The Wiert Corner – irregular stream of stuff

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

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Archive for May, 2013

A few notes on Delphi, WSDL and SOAP: passing nil values, Document/Literal versus RPC Encoded

Posted by jpluimers on 2013/05/14

I had some notes on Delphi WSDL and SOAP peculiarities somewhere, but I misplaced them.

Luckily, I found some links that explain most of my notes well:

–jeroen

Posted in Conference Topics, Conferences, Delphi, Delphi 2007, Delphi 2009, Delphi 2010, Delphi XE, Delphi XE2, Delphi XE3, Development, Event, SOAP/WebServices, Software Development | Leave a Comment »

Relevant files for ssh-keygen – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Posted by jpluimers on 2013/05/13

Edit:

After writing this, DSA got deprecated then later removed. See [WayBack] Secure Secure Shell.

When working with SSH private/public keys (often because of ssh-keygen), and using DSA for auhtentication, these are the relevant files:

  • $HOME/.ssh/id_dsa:
    (on the local system)
    The $HOME/.ssh/id_dsa file contains the protocol version 2 DSA authentication identity of the user.
  • $HOME/.ssh/id_dsa.pub:
    (on the local system)
    The $HOME/.ssh/id_dsa.pub file contains the DSA public key for authentication when you are using the SSH protocol version 2. A user should copy its contents in the $HOME/.ssh/authorized_keys file of the remote system where a user wants to log in using DSA authentication.
  • $HOME/.ssh/authorized_keys:
    (on the remote system)
    The $HOME/.ssh/authorized_keys file contains authorized DSA public keys (each line is the contents of a $HOME/.ssh/id_dsa.pub file) of users on systems that are auhorized to login on the remote system.

Important:

Be sure to transfer the contents of the local $HOME/.ssh/id_dsa.pub file to the remote system in a secure way.

–jeroen

via ssh-keygen – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

Posted in *nix, Apple, Cygwin, Endian, Linux, Mac, Mac OS X / OS X / MacOS, Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger, Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard, Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard, Mac OS X 10.7 Lion, OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion, Power User | Leave a Comment »

Mac OS X: editing ~/.bash_profile using TextEdit

Posted by jpluimers on 2013/05/10

Finder on your Mac by default does not show hidden files, and the console has vi, which lots of people find awkward to use.

There is an easy trick to open a hidden file like ~/.bash_profile (for instance to add an alias) with a visual text editor.

Just execute this in your terminal:

  • Always with TextEdit
    open -e ~/.bash_profile
  • For the default text editor (usually TextEdit)
    open -t ~/.bash_profile
  • For a specific text editor (in this cast TextWrangler)
    open -b com.barebones.textwrangler ~/.bash_profile

The man open(1) page has more information on the parameters you can pass to open.

–jeroen

PS: You can teach Finder to Quickly show and hide hidden files | Finder, Terminal | Mac OS X Tips.

Posted in Apple, bash, Development, Mac, Mac OS X / OS X / MacOS, Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger, Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard, Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard, Mac OS X 10.7 Lion, MacBook, MacBook-Air, MacBook-Pro, OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion, Power User, Scripting, Software Development | 6 Comments »

Time for a golden oldie: Pragmatic Software Development Tips

Posted by jpluimers on 2013/05/09

From the century start era of The Pragmatic Bookshelf | The Pragmatic Programmer, a – still valid – list of Pragmatic Software Development Tips.

From Care About Your Craft, via DRY, Some Things Are Better Done than DescribedKeep Knowledge in Plain Text, Work With a User to Think Like a User, Find the Box, and many others till Sign Your Work.

–jeroen

via: The Pragmatic Bookshelf | List of Tips.

Posted in .NET, C++, Cloud Development, COBOL, CommandLine, Delphi, Development, Fortran, iSeries, Java, Pascal, RegEx, Scripting, Software Development, Web Development, xCode/Mac/iPad/iPhone/iOS/cocoa | 3 Comments »

What programmers font (monospaced!) do you like best?

Posted by jpluimers on 2013/05/08

Lucida Console Sample (thanks Wikimedia!)

Lucida Console Sample (thanks Wikimedia!)

I’m in search to see if there is a better programmers font than the monospaced Lucida Console mainly to be used in Visual Studio, Delphi, the Windows console, Xcode and Eclipse. What I love about Lucida Console design is the relatively large x-height combined with a small leading (often called “line height”). This combines very readable text, and a lot of code lines in view. Lucida has two small drawbacks, see the second image at the right:

  • The captial O and digit 0 (zero) are very similar.
  • Some uppercase/lowercase character pairs are alike (because of the large x-height)

But, since the font hasn’t been updated for a very long time, lots of Unicode code points that are now in current fonts, are missing from Lucida Console (unless you buy the [Waybackmost recent version that has 666 characters from Fonts.com) Well, there are dozens of monospaced fonts around, so I wonder: which ones do you like? In the mean while, I’m going to do some experimenting with fonts mentioned in these lists:CcKkOoSsUuVvWwXxZz are much alike.

