Archive for 2014
Posted by jpluimers on 2014/12/24
Once every while you still do WinForms work, and bump into something you hadn’t bumped into before.
This time it was trying to set ForeColor = Color.Red on a ReadOnly TextBox for displaying error messages:
- Using a TextBox means the user can still copy the text to the clipboard.
- Using a Red foreground draws enough attention (it’s was an app with a really busy user interface).
When setting a TextBox from ReadOnly = false to true sets the BackColor from SystemColors.Window (usually white) to SystemColors.Control (usually light grey), and leaves the ForeColor to SystemColors.WindowText (usually black).
Setting ForeColor = Color.Red (funny there is a plural in SystemColors but not in Color) it doesn’t display it as such:
To my surprise, the TextBox had ReadOnly text (you could copy, but not modify it), which showed with a a grey (SystemColors.Control) BackColor and a black (SystemColors.WindowText) ForeColor: the defaults for a ReadOnly TextBox, not using my ForeColor = Color.Red;
I vaguely remembered there was some odd way of solving this, but since I hadn’t written a blog article about it back then (somewhere around .NET 1.x or 2.0 I didn’t have a blog yet), I was glad that Cheetah posted this answer on StackOverflow: Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in .NET, .NET 1.x, .NET 2.0, .NET 3.0, .NET 3.5, .NET 4.0, .NET 4.5, C#, C# 1.0, C# 2.0, C# 3.0, C# 4.0, C# 5.0, Color (software development), Development, Software Development, VB.NET, VB.NET 10.0, VB.NET 11.0, VB.NET 7.0, VB.NET 7.1, VB.NET 8.0, VB.NET 9.0, Visual Studio 11, Visual Studio 2002, Visual Studio 2003, Visual Studio 2005, Visual Studio 2008, Visual Studio 2010, Visual Studio and tools, WinForms | Leave a Comment »
Posted by jpluimers on 2014/12/23
If you are into serious software development, then this is a 75 minute PodCast you must listen to: Episode 215: Gang of Four – 20 Years Later : Software Engineering Radio.
Abstract
Johannes Thönes talks with Erich Gamma, Ralph Johnson and Richard Helm from the Gang of Four about the 20th anniversary of their book Design Patterns. They discuss the following topics: the definition of a design pattern and each guest’s favorite design pattern; the origins of the book in architecture workshops; the writing of the book together with the community; the rock-star feeling at the release of the book at OOPSLA conference; the influence of the book on the industry; the evolution of the Observer pattern; and new patterns since the book was released. The interview closes with each guest talking about their current projects.
What I liked
Of course I enjoyed the history of the Gang of Four (and am still sad that John Vlissides passed away).
Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in .NET, C#, Delphi, Development, Java, Java Platform, JavaScript/ECMAScript, Scripting, Software Development | Leave a Comment »
Posted by jpluimers on 2014/12/23
Found back an awesome post from about 16 months back: Am I really a developer or just a good googler? – Scott Hanselman.
I admin that I’m both, not only for development, but also for life hacking and a lot of other stuff I do.
There is so much information, that you can’t know or remember everything.
In fact one of the reasons I started my own blog, contribute to sites like StackOverflow, newsgroups, and speak/visit at events (conferences, user groups, etc) is that I don’t know everything and the interaction helps me learn more.
One of the cool things, is when Googling for some information, I stumble upon one of my own blog entries or other online contributions (:
–jeroen
Posted in About, Development, LifeHacker, Personal, Power User, Software Development | 1 Comment »
Posted by jpluimers on 2014/12/22
For my link archive: the “old” stats page, as it shows more information in a better formatted way (especially on larger monitors) My Stats — WordPress.com.
The “new” stats page used only half the screen width (long live responsive layout): Stats ‹ 7443331 — WordPress.com.
–jeroen
Posted in Development, SocialMedia, Software Development, Web Development, WordPress, WordPress | 2 Comments »
Posted by jpluimers on 2014/12/22
NameChanger cool visual tool to do pattern based mass-renames on your Mac.
