The Wiert Corner – irregular stream of stuff

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

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Archive for March, 2012

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Refined: Alternate (offline) Google Chrome installer (Windows) – Google Help « The Wiert Corner – irregular stream of Wiert stuff

Posted by jpluimers on 2012/03/30

Just updated my earlier post on Google Chrome offline installers with this info:

Google Chrome has two offline installers: one single user install, and one for all users on the same Windows machine.

It ends up at one of these download pages, each with a download link for the current version (which changes for every new version):

–jeroen

via: Alternate (offline) Google Chrome installer (Windows) – Google Help « The Wiert Corner – irregular stream of Wiert stuff.

Posted in Chrome, Google, Power User | Leave a Comment »

Shortcut URL for login with NS Businesscard as @NS_online made it way to hard to book a trip in a fast and friendly manner

Posted by jpluimers on 2012/03/30

Somehow the Nederlandse Spoorwegen “improved” their site for business users.

They added a lot of functionality, and made the User Experience the for most frequently used feature a lot harder: book a trip with a NS Business Card with the accompanying PIN code.

You need to login, follow a close to a dozen steps before you land on the booking site. Not handy when you are in a hurry to book your Fyra trip.

Luckily the auto-login URL for that booking site is very easy: it is parameterized with your NS Businesscard number (lets say it is 9876543210) and PIN code (lets assume 1234).
Then the URL is this:

https://boeken.nsbusinesscard.nl/wwwTR/component.servlet?component=selectAutoLogin&action=autoLogin&CARDNUM=9876543210&CARDPW=1234

Presuming you have a personal machine with adequate protection, add that shortcut to your favourites and you are done.

–jeroen

Posted in Power User | Leave a Comment »

KB2251481 update issues (via: MS11-049: Description of the security update for Visual Studio 2005 SP1: June 14, 2011)

Posted by jpluimers on 2012/03/29

August 2011, Microsoft re-issued KB2251481. They should not have done that, because if you have the original KB2251481 installed (also known as KB2251481.T369_32ToU865_32) you need to go through the hoopla below to uninstall it.

In stead, they should have released a new version that automatically uninstalls a previously installed one, then installs itself.

It is not the first patch that Microsoft did wrong, but this one is the “Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 Service Pack 1 XML Editor Security Update”. Every now and then I come across it when doing work on some archived virtual machines that contain Visual Studio 2005 (which I used a lot in the past, and occasionally still use for doing some maintenance work for clients that long ago ditched stuff they thought they’d never need to use again).

The really stupid thing is the error message you get when it cannot get installed: John Doe user will never find out why it failed, let alone figure out how to get it install properly.

This is the message you will see:

[Automatic Updates]
Some updates could not be installed
The following updates were note installed:
Security Update for Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 Service Pack 1 XML Editor (KB2251481)
[Close]

The message doesn’t even include that it is trying to install the August 2011 version (hinting that there might be an earlier version you need to uninstall). Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in .NET, C#, C# 2.0, Development, Software Development, Visual Studio 2005, Visual Studio and tools | Leave a Comment »

naming – What’s the use/meaning of the @ character in variable names in C#? – Stack Overflow

Posted by jpluimers on 2012/03/28

Duh, I always thought @ could only be used for strings.

Not so: just like with the & in Delphi is used to escape keywords, the additional use of @ in C# is to escape identifiers:

The prefix “@” enables the use of keywords as identifiers, which is useful when interfacing with other programming languages. The character @ is not actually part of the identifier, so the identifier might be seen in other languages as a normal identifier, without the prefix. An identifier with an @ prefix is called a verbatim identifier.

–jeroen

via: naming – What’s the use/meaning of the @ character in variable names in C#? – Stack Overflow.

Posted in .NET, C#, C# 2.0, C# 3.0, C# 4.0, Delphi, Development, Software Development | Leave a Comment »

reflection – C# – Resolving a parameter name at runtime – Stack Overflow

Posted by jpluimers on 2012/03/27

So I won’t forget: a GetName method returning the name of a parameter, local or field.

Tags: C#, reflection, IL parsing, argument name, anonymous type, generic type cache, generic type caching.

–jeroen

via: reflection – C# – Resolving a parameter name at runtime – Stack Overflow.

Posted in .NET, C#, C# 2.0, C# 3.0, C# 4.0, Development, Software Development | 4 Comments »

Pictures taken at the handover of the auctioned Giacomo Agostini Yamaha R1 ‘Ago’ special edition

Posted by jpluimers on 2012/03/26

20120324 - Pictures taken at the handover of the auctioned Giacomo Agostini Yamaha R1 'Ago' special edition - Peter Langaslag - MotoPort UithoornThis weekend I had the pleasure of taking some pictures during the handover of the auctioned Giacomo Agostini Yamaha YZF-R1 ‘Ago’ special edition. This one-off bike that was unveiled mid december 2011 by Giacomo Agostini himself together with Jaap van Zweden to be auctioned by BVA automotic to benefit Stichting Papageno.

