Just because a menu is enabled doesn’t mean you should expect it to work. E.g. You cannot use import from TXA if you are currently editing a procedure.

These are just some of the things I am stumbling across, your mileage may vary!

Tip# 1 – Don’t click…

After opening an application/solution/project/whatever don’t click on ANYTHING until the CPU has returned to idle.

I have found that the IDE is very sensitive to a loss of focus. It doesn’t always happen but sometimes if you click or transfer focus at the wrong moment things will stop working. Safer to just wait!

More info http://www.clarionmag.com/cmag/faq.html

This is something I hadn’t noticed before today. It may be common knowledge to others

When editing an embed, if you hold down control key then PageUp and PageDown are restricted to the current page instead of scrolling up/down. Kind of like Home/End for the visible area only.

Do you know of any other obscure keyboard tricks in the Clarion editor?

J-Blowfish is a Clarion wrapper (pure Clarion source, no black boxes) for the Blowfish  encryption algorithm. Most of this code was written by Andy Ireland  – we have added a helper class, examples, templates, etc.

I learnt a lot looking into this code a few years ago (wow, it was 2006 looking at my notes!). At the time we needed an implementation of the Blowfish Encryption Algorithm to share encrypted data between a Clarion and Java application. J-Blowfish seemed like a great fit but unfortunately we found that it was not producing standard encrypted data and was also unable to decrypt anything produced by another implementation.

The solution at the time was to use a C DLL instead. This worked fine but seemed a bit ugly, I would have much preferred a pure clarion solution. Also, the code in  jblowfish.clw intrigued me.

NOTE: This is just me poking around in things to learn something new. Don’t blame me if following anything in this blog sinks your submarine or whatever

Here is what I found…

(It is simpler to deal with hex output so that is the only section I have looked at but the results impact all encrypt/decrypt functions.)

1st, Implementation problem:

(In the “Main” procedure of BlowDemo.app)

In the demo supplied with J-Blowfish the local variable holding the key is not clipped. This means the actual key used for the Encryption is inclusive of the trailing spaces in the STRING.

Additionally, the blowfish encryption mode implemented in J-Blowfish (which I believe is ECB) requires your data to be a multiple of 8 bytes. The original implementation will pad an extra 8 bytes if the data is already a multiple of 8.

Original:

RtnEncryptHex  routine
 
  ! Set some properties
  MyBlowfish.Key32 = loc:Key
  MyBlowfish.Size = Len(Clip(loc:Text)) + (8-(Len(Clip(loc:Text))%8))

Suggested improvements:

RtnEncryptHex  routine
 
  ! Set some properties
  MyBlowfish.Key32 = Clip(loc:Key) ! Because loc:Key is a string not cstring without the Clip() your key is including spaces
 
  IF Len(Clip(loc:Text))%8 > 0
    ! Pad the data to the nearest 8 character block
    MyBlowfish.Size = len(clip(loc:Text)) + (8-(len(clip(loc:Text))%8))
  ELSE
    ! If the data length is exactly a multiple of 8 then there is no need to pad another 8.
    MyBlowfish.Size = len(clip(loc:Text))
  END

2nd, Encryption problem (jblowfish.clw)

The “BlowFish._Encrypt” method seems to be the culprit in the encryption errors I experienced.

In my testing I was using this data:

key: “abc”

plain text: “abcdefgh”

encrypted result (other tools): “94c559d64e1251fb”

I discovered that if in the BlowDemo.exe I used this data, “dcbahgfe” I would get the correct result (almost… the result was also backwards “d659c594 fb51124e”)

So it came down to a problem with the way the data was being passed to the “self.BF_Encrypt(pWork, pWork2)” part of this method.

(note: the BF_Encrypt method is used successfully in the BlowFish.Initialise method, I checked the values being generated and they are all correct)

Basically I believe this is because the Endianness of clarion longs is different to whatever assumption is made in the algorithm J-.Blowfish is based upon.

This is what I came up with:

BlowFish._Encrypt procedure(long pData, long dwBytes)
 
nBlocks                 long,auto
i                       long,auto
pWork                   long,auto
pWork2                  long,auto
bchar                   &byte
block                   string(8)
block2                  string(8)
 
  code
    if dwBytes % 8
      return false.
 
    nBlocks = bshift(dwBytes, -3)
    pWork = pData
 
    loop i = 1 to nBlocks
      pWork2 = pWork + 4
 
      ! Reverse the order of the first 4 bytes 
      bchar &= (pWork + 3)
      block[1] = Chr(bchar)
      bchar &= (pWork + 2)
      block[2] = Chr(bchar)
      bchar &= (pWork + 1)
      block[3] = Chr(bchar)
      bchar &= (pWork + 0)
      block[4] = Chr(bchar)
      ! Reverse the order of the next 4 bytes 
      bchar &= (pWork + 7)
      block[5] = Chr(bchar)
      bchar &= (pWork + 6)
      block[6] = Chr(bchar)
      bchar &= (pWork + 5)
      block[7] = Chr(bchar)
      bchar &= (pWork + 4)
      block[8] = Chr(bchar)
 
