The Wiert Corner – irregular stream of stuff

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

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Archive for 2014

Markdown notes

Posted by jpluimers on 2014/11/10

Wishing an online collaboration tool that supports Markdown, especially since tools like GitHub have native support, and because of the textual nature of the file format, it plays well with version control systems. Until that, I’ll try to use editors on Mac, Windows and my blog, syncing with DropBox.

Some links that might get useful:

What is Markdown?

Online editors:

Windows + Mac:

Windows only:

Mac only:

Mobile:

Chrome plugins:

Comparison of tools and features:

Preview:

Conversion:

Comparison and resource overviews:

Markdown is very common in the scripting world.

A few examples:

On the syntax:

The Markdown syntax can be quite odd. Syntax examples are in http://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/syntax.text, which is the source code for Daring Fireball: Markdown Syntax Documentation. For instance [WayBackwhen nesting ordered and unordered lists, your code needs to be indented like this:

1. Ordered item 1
    - Unordered item a
    - Unordered item b
1. Ordered item 2
    - Unordered item c
    - Unordered item d

On CommonMark and John Gruber:

Even though John Gruber – the original Markdown inventor – wasn’t involved with Markdown for like 10 years, in September 2014 he was involved in the [WayBack“Standard” Markdown Controversy which led to the [WayBackCommonMark project trying to set a standard for Markdown.

–jeroen

Posted in Google, GoogleDocs, MarkDown, Power User | Leave a Comment »

Introducing nogotofail—a network traffic security testing tool for TLS/SSL – via: Google Online Security Blog

Posted by jpluimers on 2014/11/07

Great! And it is open source at https://github.com/google/nogotofail:

The Android Security Team has built a tool, called nogotofail, that provides an easy way to confirm that the devices or applications you are using are safe against known TLS/SSL vulnerabilities and misconfigurations. Nogotofail works for Android, iOS, Linux, Windows, Chrome OS, OSX, in fact any device you use to connect to the Internet.

There’s an easy-to-use client to configure the settings and get notifications on Android and Linux, as well as the attack engine itself which can be deployed as a router, VPN server, or proxy.

–jeroen

via Google Online Security Blog: Introducing nogotofail—a network traffic security testing tool.

Posted in *nix, Android Devices, Chrome, Google, iOS, Mac OS X / OS X / MacOS, OpenSSL, Power User, Security, Windows | Leave a Comment »

Windows .RES/Resource editors

Posted by jpluimers on 2014/11/07

While researching the manifest problem I will post about next week, I made a short list of free Windows Resource Editors:

All other resource editors I found were not free, and someof them not maintained for an even longer period than the free ones.

–jeroen

Posted in Delphi, Delphi 2, Delphi 2005, Delphi 2006, Delphi 2007, Delphi 2009, Delphi 2010, Delphi 3, Delphi 4, Delphi 5, Delphi 6, Delphi 7, Delphi XE, Delphi XE2, Delphi XE3, Delphi XE4, Delphi XE5, Delphi XE6, Delphi XE7, Development, Power User, Software Development, Windows, Windows 7, Windows 8, Windows Server 2000, Windows Server 2003, Windows Server 2003 R2, Windows Server 2008, Windows Server 2008 R2, Windows Vista, Windows XP | 4 Comments »

ITDevCon and EKON session materials on Delphi Unit Testing + Build Automation and Continuous Integration on-line

Posted by jpluimers on 2014/11/06

The last couple of weeks I taught two sessions at both ITDevCon 2014 in Milano, Italy and EKON 2014 in Köln, Germany.

The EKON materials are slightly more up to date and elaborate (sessions there were 75 minutes), so below are all the links.

Notes:

  • I’ve switched to Markdown for presenting as that is very version control friendly
  • GitHub very good at handling relative links from your Markdown files to other resources, that I’ve switched the Conference repository to GitHub from BitBucket.
  • Somewhere over the next few months, the BeSharp.net repository will convert from Mercurial to Git and also move to GitHub.

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Delphi, Delphi 2007, Delphi 2009, Delphi 2010, Delphi x64, Delphi XE, Delphi XE2, Delphi XE3, Delphi XE4, Delphi XE5, Delphi XE6, Delphi XE7, Development, Software Development | 1 Comment »

Delphi and Batch Files

Posted by jpluimers on 2014/11/06

Two interesting links today about Delphi and Batch files.

–jeroen

PS: If you want to see some serious Batch file and PowerShell related scripts, then read through the Build Automation part of my session materials I posted to ITDevCon and EKON session materials on Delphi Unit Testing + Build Automation and Continuous Integration on-line.

More details are in the batch files here:

and PowerShell scripts here:

Posted in Batch-Files, Delphi, Delphi 2005, Delphi 2006, Delphi 2007, Delphi 2009, Delphi 2010, Delphi 7, Delphi XE, Delphi XE2, Delphi XE3, Delphi XE4, Delphi XE5, Delphi XE6, Delphi XE7, Development, QC, Scripting, Software Development | 7 Comments »

Windows software developers – High DPI awareness: the developer Y2K (or is it EUR introduction) of our time.

Posted by jpluimers on 2014/11/05

An interesting statement by Steve Maughan:

Looking at how many High DPI awareness or lack of is the developers Y2K of our time.

Looking at the trouble Windows and Windows applications in general have with High DPI (more in general: resolution independence). I think it rates even higher: as the EUR introduction problem of our time.

What do you think?

–jeroen

via High DPI awareness is must have feature for XE8. Not only for Delphi IDE, but….

Posted in .NET, C++, Delphi, Development, Software Development, WPF | 12 Comments »

Accessing the ESXi Direct Console User Interface DCUI via SSH – Wahl Network

Posted by jpluimers on 2014/11/05

I just learned (thanks Chris Wahl!) about the dcui command: often easier to configure basic parameters than the other UIs.

The DCUI is normally available from the console after you login, for instance to enable SSH.

This was new to me:

DCUI is available over SSH.

Even more embarrassing: duic has been actually there since ESXi 4.1 (:

–jeroen

via: Accessing the ESXi Direct Console User Interface DCUI via SSH – Wahl Network.

Posted in *nix, ESXi4, ESXi5, ESXi5.1, ESXi5.5, Power User, Virtualization, VMware, VMware ESXi | Leave a Comment »

Delphi; Conditional defines in the .dpr: FastMM4 disappearing – via: G+ I’ve got an old problem, in which the IDE…

Posted by jpluimers on 2014/11/05

Vin Colgin posted on G+:

The kind of text that the Delphi IDE often removes in a .dpr file.

The kind of text that the Delphi IDE often removes in a .dpr file.

FastMM4 and lines in the *.dpr

I’ve got an old problem, in which the IDE will take the lines required out of the “uses” clause in the *.dpr. Something I’m sure we’re all aware of, but is there a solution to keep it from doing it?

The comments indicate the problem is less severe in more recent Delphi versions:

Daniela Osterhagen Actually it has become much better. The IDE doesn’t meddle as much with the DPR files as it used to.

One option for solving this issue is adding a new unit as the first entry that permanently stays there and moving the ifdef to that unit.

That’s what I did a long time ago and even put on-line, and even put it on-line at CodePlex as FastMM4BootstrapUnit.pas (now moved to bitbucket as FastMM4BootstrapUnit.pas). Too bad CodePlex and BitBucket are not indexed on Google, so I commented this:

I’m using a FastMM4BootstrapUnit for that at the top of my DPR; it  looks like this […]

It will eventually end up at my BeSharp.net repository any way.Let me know if you need it there soon, and I can probably get something published after the Entwickler Konferenz next week.

So various people are now using this:

  • Vin Colgin:  very nice. Thanks for the tip!
  • Warren Postma: This works fine for me in xe6 and up.
  • Bruce McGee: Nice. May I steal this? And by “steal”, I mean giving credit in the code comments.

Since I could use this unit during my EKON 2014 talk about Delphi Unit Testing, I expedited the publication:

https://bitbucket.org/jeroenp/besharp.net/src/tip/Native/Delphi/Library/FastMM/FastMM4BootstrapUnit.pas

And explained the usage in this Unit testing session session materials.

Note: this file isn’t indexed either (as BitBucket doesn’t allow it), but since the repository will be git based in the foreseeable future anyway, I can then move it to GitHub which does allow Google to crawl the master branch.

–jeroen

via FastMM4 and lines in the *.dpr I’ve got an old problem, in which the IDE….

Posted in Delphi, Delphi 2005, Delphi 2006, Delphi 2007, Delphi 2009, Delphi 2010, Delphi 3, Delphi 4, Delphi 5, Delphi 6, Delphi 7, Delphi x64, Delphi XE, Delphi XE2, Delphi XE3, Delphi XE4, Delphi XE5, Delphi XE6, Delphi XE7, Development, Software Development | 5 Comments »

PowerShell: 3 ways of `not` (except `not` itself: that doesn’t work) via Stack Overflow

Posted by jpluimers on 2014/11/05

Thanks Ryant for posting this answer, which I’ve paraphrased a bit:

not itself is not a boolean operator in PowerShell.

The reason is that PowerShell borrows a lot from *nix history, and this has been in *nix forever.

So there are 3 ways of negating a boolean, all equivalent: Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in CommandLine, Development, PowerShell, Software Development | Leave a Comment »

Delphi; Reminder to self: “Parallel Programming Library” in XE7 is the end result of “Delphi Parallel Library” by Allen Bauer

Posted by jpluimers on 2014/11/04

Like any long term project (Spring4D took [WayBack] about 5 years to release version 1.0 and still needs a lot of mobile polishing) the “Delphi Parallel Library” took a long time to complete.

It got incorporated as the “Parallel Programming Library” in Delphi XE7.

Since the documentation is thin (like Spring4D <g>), but the posts about “Delphi Parallel Library” (those started in 2008!) give a lot of background information.

Hence the reminder to self.

Now I need to compare this to the [WayBackOmni Thread Library for Delphi (which is on [WayBack] version 3+ now and moved to [WayBack] GitHub – gabr42/OmniThreadLibrary: A simple and powerful multithreading library for Delphi in the same release range) one day (:

(PPL is cross platform whereas OTL is not, but there must be much more differences).

–jeroen

Posted in Delphi, Delphi XE7, Development, Software Development | Leave a Comment »