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 1,854 other subscribers

Archive for 2015

CSV libraries for .NET

Posted by jpluimers on 2015/01/27

A few libraries for writing and/or reading CSV files in .NET:

Most of the above links come from these SO questions:

Together with the links from my previous CSV post If you think CSV is easy; think again that should get everyone going.

–jeroen

Posted in .NET, .NET 2.0, .NET 3.0, .NET 3.5, .NET 4.0, .NET 4.5, C#, C# 2.0, C# 3.0, C# 4.0, C# 5.0, CSV, Development, Software Development | Leave a Comment »

Skiplagged: book flights, and skip legs to make them cheaper – via: Jan Wildeboer, Brandon Downey, Bloomberg

Posted by jpluimers on 2015/01/26

I remembered about skipping flight legs, so was glad to find back this post where Jan Wildeboer has shared:

“Actually, it’s about ethics in ticket booking” ;-)

Brandon Downey originally shared:

Honestly, given how poorly airlines treat their customers, an argument that “Once you buy a ticket to a destination, you agree to travel all the way there and it would be unethical to do otherwise” is pretty laughable — basically, “it is unethical to find loopholes in our broken business model.” Also, great marketing for skiplagged.com.

United, Orbitz Sue Travel Site Over ‘Hidden City’ Tickets:

United Airlines Inc. and Orbitz Worldwide LLC sued to prevent the travel website Skiplagged.com from helping consumers buy what the companies call improper “hidden city” plane tickets that undercut their sales.

–jeroen

via: Honestly, given how poorly airlines treat their customers, an argument that….

Posted in LifeHacker, Power User | Leave a Comment »

More secure SSH: hardening both client and server. And use Tor

Posted by jpluimers on 2015/01/26

Thanks Jan Wildeboer for sharing a link to https://stribika.github.io/2015/01/04/secure-secure-shell.html.

That describes how to harden your secure shell by configuring the most secure algorithms for it.

Related: [WayBack] encryption – What are ssh-keygen best practices? – Information Security Stack Exchange

–jeroen

via More secure SSH. https://stribika.github.io/2015/01/04/secure-secure-shell.html.

Posted in *nix, *nix-tools, Communications Development, Development, Internet protocol suite, Power User, SSH, TCP | Leave a Comment »

NotePad++: Text Editor which shows \r\n (via: Stack Overflow)

Posted by jpluimers on 2015/01/26

I hadn’t monitored Notepad++ in a very long time, so I was glad that User Thomas Owens mentioned that it can show you the CR and LF codes:

With Notepad++, you can show end-of-line characters. It shows CR and LF, instead of “\r” and “\n”, but it gets the point across. […]

To use Notepad++ for this,

  1. open the View menu, open the Show Symbols slide out, and
  2. select either “Show all characters” or “Show end-of-line characters”.

I needed this because many development environments get confused when you have text files using a mix of line-break kinds (in my case LF, CR and CRLF).

–jeroen

via Text Editor which shows \r\n? – Stack Overflow.

Posted in *nix, Apple, Linux, Mac, Mac OS X / OS X / MacOS, Mac OS X 10.7 Lion, OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion, Power User, SuSE Linux, Windows | Leave a Comment »

Sudoku Solving Techniques

Posted by jpluimers on 2015/01/23

Interesting: some Links for the less than trivial Sudoku Solving techniques.

–jeroen

Posted in LifeHacker, Power User | Leave a Comment »

RosettaCode: cool way to improve your coding skills

Posted by jpluimers on 2015/01/22

Wow: I feel like having lived under a stone for 8 years, as RosettaCode has been alive since it was founded in 2007 by Mike Mol.

The idea is that you solve a task and learn from that, or learn by seeing how others have solved tasks or draft tasks.

So in a sense it is similar to the Rosetta stone: it has different languages phrasing the same tasks.

There are already a whole bunch of languages on RosettaCode (of which a few are in the categories below), and you can even suggest or add your own languages.

When you want to solve tasks, be sure to look at the list unimplemented tasks by language that leads to automatic reports by language (for instance two of the languages I use most often: C# and Delphi).

I’m sure there are lots of programming chrestomathy sites, even beyond the ones, and it feels very similar to programming kata sites.

–jeroen

Posted in .NET, APL, Awk, bash, Batch-Files, C, C#, C++, COBOL, CommandLine, Delphi, Development, Fortran, FreePascal, Java, JavaScript/ECMAScript, Lazarus, Object Pascal, Office VBA, Pascal, Perl, PHP, PowerShell, PowerShell, Prism, Scripting, sed script, Sh Shell, Software Development, Turbo Prolog, VB.NET, VBS, VBScript, Visual Studio and tools, Web Development | Leave a Comment »

A few nice G+ threads on Castalia and Usertility being acquired by Embarcadero, and Jacob Thurman staying active on them

Posted by jpluimers on 2015/01/21

Uwe Raabe was the first one to suggest that it might just be so that Castalia got acquired by Embarcadero. In the thread rumoured Usertility might as well been, or that Jacob Thurman might be responsible for IDE stability.

So today

These seem to be the hard facts:

  • Castalia and Usertility are now owned by Embarcadero
  • Jacob Thurman keeps involved but it is unclear if he is employed by Embarcadero

–jeroen

Posted in Castalia, Delphi, Delphi XE8, Development, Software Development | 3 Comments »

Great Unicode presentation by

Posted by jpluimers on 2015/01/21

Stefan Heymann did a great presentation Character Sets and Unicode in Firebird at fbcon11. About 90% of it is not about Firebird, but about Unicode: a highly recommended presentation.

There is also a PDF version of the same presentation for easier reading/searching.

If you like Firebird, there is a whole bunch of Firebird related presentations from various authors shared by MindTheBird.

–jeroen

Posted in Ansi, Database Development, Development, Encoding, Firebird, ISO-8859, ISO8859, Software Development, Unicode, UTF-8, UTF8 | Leave a Comment »

Wink – now that is a cool way to automate your home

Posted by jpluimers on 2015/01/21

While in the USA I usually go by Home Depot to get some inspiration.

This time my Eye fell on a lot of  Smart Home Products compatible with the Wink Hub: people in the USA have a lot more choice in that area than in The Netherlands.

So I did some more browsing and found this: Shop Amazon – 20% or More Off Select Wink Home Automation Bundles until January 31st 2015.

Some of that is even better than the ones listed at Wink – Featured Products – The Home Depot.

Too bad this 110V stuff doesn’t work in 220V land (:

–jeroen

via: Wink | Buy and View Smart Home Products.

Posted in LifeHacker, Power User | Leave a Comment »

Favorite Documents extension for Visual Studio 2010 and up

Posted by jpluimers on 2015/01/20

This used to be a great Delphi-only feature that I missed in Visual Studio, but I found the downloadable free extension Favorite Documents extension.

It is a by Sergey Vlasov, who has a whole bunch of free and paid Visual Studio add-ins, extensions and tools.

–jeroen

Posted in Delphi, Delphi 2007, Delphi 2009, Delphi 2010, Delphi XE, Delphi XE2, Delphi XE3, Delphi XE4, Delphi XE5, Delphi XE6, Delphi XE7, Development, Software Development, Visual Studio 11, Visual Studio 2010, Visual Studio and tools | