many people are experts in highly concurrent systems, I am not one of them either.  But hopefully by reading this article we will all be a little better in how we implement parallelism/concurrency.

Cheers!

SQL Server Performance Tuning For Developers

Chances are if you are reading this, you are a software developer.  Relax, I am one too, as well as a database administrator.  I spend a lot of time helping people to write code that is efficient or get the right results.  I want to share this post on SQL Database Tuning http://www.toptal.com/sql/sql-database-tuning-for-developers by Rodrigo Koch. It provides some really good advice, especially for beginners in the area.

Really hits the nail on the head though, keep it minimalistic. Only return what you need, it takes more time on the server and then the data has to go over the network.  He goes into some detail of how to troubleshoot slow queries and when to create indexes

 

Mocking in Python

An Introduction to Mocking in Python by Naftuli Tzvi Kay

This article is very insightful for covering mocking in Python.  In case you don’t know mocking is a technique for testing where you don’t want to use a particular object or set of objects.  For example, you might want to simulate database functionality while you are writing your test cases.

Hope you all find this useful, have a great day!

 

A ClickOnce gotcha – FIPS algorithms

If you are using FIPS, your ClickOnce applications might not work. I ran into this bug running BookSmarts, an application I wrote. Turned FIPS on and started receiving errors.

The issue is that enabling FIPS makes the mechanism that verifies the validity of ClickOnce applications fail every time.

The article, a very long one, can be found here: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/kb/811833

Just keep this in mind if you are trying to support someone who is the odd ball out.

Note: Enabling/Disabling FIPS in Windows is done through the registry key: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Lsa\FipsAlgorithmPolicy\Enabled (DWORD)

1 is on, 0 is off

When changing this setting, it’s necessary to reboot the computer.