Needs OS X 10.6 or better (Snow Leopard, Lion, Mountain Lion, Mavericks), though previous versions that are still available support all the way back until 10.3 (Panther).
–jeroen
via: MRR Software.
Posted in 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, MacBook, MacBook Retina, MacBook-Air, MacBook-Pro, OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion, OS X 10.9 Mavericks, Power User | Leave a Comment »
Posted by jpluimers on 2014/12/21
I absolutely love the Lucida family of fonts, and wrote about Bigelow and Holmes before in my font and typography categories.
So I’m glad I bumped (thanks Kristian!) into the Bigelow and Holmes blog (and Lucida fonts store), that recently published this article:
Bigelow & Holmes – How and Why We Designed Lucida.
Recommended reading for font lovers.
And while we are at it, a few more interesting reads on typography history:
–jeroen
Posted in Font, Power User, Typography | Leave a Comment »
Posted by jpluimers on 2014/12/20
Earlie this month, I wrote a review about Delphi Cookbook.
Well: as of last thursday, you can get that for USD 5 (or EUR 4.80, so better get yourself a USA account: just ensure your address is in the USA).
Heck: until januari 6th, you can get any eBook or Video on Packt for USD 5.
Note there is even an x-Mas countdown on the way (with each day a free book that is readable/downloadable for 24 hours).
There’s over 2500+ books to choose from, so I’m grabbing this chance to learn a few things on OpenCV, Scala, and PowerShell.
–jeroen
via: Book review: Delphi Cookbook by Daniele Teti, Packt publishing.
Posted in .NET, CommandLine, Delphi, Delphi XE, Delphi XE2, Delphi XE3, Delphi XE4, Delphi XE5, Delphi XE6, Delphi XE7, Development, Java Platform, PowerShell, Scala, Scripting, Software Development | Tagged: Delphi Cookbook, Packt | Leave a Comment »
Posted by jpluimers on 2014/12/20
My ZFS question on G+:
Hi everyone. I’m a geek. Learned most of the stuff by doing, and keeping tracks of what I did on my tech-blog http://wiert.me
I want to start with ZFS on a pair of HP XW6600 machines having 32gigabyte of RAM.
Any help on that is much appreciated.
The idea is to have one of these here in a closet and the other remotely, and perform replication between them (I’ve a 50megabit fiber-to-the-home uplink which can grow to 100megabit plus, internally my network is gigabit).
My current data is on a Windows 2003 x64 server with dual RAID5 configurations that are synced every night (not optimal for various reasons) with about 12gigabyte of files having mostly read-only access patterns and these kinds of sizes:
– small files between 4kilobyte and a few megabytes
– photos between 5 and 20 megabytes
– ISO backups and 7zip archives of projects (operating system installers, etc) between 100megabytes-6gigabytes
plus an ESXi machine having about 4gigabyte of data (mostly sizes between 20 and 200 gigabyte).
New storage should initially be at least 16gigabyte with room for growth.
I’m having active experience with OpenSuSE, ESXi and Windows. Solaris experience is from a long time ago. Learning by doing is my way of quickly gaining knowledge.
My schedule is doing research until the end of January (partially overlapping with a holiday) then building and testing until the end of Q1, going live early Q2.
Current plan is to put a lot of Samsung M9T 2terabyte SATA drives (they are only 9.5millimeter high) into the XW6600 rigs.
Earlier this year I did some research on controllers and hard drives, and I wonder how much of it is still current: https://wiert.me/2014/03/12/lots-of-2-5-3-5-and-5-25-conversion-brackets-and-hot-swap-bays/
(A quick calculation shows I should be able to get at least 14 externally accessible M9T drives into this machine, plus room for internal SSDs, etc).
So: where should I get started?
Initial questions I have:
– how about rebuild time when drives are lost? (how does the process of cold/hot spares work, can this be automated, how fast is it?)