A few fonts I’m considering (I only want scalable fonts, so raster .fon files are out):

I have tried Adobe Source Code Pro about half a year ago. That didn’t cut it: problem with italics in Delphi, and not enough lines per screen. [WaybackNew Open Source monospaced font from Adobe: Source Code Pro.

–jeroen

Posted in .NET, Adobe Source Code Pro, Apple, Delphi, Delphi 2007, Delphi XE3, Development, Encoding, Font, Lucida Console, Mac, Mac OS X / OS X / MacOS, Power User, Programmers Font, Software Development, Typography, Unicode, Visual Studio 11, Visual Studio 2005, Visual Studio 2008, Visual Studio 2010, Visual Studio and tools, Windows, Windows 7, Windows 8, Windows Server 2008 R2, Windows XP, xCode/Mac/iPad/iPhone/iOS/cocoa | 43 Comments »

Taking pictures from space

Posted by jpluimers on 2013/05/07

Just came across this: Astronaut Chris Hadfield: how to take photos from the ISS

Great stuff!

–jeroen

Posted in About, LifeHacker, Opinions, Personal, Photography, Power User | Tagged: , , , , | Leave a Comment »

c# – What’s the hardest or most misunderstood aspect of LINQ? – Stack Overflow

Posted by jpluimers on 2013/05/07

It is such a pity that StackOverflow is not the place any more for questions like these:

c# – What’s the hardest or most misunderstood aspect of LINQ? – Stack Overflow.

These questions and answers historically got me most of the insight from SO.

Alas, no more.

–jeroen

Posted in .NET, Development, LINQ, Opinions, Pingback, Software Development, Stackoverflow | Leave a Comment »

Top Ten Mac OS X Tips for Unix Geeks – O’Reilly Media

Posted by jpluimers on 2013/05/06

This 5 year article from 2007 (which was an update for the 2002 version) is still very up to date in 2012: Top Ten Mac OS X Tips for Unix Geeks – O’Reilly Media.

Originally it was to promote Mac OS X for Unix Geeks – O’Reilly Media. In between the updates there was Mac OS X Panther for Unix Geeks, 2nd Edition – O’Reilly Media.

Now it is to promote Mac OS X for Unix Geeks (Leopard), 4th Edition – O’Reilly Media.

Note there is also a nice, but independent presentation with the same title from HTGR-MacOSX.

–jeroen

Posted in *nix, Apple, Mac, Mac OS X / OS X / MacOS, Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger, Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard, Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard, Mac OS X 10.7 Lion, Power User | Leave a Comment »

30 april 1993: the free and open WWW started…

Posted by jpluimers on 2013/05/03

This year, the Dutch Queens day this year had a special nature. On the nation level: the abdication by former Queen, now Princess Beatrix, and the succession and inauguration of King Willem-Alexander. On the marching band level: Adest Musica had their Dutch premiere of the new show Mother Earth which will be their entry during the quadrennial Word Music Concours this summer. On the personal level, my best friend visiting The Netherlands for just a few days, so finally a chance to catch up in person.

So I totally missed another important historic event: the 20th birthday of the releasing the WWW source code in the public domain.

On the 30st of April 1993, CERN: Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in About, Adest Musica, Personal, Power User, Web Browsers | Tagged: , | Leave a Comment »

Screenshots: Creating vSphere 5 ESXi embedded USB Stick with MBR partition table

Posted by jpluimers on 2013/05/03

A long time ago, I promised steps how to install VMware 5 ESXi using the MBR boot format.

The steps with screenshots are below, but first some background information.

As of VMware ESXi 5, GPT (short for GUID partition table) is the default partition table used by VMware ESXi.

Disks smaller than 2 TB can boot with MBR, but GPT It is a requirement for disks bigger than 2 TB. GPT also needs a UEFI compatible  BIOS.

Some older BIOSes (like those of my HP XW6600 machines: still running strong after many years of fine service) do not support GPT.

Luckily, weasel (the open source Operating System Installer that VMware ESXi uses) can be forced to use MBR using runweasel formatwithmbr.

Forcing MBR is a 2-step process.

  1. Get to the boot prompt: press Shift+O when the progress bar appears
  2. Running weasel with the MBR option: after the “runweasel”, type a space, then formatwithmbr

Below are the screenshots of a VMware ESXi 5.0.0 installation I did this way.

But it works equally well in ESXi 5.1.x

After writing this post, I found out about ESXi 5 Won’t Boot From USB which solves this exact problem for an HP XW8600 configuration (those are slightly larger machines than the XW6600 I have, but the architecture is the same).

Screenshots

Click on the image or link for larger screenshots, or view the series here at Flickr. Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in BIOS, Boot, ESXi5, ESXi5.1, Hardware, HP XW6600, Power User, UEFI, Virtualization, VMware, VMware ESXi | 1 Comment »