The Wiert Corner – irregular stream of stuff

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

  • My badges

  • Twitter Updates

  • My Flickr Stream

  • Pages

  • All categories

  • Enter your email address to subscribe to this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email.

    Join 1,830 other subscribers

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.

Read the rest of this entry »

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

“You need to learn to delegate” … That’s not always easy due to a variety of situations out of one’s control : @hhariri on Thread Reader App

Posted by jpluimers on 2026/07/24

A year ago, Hadi Hariri wrote this very important Tweet which I preserved through [Wayback/Archive] Thread Reader App because the Space Karen hates the Wayback Machine so much that it still can’t archive tweets ¹:

[Wayback/Archive] Thread by @hhariri on Thread Reader App

“You need to learn to delegate”

Learning to delegate is not that hard. Delegating, and doing it successfully on the other hand, requires having the right people to delegate to.

That’s not always easy due to a variety of situations out of one’s control.

Luckily, Archive.is can still archive Tweets, so here is the original one: [WaybackSave/Archive] Hadi Hariri on X: “”You need to learn to delegate” Learning to delegate is not that hard. Delegating, and doing it successfully on the other hand, requires having the right people to delegate to. That’s not always easy due to a variety of situations out of one’s control.”

 

Anyway, I responded with my story, which I archived too, but this time because Twitter does not allow viewing threads as an anonymous user since 2021: [Wayback/Archive] Twitter won’t show complete threads now without an account. :( Twitter accounts … | Hacker News.

My story [Wayback/Archive] Thread by @jpluimers on Thread Reader App

@hhariri Especially when explaining what and how to a delegatee is taking more time/energy/effort than doing it yourself.

Still training the new internal care of my brother. Costs less energy than last year, but back then the old “ambulant” care took 2 hours and then “it was OK”.

@hhariri Weekly I try to figure out what happened then hours re-explaining “treat him like he is: mentally a 3 year old with autism in a full grown body that seems to speak Dutch very well, but does not really understand what he says. So what he says is different from what he wants/needs”

@hhariri And for “normal work”, the life long job is to keep explaining that doing things right the first time saves a lot of effort.

@hhariri And yes, there is hindsight when at the time you did things, you didn’t know there was or would become a better way, or that the current situation changed.

Those are valid reasons for redoing things later, but not valid reasons for not even trying to do it right the first time.

In case you have a Twitter account, you can find the thread start at [WaybackSave/Archive] Jeroen Wiert Pluimers @wiert@mastodon.social on X: “@hhariri Especially when explaining what and how to a delegatee is taking more time/energy/effort than doing it yourself. Still training the new internal care of my brother. Costs less energy than last year, but back then the old “ambulant” care took 2 hours and then “it was OK”.”

--jeroen

¹ sometimes it archives something of the tweet, in this case the [Wayback/Archive] Tweet JSON which you normally would get through the Twitter CDN like [Wayback/Archive] Tweet JSON (I wrote about creating a JavaScript Bookmarklet for this method in Probably many more like these are needed to download Twitter videos: [extractor/twitter] Fix unauthenticated extraction by bashonly · Pull Request #7476 · yt-dlp/yt-dlp).

Posted in About, Awareness, Bookmarklet, Development, JavaScript/ECMAScript, LifeHacker, Personal, Power User, Scripting, Software Development, Web Browsers | Tagged: | Leave a Comment »

@NL_Wetenschap on Twitter: “Hier een overzicht van de wetgeving over mantelzorg. De regels gaan over hele verschillende situaties/onderwerpen, de doelgroep is vaak anders, de toegangsvoorwaarden verschillen en de uitvoerende instanties zijn niet voor elke regel hetzelfde. Het is echt een lappendeken!”

Posted by jpluimers on 2026/07/24

Hier een overzicht van de wetgeving over mantelzorg. De regels gaan over hele verschillende situaties/onderwerpen, de doelgroep is vaak anders, de toegangsvoorwaarden verschillen en de uitvoerende instanties zijn niet voor elke regel hetzelfde. Het is echt een lappendeken!