– I’m not happy about the RAID5 rebuild times, so are 2TB drives indeed the sizes to go for?
– how about configuring things like ZFS equivalents of stripe size, buffer sizes, etc?
– what SATA controllers to use (is mainboard OK, what in addition to the mainboard SATA?)
– how can ZFS be used as an iSCSI target? how well does that work? (That would be really nice to connect to it from ESXi, Windows and many Linuxes/Linii)
– what about compression and block-deduplication?
– what about ZIP and L2ARC? how to estimate their size?
– which ZFS implementation to use? ZoL? OpenSolaris? Nexenta? Others?
– can a ZFS volume grow by adding extra drives?
(14 drives would get ~20terrabyte based on Z-3: http://www.servethehome.com/raid-calculator/ or http://wintelguy.com/raidcalc.pl but I want to have room for growth)
–jeroen
via: Hi everyone. I’m a geek. Learned most of the stuff by doing, and keeping tracks….
Posted in *nix, Hardware, HP XW6600, Linux, openSuSE, Power User, SuSE Linux, ZFS | 2 Comments »
Posted by jpluimers on 2014/12/19
Some settings I applied to match my Nexus 4 setup on my OnePlus One 64 Gb:
- Created an App Password to auto-login on Google to complement my 2-factor-login.
- Allows all way screen rotation (180 degrees was off by default):
- Settings > Display & lights > Rotation > 0, 90, 180 & 270 degrees
- Lockscreen weather temperature units – OnePlus Forums.
- Settings > Lock screen > Clock widget > Weather panel > Use metric
- Installed the Android Device Manager app to enable Locate My Device from the Android Device Manager web page.
- CyanogenMod has a similar Device functionality, but I like to centralise on one workflow.
- How to switch between various apps on Cyanogenmod on One Plus One – OnePlus Forums.
- How to enter USB debugging mode in Cyanogenmod – Android Enthusiasts Stack Exchange.
- Had to tap “Build Number” not 5, but 7 times:
- Settings > About phone > Build Number: Tap it 7 times > toast pop-up letting you know that the Developer Options have been enabled
- Settings > Developer options > Android Debugging; USB Debugging Notify; ADB over network
- You cannot change the order of the 3 hardware buttons (Menu, Home, Back). The onscreen buttons are more versatile, but take up screen space.
- Without these 9 changes, your OnePlus One sucks | THE CORNERPLAY isn’t completely accurate any more (and probably as of writing this, things might have changed slightly as well), but I took over these changes:
- Set the battery meter to show percentage full:
Settings >
- Enable (it isn’t enabled by default) double tap to wake up:
Settings > Display & lights > Double tap to wake up
- Settings > Display & lights > Adaptive backlight
- Settings > Display & lights > Sunlight enhancement
- OnePlus One: Helpful Tips and Tricks | Digital Trends.
I’m still hesitating about the home and work profiles mentioned at Without these 9 changes, your OnePlus One sucks | THE CORNERPLAY.
I copied the apps and settings from my old Nexus 4 to my new OnePlus One. Not everything transferred at once:
- About a dozen apps didn’t get installed, including AirBnB,
- The identities of some applications did transfer
- like ABN AMRO Bankieren, Tweetcaster, Firechat, Whatsapp, DropBox
- While others didn’t
- like Google, ING Banking, Twitter, Endomondo, WordPress, Facebook, LinkedIn, Pushbullet
–jeroen
Posted in Android Devices, OnePlus One, Power User | Leave a Comment »
Posted by jpluimers on 2014/12/19
I need to put a bit more research in this, as it is cannot read OV Chipkaart fare/balance out of the box: it needs some encryption information from that card.
FareBot by CodeButler is open source, and it might even be possible to write information to the fare cards.
–jeroen
via: FareBot – Android Apps on Google Play.
Posted in Android Devices, Power User | Leave a Comment »
The Wiert Corner - irregular stream of stuff 