Some knowledge deserves to be spread

Upgraded my motherboard recently. With Windows, it's always a gamble. In recent versions, it often just works - Windows boots, some hardware doesn't work but once you install all the OEM drivers, it does.

In my case, not so much. After the hardware swap, Windows booted straight into the blue screen of death. Here's what helped: I booted into recovery mode, downloaded all OEM drivers on a different machine, copied them to a thumb drive, and ran the following command on the recovery console's command line:

dism /image:c:\ /add-driver /Driver:X:\ /recurse

Where C: is the Windows drive, and X: was the thumb drive. And voilà, Windows booted up on the next attempt.

Helpful idea found here. Spreading the knowledge because it deserves to be spread.

Base64 encoding in VBA

UPDATE: it's now a Gist.

Today's useful snippet: Base64 encoding in VBA (not VB.NET; the latter has a builtin API for that).

Encodes an array of bytes into a string. Doesn't make any assumptions about the bounds of the source array. Processes the entire array; can be trivially modified to deal with a array slice.

Public Function ToBase64(Src() As Byte) As String
    Const ALPHABET = "ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZabcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz0123456789+/"

    Dim SrcLen As Long, i As Long, Remainder As Long
    Dim RLen As Long, Triad As Long, LastSrcIndex As Long
    SrcLen = UBound(Src) - LBound(Src) + 1
    Remainder = SrcLen Mod 3
    'Index of the first byte of the leftover 1- or 2-byte chunk
    RLen = LBound(Src) + SrcLen - Remainder
    LastSrcIndex = RLen - 3
    ToBase64 = ""
    
    'The 3 byte chunks of the block
    For i = LBound(Src) To LastSrcIndex Step 3
        Triad = (CLng(Src(i)) * &H10000) Or _
            (CLng(Src(i + 1)) * &H100) Or Src(i + 2)
        ToBase64 = ToBase64 & _
            Mid(ALPHABET, ((Triad \ &H40000) And &H3F) + 1, 1) & _
            Mid(ALPHABET, ((Triad \ &H1000) And &H3F) + 1, 1) & _
            Mid(ALPHABET, ((Triad \ &H40) And &H3F) + 1, 1) & _
            Mid(ALPHABET, (Triad And &H3F) + 1, 1)
    Next
    
    'The remainder, if any
    If Remainder = 1 Then
        ToBase64 = ToBase64 & _
            Mid(ALPHABET, ((Src(RLen) \ 4) And &H3F) + 1, 1) & _
            Mid(ALPHABET, ((Src(RLen) * &H10) And &H3F) + 1, 1) & "=="
    ElseIf Remainder = 2 Then
        Triad = (CLng(Src(RLen)) * &H100) Or Src(RLen + 1)
        ToBase64 = ToBase64 & _
            Mid(ALPHABET, ((Triad \ &H400) And &H3F) + 1, 1) & _
            Mid(ALPHABET, ((Triad \ &H10) And &H3F) + 1, 1) & _
            Mid(ALPHABET, ((Triad * 4) And &H3F) + 1, 1) & "="
    End If
End Function

A useful variation would use a preallocated buffer for the encoded chunk, with assignment to Mid() instead of concatenation. When encoding large pieces (>100KB), it makes sense to save on string allocation and copying.

The formula for the length of a Base64-encoded string is: ((SourceLength + 2) \ 3) * 4.

CryptoAPI issue I've found

Continuing with the crypto theme, this is a story about an issue in Microsoft CryptoAPI that I've discovered a few years ago. It was originally posted at an MSDN forum, but I thought I'd rather republish it here. I've used some pretty deep magic to get to this result.

OpenSSL vs. the Microsoft crypto stack

UPDATE: the same with PowerShell.

I'd like to publish a Microsoft Word VBA macro for my co-workers. I would also like to have it digitally signed, so that Word doesn't complain about scary insecure macros.

Yet another reverse proxy

The general idea of reverse proxy is quite simple. Sometimes, one wants to designate a portion of a website  to return a copy of another website.

Hash of a hash of a hash

Problem: there are two MySQL databases on two different websites that should be mostly identical, except for maybe a few tables. I would like to figure out quickly which tables don't match so that I can run a manual sync.

Reverse proxy needed

HTTP reverse proxies are a Useful Thing. Sometimes it's for exposing an endpoint from behind a firewall that you don't control, sometimes it's for moving a service from one public URL to another while not leaving legacy consumers in the dark.

Splitting GIF into frames on Android via giflib

PREAMBLE: the app where this technique originated is no longer using it. I've integrated GifFileDecoder by Google and never looked back. Had to patch it somewhat, though - my GIFs are small, makes more sense to read them into memory rather than display progressively.

UPDATE: it's now a Gist.

This is a followup to my answer at StackOverflow regarding animated GIFs on Android. Folks want code - I've got some. The general idea is - use giflib to get RGB(A) pixel data for each frame in a format that's compatible with Android's, feed the pixels to bitmaps, display the bitmaps.

Inflating a bicycle tire with a potato

The inimitable Raymond Chen of Old New Thing fame once wrote a blog post about using inappropriate tools for the job. It came to my mind the other day when I needed to do a timestamp-based conditional in a batch file. The underlying cause was rather vanilla - file H is generated from file X, so if file X was modified later than H was, the batch needs to rebuild H.

SEH for fun and profit

PREAMBLE: this technique is no longer necessary. As of Visual Studio 2015 Update 2, one can mix C++ exceptions with SEH.

The built-in crash reporting of Windows Phone 8 sucks. It doesn't report registers, stack, what modules were loaded at crash time... Definitely not something you can debug from.