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in About, Care/Zorg, LifeHacker, Personal, Power User | Leave a Comment »

The Dutch Tax and Customs Administration uses JetBrains MPS with a their self developed DSL

Posted by jpluimers on 2026/07/23

Cool: part of the Dutch Tax and Customs Administration (Douane / Belastingdienst) uses JetBrains MPS (Meta Programming System) with a DSL (Domain Specific Language):

[Wayback/Archive] MPS_DTO_Case_Study.pdf [Wayback PDF View/PDF View]

Agile Law Execution Factory (ALEF), is an IDE developed with JetBrains MPS that uses a natural language to specify services, fact patterns, tax rules, and test cases.

It reminds me of some 30 years ago having trained a group of students that were also taught how to use a subset of natural language to phrase specifications by Professor G.M. Nijssen.

--jeroen

Posted in Development, JetBrains, Software Development, Systems Architecture | Leave a Comment »

Julia posted a challenge: Implement DNS in a weekend

Posted by jpluimers on 2026/07/23

Missed the original announcement of [Wayback/Archive] Implement DNS in a weekend

Even after a few years, it is still a fun project to take on.

Via [Wayback/Archive] Julia Evans on Twitter: “it’s fun to see all the different languages people are implementing DNS in a Weekend in (implement-dns.wizardzines.com) — so far I’ve seen C#, Rust, Kotlin, Clojure, Golang, Elixir, Typescript, and Python”

More:

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Communications Development, Development, DNS, Internet, Software Development, TCP, UDP | Leave a Comment »

Forensics: Automating Active Directory Account Lockout Search with PowerShell (an example of deep XML filtering of event logs across multiple servers in parallel) – where the images disappeared from blogs.technet.microsoft.com

Posted by jpluimers on 2026/07/22

Yes, the text of this post is still on [Wayback/Archive] Forensics: Automating Active Directory Account Lockout Search with PowerShell (an example of deep XML filtering of event logs across multiple servers in parallel) | Microsoft Learn but the original images from blogs.technet.microsoft.com as well as the code snippet got lost due to link rot and incomplete migration. I restored the blog post with comments from the Wayback Machine archives.

I needed the images and the snippet to be able to write future blog post Some links on getting the most recent defragmentation time of a Windows volume hat is appearing in a week or so.

The script is downloadable from LockoutEventsXML.ps1 or via [Wayback/Archive] TechNetGalleryArchive/LockoutEventsXML.ps1 at master · GoateePFE/TechNetGalleryArchive · GitHub at [WaybackSave/Wayback/Archive] github.com/GoateePFE/TechNetGalleryArchive/raw/refs/heads/master/LockoutEventsXML.ps1 by [Wayback/Archive] GoateePFE (Ashley McGlone) · GitHub.

Note the blog post uses @" strings – with $using.variable to pass local variables to remote sessions. See these entries for more information about that topic:

Queries:

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in .NET, CommandLine, Development, Power User, PowerShell, PowerShell, Scripting, Software Development, Windows | Tagged: , , , , , , | Leave a Comment »

Since more than 40 years, `c:tmp.txt` is a valid file path on Windows (because of MS-DOS 2.x)

Posted by jpluimers on 2026/07/22

Some are surprised but because of MS-DOS 2.x compatibility:

`c:tmp.txt` is a valid file path on Windows

Since each drive letter remembers the current directory and that memory bit is not thread-local nor process-local, so relying on it is bad practice.

The above is a quote from [Wayback/Archive] Oleksii Holub 🇺🇦 on Twitter: “So I was trying to understand the difference between <code>Path.IsPathRooted(...)</code> and <code>Path.IsPathFullyQualified(...)</code> and learned that apparently <code>c:tmp.txt</code> is a valid file path on Windows 🤯” which has an image without alt-text on a long bit of Microsoft documentation which I will further quote below.

