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 »

Some pages that have lists of Amazon toplevel domains

Posted by jpluimers on 2026/04/16

Amazon has activities spread across many different countries and regions, heck they even own their own toplevel domain .amazon.

Yesterday in Online tools to test JSONPath Queries (plus a small list of Amazon top level domains) I wrote about the JSON parsing I did for Download your Kindle books soon, because Amazon will block them after February 25, 2025 .

The source of that list is [Wayback/Archive] Amazon operating domains by country. · GitHub [Wayback/Archive] in the file amazon-domains.json.

In the meantime, I finally managed to go through a list of old open browser tabs having more of such lists. Here they are:

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Posted in Development, JavaScript/ECMAScript, JSON, JSONPath, Scripting, Software Development, Web Development | Leave a Comment »

Remember: languages automatically evaluate const expressions

Posted by jpluimers on 2026/04/16

The first tweet below reminded me that few people seem to realise that const expressions are evaluated by the compiler/interpreter into the actual const value. Often this is called constant folding (though that can happen outside constant definitions too!)

Truckloads of source code I have come across in all kinds of languages where people put the calculated values in the expression like described here:

[Wayback/Archive] Kevlin Henney on Twitter: “For example: const int secondsInDay = 24 * 60 * 60; There is no need to calculate it yourself: const int secondsInDay = 86400; Or, related to what I’ve just seen: const int secondsInDay = 86400; // 24 * 60 * 60“.

In languages that support rich enough types, you can even pass a typed constant like timespan, duration or period around:

[Wayback/Archive] David Kerr on Twitter: “@KevlinHenney The general point is well made of choir course. In java, etc you can pass a Duration object around, no need to interpret an in. Type safety, self documenting.”

My recommendation is to use an expression like the first and maybe document the calculated value (for instance for ease of bug hunting) like here

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Posted in Conference Topics, Conferences, Development, Event, Scripting, Software Development | Leave a Comment »

Online tools to test JSONPath Queries (plus a small list of Amazon top level domains)

Posted by jpluimers on 2026/04/15

I wanted to parse some JSON being sent back during an XMLHttpRequest (what a wrongly named call is that!) of which I grabbed the content using the web development tools of my Chromium based browser.

Input

I got this list of amazon top level domain names from research I did for my blog post Download your Kindle books soon, because Amazon will block them after February 25, 2025 . The source is [Wayback/Archive] Amazon operating domains by country. · GitHub [Wayback/Archive] in the file amazon-domains.json:

{
    "us": "https://www.amazon.com",
    "uk": "https://www.amazon.co.uk",
    "ca": "https://www.amazon.ca",
    "de": "https://www.amazon.de",
    "es": "https://www.amazon.es",
    "fr": "https://www.amazon.fr",
    "it": "https://www.amazon.it",
    "jp": "https://www.amazon.co.jp",
    "in": "https://www.amazon.in",
    "cn": "https://www.amazon.cn",
    "sg": "https://www.amazon.com.sg",
    "mx": "https://www.amazon.com.mx",
    "ae": "https://www.amazon.ae",
    "br": "https://www.amazon.com.br",
    "nl": "https://www.amazon.nl",
    "au": "https://www.amazon.com.au",
    "tr": "https://www.amazon.com.tr",
    "sa": "https://www.amazon.sa",
    "se": "https://www.amazon.se",
    "pl": "https://www.amazon.pl"
}

The list is far from complete, so tomorrow I will post some more sources in Some pages that have lists of Amazon toplevel domains.

The queries and results show you that the original JSONPath (2007) and its RFC 9535 definition (2024, just 2 years ago) do not support getting the key names of the above list the ~ part in the first query below fails, and only the second query works.

This means that finding the right tooling is important.

Example

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Posted in Conference Topics, Conferences, Delphi, Development, Event, JavaScript/ECMAScript, JSON, JSONPath, PHP, Python, Scripting, Software Development, TypeScript, Web Development | Tagged: | Leave a Comment »

Need to find a “smart” broken/404 link checker

Posted by jpluimers on 2026/04/15

Most of the links from my blog get accompanied with Wayback or Archive.today links, but some don’t.