The Dutch foundation Stichting Papageno supports families that have one or more children with autism. Jaap van Zweden – famous Dutch violin player and conductor of the year 2012 – and his wife Aaltje founded it 14 years ago. One of their sons (Benjamin, 1990)  is autistic, and while raising him they found out that many more families were in need for support (about 1% of the children is diagnosed with some form of disorder in the autistic spectrum), hence the foundation.

Peter Langeslag racing for Stokvis Uithoorn at Zandvoort in 1986

Peter Langeslag racing for Stokvis Uithoorn at Zandvoort in 1986

The bike was modeled after the famous bike that Giacomo Agostini (English Wikipedia) (Dutch wikipedia) drove in the 70s and 80s of last century.

Peter Langeslag – friend and Yamaha race driver in the 80s (this is Peter Langeslag racing for Stokvis Leimuiden in the 80s, he raced on 500cc Yamaha bikes) won the action. News links on the auction:

–jeroen

the auctioned Giacomo Agostini Yamaha R1 'Ago' special edition - picture by Yahama Motor Nederland BV

the auctioned Giacomo Agostini Yamaha R1 'Ago' special edition - picture by Yahama Motor Nederland BV modeled after the bike on the right that Agostini used to drive on

Posted in About, Personal, Photography | Leave a Comment »

Shapecatcher.com: Unicode Character Recognition

Posted by jpluimers on 2012/03/26

There are so many Unicode code points, that finding back one based on how a glyph looks like is similar to finding the needle in a haystack.

ShapeCatcher.com to the rescue: it has a drawing box where you can draw the glyph, and a recognition engine that presents you with Unicode code points that have a similar glyph.

Draw something in the left box!

And let shapecatcher help you to find the most similar unicode characters!

–jeroen

via: Shapecatcher.com: Unicode Character Recognition.

Posted in Development, Encoding, LifeHacker, Power User, Software Development, Unicode | 1 Comment »

intelligent answer to “whats my ip” on Google Search

Posted by jpluimers on 2012/03/23

It looks like Google decreased traffic to many “Whats My IP” sites by automatically answering the whats my ip – Google Search query.

I’m not sure when they introduced this, but it is good and bad at the same time.

–jeroen

Via: whats my ip – Google Search.

Posted in Google, LifeHacker, Opinions, Power User | 2 Comments »

Some PowerShell SCCM links

Posted by jpluimers on 2012/03/22

http://www.powershell.nu/2010/10/07/powershell-sccm-client/

http://www.powershell.nu/tag/sccm-2007/

 

http://devinfra-us.blogspot.com/2008/04/sccm-and-powershell-part-1.html

http://devinfra-us.blogspot.com/2008/04/sccm-and-powershell-part-2.html

 

http://thepowershellguy.com/blogs/posh/archive/2008/05/16/sccm-and-powershell-series-using-my-powershell-wmi-explorer.aspx

http://thepowershellguy.com/blogs/posh/archive/tags/WMI+Explorer/default.aspx

http://thepowershellguy.com/blogs/posh/archive/2007/03/22/powershell-wmi-explorer-part-1.aspx

 

http://tfl09.blogspot.com/2010/03/sccm-powershell-module.html

 

http://www.snowland.se/2010/03/10/sccm-module-for-powershell/

http://www.snowland.se/sccm-posh/

 

Posted in .NET, PowerShell, Scripting, Software Development | Leave a Comment »

Enabling powershell to run unsigned scripts for the current user only (via: Absoblogginlutely!)

Posted by jpluimers on 2012/03/21

More than a year ago, I wrote about enabling PowerShell to run unsigned scripts, and a way to circumvent the “cannot be loaded because the execution of scripts is disabled on this system” error.

The solution  there uses the Set-ExecutionPolicy cmdlet, but only works for administrators. As of PowerShell 2.0, there is more fine grained control for the Set-ExecutionPolicy cmdlet, and an updated Set-ExecutionPolicy cmdlet topic which I overlooked.

The solution below shows what happens when the current user is not an administrator, and works around it by applying it only for the current user.

error message:

Set-ExecutionPolicy : Access to the registry key 'HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\PowerShell\1\ShellIds\Microsoft.PowerShell' is denied.

Sure enough I don’t have permission to this registry key.

I checked with our admin to ensure this wasn’t set in group policy before I started fiddling around. Found out that there is another setting that is user specific that can be set with

Set-ExecutionPolicy -Scope CurrentUser -ExecutionPolicy RemoteSigned

This will allow the current user to run unsigned scripts he wrote himself, but still require remote (for instance downloaded) scripts to be signed.

Note it is easy to strip the “remote” flag of a downloaded script: NTFS keeps this flag in the Zone:Identifier NTFS alternate data stream.
Only do that for scripts you trust.

–jeroen

via: Absoblogginlutely! » Enabling powershell to run scripts with registry permissions..

Posted in .NET, Development, PowerShell, Scripting, Software Development | 4 Comments »

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