Many people don’t know this, so here is a list of variations on relative paths:

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Conference Topics, Conferences, Development, EKON, Event, History, MS-DOS, Power User, Retrocomputing, Software Development, Windows Development | Leave a Comment »

Wayback Machine search string for either docwiki, Delphi 2007 or Delphi 2009 docs

Posted by jpluimers on 2026/07/21

A long time ago, I wrote about Google Search string for either docwiki, Delphi 2007 or Delphi 2009 docs.

Well, not long after Embarcadero totally messed up their DocWiki installation, ditched all DocWiki history cand causing a multi-day DocWiki outage (see The Delphi documentation site docwiki.embarcadero.com has been down/up oscillating for 4 days is now down for almost a day.), they also killed their (then still working) Docs server (containing all the Delphi 2007 and Delphi 2009 documentation).

That means the search strings in my previous blog post mentioned above do not work any more. The only way to find back that kind of documentation is through old blog posts (those usually are in the various Web Search Engine indexes), or through the Wayback Machine.

What Embarcadero also did not do is cooperate with the people at the Internet Archive to ensure the docs server was completely archived in the Wayback Machine. Since about Delphi 2010, their behaviour has been ticking boxes in the product feature matrices instead of tickling their users with great user experience including understanding what ensuring history is available actually means.

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Delphi, Delphi 2007, Delphi 2009, Development, Internet, InternetArchive, Power User, Software Development, WayBack machine | Leave a Comment »

bluesky-social/social-app: The Bluesky Social application for Web, iOS, and Android

Posted by jpluimers on 2026/07/21

Took me a while to notice this is open source: [Wayback/Archive] bluesky-social/social-app: The Bluesky Social application for Web, iOS, and Android

Via [Wayback/Archive] Gergely Orosz on Twitter: “Wow. The other Blue site open sourced their app (The protocol is already open sourced) Unlike Twitter’s recommendation algorithm that is a fork (and not the real thing), both these are the prod thing. This developing in the open is new, and encouraging! “

Related:

–jeroen

Posted in BlueSky, Development, JavaScript/ECMAScript, Scripting, SocialMedia, Software Development, TypeScript | Leave a Comment »

Pink Floyd at Pompeii – MCMLXXII [Blu-ray]: Amazon.de: DVD & Blu-ray

Posted by jpluimers on 2026/07/20

On my wish list, which is supposed to be the Bluray edition: [Wayback/Archive] Pink Floyd at Pompeii – MCMLXXII [Blu-ray]: Amazon.de: DVD & Blu-ray – Blu-Ray box

And note that this is not the DVD, but a CD in DVD packaging: [Wayback/Archive] Pink Floyd at Pompeii – MCMLXXII: Amazon.de: DVD & Blu-ray – DVD Amaray (style) Box

If you want the CD, then better buy the this 2 CD box: [Wayback/Archive] Pink Floyd at Pompeii – MCMLXXII: Amazon.de: CDs & Vinyl – 2 CD in softpack

Found this after an acquaintance mentioned that selected movie theatres had the remastered Pink Floyd at Pompeii movie running for a short period in 2025.

Related:

Read the rest of this entry »

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

Enorm optimistische weergave van Schiphol: Woon ik onder een vliegroute?

Posted by jpluimers on 2026/07/20

De heel optimistische weergave in plaatjes [Wayback/Archive] Schiphol | Woon ik onder een vliegroute?.

In werkelijkheid buigen veel vliegen nog veel eerder af, vaak al als ze onder de 500 meter hoogte zijn, en komen daardoor laag en vol gas over woonwijken heen.

Idem voor naderend verkeer. Het komt geregeld voor dat ze vol gas wisselen van een toenadering naar de Zwanenburgbaan om dan vol gas laag over Nieuw-West en Badhoevedorp naar de Kaagbaan te vliegen.

–jeroen

Posted in Schiphol | Leave a Comment »