For those, I need to find a broken/404 link checker which I already hinted at in scr.im « Share your email in a safe way. Get less spam.

Some links that hopefully help me:

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Posted in Development, HTTP, Internet protocol suite, Power User, Software Development, TCP, Web Development | Leave a Comment »

Google Sheets actually has a ton of Excel compatible functions; wish the User Experience was better though

Posted by jpluimers on 2026/04/14

I have been using Microsoft Excel since it beat the Quattro Pro limitation of rows and columns with the version 12.0, on Windows more commonly named Excel 2007 (which also introduced a fully new user experience including the vertical screen estate eating Ribbon – the main reason I like 16:10 monitors over 16:9 ones) and on Mac as Excel 2008.

It means I have like 20 years of Excel experience not just on what it can technically can do (see my Excel posts) but especially on the user experience bit.

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Posted in Development, Excel, Google, GoogleDocs, GoogleSheets, Office, Office 2007, Power User, Software Development, User Experience (ux) | Tagged: | Leave a Comment »

Honghong Lu on Twitter: “Alcohol+paste flux = liquid flux It is pretty good, especially when I use to tin the cable with the solder pot.”

Posted by jpluimers on 2026/04/14

Smart: [Wayback/Archive] Honghong Lu on Twitter: “Alcohol+paste flux = liquid flux It is pretty good, especially when I use to tin the cable with the solder pot.”

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Posted in Development, Hardware Development, Soldering | Leave a Comment »

Falconer’s knot: the worlds best one handed knot! – YouTube

Posted by jpluimers on 2026/04/13

[Wayback/Archive] The Worlds BEST One Handed Knot! – YouTube which “The Bear Essentials” in this video calls “the thumbs up knot” but in fact is the Falconer’s Knot (which in turn is a one-handed way of tying a Halter Hitch) and also covered in his longer video [Wayback/Archive] TOP 10 BEST Knots for Life – YouTube.

The Thumbs Up knot is in fact a different knot which you can for instance use at the start of a paracord keychain: [Wayback/Archive] THUMBS UP! – YouTube

The short video explains the Falconer’s Knot well, but I do more like the step by step pictures in [Wayback/Archive] The Modern Apprentice – How to Tie a Falconer’s Knot

A video that also explains it better is [Wayback/Archive] Tying the Falconers Knot – YouTube.

More links:

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

Interactive maps with building ages in The Netherlands / Interactieve kaarten met bouwjaar gebouwen in Nederland

Posted by jpluimers on 2026/04/13

I found these maps:

  • Years at the time of writing this post (spring 2023)

Via:

–jeroen

Posted in LifeHacker, Power User | Leave a Comment »

Some URLs Are Immortal, Most Are Ephemeral

Posted by jpluimers on 2026/04/10

I mention dead links a lot, and always try to archive content before scheduling it in a blog post.

No different for [Wayback/Archive] Some URLs Are Immortal, Most Are Ephemeral, which provides background information about how the short lifespan of most URLs.

Their 2024 publication was a poster in PNG and PTTX format (linked below under the abstract), so I created this PDF out of it:

Abstract

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Posted in Conference Topics, Conferences, Event, Internet, LifeHacker, Power User, Web Browsers, WWW - the World Wide Web of information | Leave a Comment »

scr.im « Share your email in a safe way. Get less spam.

Posted by jpluimers on 2026/04/10

Cool: [Wayback/Archive] scr.im « Share your email in a safe way. Get less spam.

Bumped into this via [Wayback/Archive] Mary Branscombe (@marypcbuk) / Twitter.

At the time of writing, it had an invalid TLS certificate, so you would get red warnings when accessing it over HTTPS.

Hopefully that has been fixed by now.

It’s not exactly security through obscurity, but it allows people to access your email after solving a captcha so it is not 100% secure but a lot more secure than otherwise.

I found it 5 years after mailhide got discontinued by Google. I used it on my [Wayback/Archive] Contact form through mailhide.recaptcha.net which Google slowly killed without me noticing likely because Google didn’t want to upgrade it from using reCAPTCHA v1 into v2 or v3.:

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

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