      !self.BF_Encrypt(pWork, pWork2) ! <-- doesnt work
      self.BF_Encrypt(Address(block), Address(block)+4)
 
      ! Now swap them back again
      block2[1] = block[4]
      block2[2] = block[3]
      block2[3] = block[2]
      block2[4] = block[1]
      block2[5] = block[8]
      block2[6] = block[7]
      block2[7] = block[6]
      block2[8] = block[5]
      ! And replace the data in "BinData" with the encrypted values
      Poke(pWork, block2)
 
      pWork += 8
    end
    return true

Other considerations:

• This only takes care of the Encryption phase something similar will need to happen in the Decrypt method.
• There may be better ways (band, bshift, bxor, whatever) to do this but it was late and this way is at least descriptive
• I passed a few of the standard test vectors through the changed version and it seems to work correctly now. Most implementations have in them somewhere a self test method that uses these test vectors to prove they are running correctly:

  http://www.schneier.com/blowfish.html

  http://www.schneier.com/code/vectors.txt

• One thing I learned (amongst many!) whilst doing all this. It seems you can safely do a search replace in jpwbfish.inc and jpwbfish.clw to replace all ULONG’s with LONG’s. This may even result in some speed improvements as supposedly longs are faster then ulongs. Reason for this is that longs are 32 bit and that is sufficient for blowfish as it works in 32 bit words. It seemed weired to me at first, its like when you do this:

SomeProcedure PROCEDURE()
x LONG
  CODE
 
  x = 2147483647 ! The highest value a long can take
  Message(x) ! It will show "2147483647"
  x += 1
  Message(x) ! It will show "-2,147,483,648"

But blowfish doesn’t care about the +/- part as it is working directly on the bytes in the long, thus a LONG is sufficient.

(This explanation may be off on a few technical points but you get the drift?)

I hope all the above makes (some) sense!

-brahn

This is something I discovered by accident a while ago, maybe you already know about it…

Use the mouse to move a window around and then, while you still have the left mouse button held down, press the escape key. The window will be returned to its original position!

Ok, so it isn’t very useful but it was new to me

Clarion IDE Fonts & save your eyes ? 17/12/2005 3:44:38 PM

I found that by careful tweaking of the registry values it was possible to alter the fonts used by the Clarion IDE!

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\FontSubstitutes

It’s not quite as straight forward as simply specifying the fonts you want as it seems that not all fonts will be accepted. I have no idea if this is the Clarion IDE or the windows font substitutions fault but I think it is best to take what you can get at this point!

Important Note:
It is required to restart Windows to allow a new or changed font substitution to take effect.

First, lets go straight to the before and after pictures:

And now for a little more detail on just how this works…

For demonstration purposed I have used Segeo Script in all these examples. You will have to play with it and work out what suits your tastes best.

The After pictures employes these techniques:

• Font substitution to change the IDE fonts
• CWPlus with custom ClarionEdge icon set!
• Custom background specified in the C60PE.ini/C60EE.ini file. (I think the one I am using here cam from 1stLogoDesign at some point)

There are three main registry string that we are going to play with:

1. MS Shell Dlg
2. Helv
3. MS Sans Serif

The last one, MS Sans Serif, is a new registry string that you will have to add to make this work.

Helv

This one covers most of the IDE – procedure Tree, template dialogs, etc

New String: MS Sans Serif

File picker, All the other IDE property boxes such as the Populate column toolbox and things like the main IDE Tabs.

Finally: MS Shell Dlg

This one will change all window dialogs, you will notice it a lot more in other places than just the ClarionIDE

e.g.

Not hard but nice to have.

Thanks Mark for the assistance!

Some examples:

1. 05-Oct-2009 + 1 Month = 05-Nov-2009
2. 31-Oct-2990 + 1 Month = 30-Nov-2009

AddMonths PROCEDURE  (LONG pDate, BYTE pMonths) !,LONG
originalDay BYTE
returnDate  LONG
  CODE
  originalDay = Day(pDate)
 
  returnDate = Date(Month(pDate) + pMonths, Day(pDate), Year(pDate))
 
  IF Day(returnDate) <> originalDay
    returnDate = Date(Month(returnDate), 1,  Year(returnDate)) - 1
  END
 
  RETURN returnDate

Textpad, a great general purpose editor – http://www.textpad.com/download/index.html

I have just started using this and so far it looks really good and appears to still be in active dev – http://ditto-cp.sourceforge.net/

Yay!