The Wiert Corner – irregular stream of stuff

Jeroen W. Pluimers on .NET, C#, Delphi, databases, and personal interests

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Having cancer is not a fight or a battle, it is about having luck or misfortune

Posted by jpluimers on 2021/12/10

It has been a while after my last post about me having cancer. No, I am not giving up. But I am having the regular fear of the upcoming checks: did the metastases return, or do I have the luck to outlive some 30% of my peer group.

The last metastases surgery has been slightly more than a year ago. A year from now, that percentage hopefully will be 50% and slowly increase over time until about 90% in some 9 years from now.

At year’s end, I will know for sure.

Below are some links on, mostly Dutch but with English abstract, articles about the mental side of having cancer, or having survived it for now.

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Posted in About, Cancer, LifeHacker, Personal, Power User, Rectum cancer | Leave a Comment »

When Ctrl-Alt-Del fails on Linux: Fix a Frozen System with the Magic SysRq Keys (via FOSSwire)

Posted by jpluimers on 2024/04/26

Ctrl-Alt-Del will not safely reboot all systems under all circumstances.

If you run Linux, your keyboard has a magic RysRq key (sometimes not marked, but its the same key as the Print-Scrn key) and the Linux kernel is still running not all is lost.

Due to link rot, the archived links are the most recent that have all the comments for [Wayback/Archive] Fix a Frozen System with the Magic SysRq Keys | FOSSwire which amend

You finally got your Linux environment to crash. Ctrl+Alt+Backspace does nothing, nor do the F-keys. You know you shouldn’t have installed that bad driver, but you did it anyway.
So you reach for the power button.
Stop.
Mashing in the power button to reboot could cause a problem if your hard drive is still being written to, and usually causes more problems than it solves. The Linux kernel includes a secret method of restarting your PC should it ever stop doing its job.
  1. Hold down the Alt and SysRq (Print Screen) keys.
  2. While holding those down, type the following in order. Nothing will appear to happen until the last letter is pressed: REISUB
  3. Watch your computer reboot magically.

This 2007 comment makes it easier to remember: REISUB is the reverse of BUSIER:

R E I S U B – is just the word busier in reverse.

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Posted in *nix, *nix-tools, Hardware, Keyboards and Keyboard Shortcuts, KVM keyboard/video/mouse, LifeHacker, Linux, Power User | Leave a Comment »

The halogen transformers we had: to high minimum power for use with LED

Posted by jpluimers on 2024/04/26

The ceiling spots had these power bricks had minimum power load of 20 and 35 watt, which was too high for our LEDs to function.

Models:

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Posted in DIY, LifeHacker, Power User | Leave a Comment »

Type systems are an accessibility tool for programming; for weakly languages you should enable type hints or type enforcement

Posted by jpluimers on 2024/04/25

I made [Wayback/Archive] Rebecca Skinner on Twitter: “Type systems are an accessibility tool for programming with ADHD.” stronger in the post title, as I have been a proponent of stronger typed environments for all my programming life.

Yes, (unit) tests and tooling can alleviate this in part for more weakly typed languages but lots of people forget (or “forget”) putting these in place.

So please please: make your development environment as strictly typed as possible.

Not just your ADHD colleagues will applaud you for this, but your future self will as well.

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Posted in Awareness, Development, Scripting, Software Development | Leave a Comment »

Waarom is de “nieuwe” bank-web site uit 2017 van ABN AMRO al ruim 5 jaar een drama?

Posted by jpluimers on 2024/04/24

Ik ben het zo hartgrondig eens met [Wayback/Archive] Ik ben een mens en geen computer!, dus daarom wat citaten en wat Tweets die ik in de afgelopen jaren stuurde.

  • 2. Kopiëren bedrag
    Iedere ondernemer kent het wel: de ontvangst van facturen via e-mail, of het downloaden van facturen. Juist om geen fouten te maken bij het overschrijven, kopieer ik het bedrag en plak dat in de webapplicatie. Bij ING Bank kan dat gewoon, maar in het bedragveld weigert de webapplicatie van ABN AMRO halsstarrig alle input middels Ctrl-V (plakken). Terwijl toch ook bij ABN AMRO wel bekend zou moeten zijn dat handmatige invoer tot fouten leidt!
  • 3. Kopiëren betalingskenmerk
    Eenzelfde soort probleem zien we bij het betalingskenmerk. Dat is een getal van 16 cijfers, bij uitstek geschikt om fouten te maken bij het overtikken. Hoewel tikfouten ontdekt kunnen worden middels het controlegetal in het betalingskenmerk, ligt het voor de hand om zo’n kenmerk te kopiëren en te plakken om zulke fouten te voorkomen. Zo niet bij ABN AMRO.
    Om het betalingskenmerk voor de mens nog enigszins leesbaar te houden, wordt het meestal gepresenteerd in vier blokjes van vier cijfers. De Belastingdienst doet dit bijvoorbeeld op de aangifte BTW

Tweets over de web-site en de mobiele app waar problemen na jaren nog niet opgelost zijn stonden voor een groot deel al in Sometimes you wish that companies – especially banks – would pay you for testing their sites instead of you paying them for using their sites en geen enkel punt was toen ik dit artikel in mei 2022 schreef opgelost.

Het is nu voorjaar 2024, een maand of 7 totdat European Accessibility Act in gaat en digitale toegankelijkheid verplicht wordt (met een overgang van 2022 tot 2025). Ik ben heel benieuwd waar ABN AMRO nu staat voor bovenstaande en of er ook iets aan onderstaande gedaan is.

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Posted in Development, Power User, Software Development, Web Development | Leave a Comment »

Please do not make your C# code an obfuscation contest

Posted by jpluimers on 2024/04/23

You. This is valid C# code. Guess what it does [Wayback/Archive]:

for (
  var (f,l) = (1, 10);
  f <= 10;
  Console.WriteLine($"{f} + {l} = {f + l}"),
  f++,
  l--
);

Via [Wayback/Archive] Khalid 🐕‍🦺🐕🐩 on Twitter: “I’m trying some programming in #csharp today. Am I doing this right? #dotnet”

–jeroen

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Posted in .NET, C#, C# 10, C# 11, Development, Software Development | Leave a Comment »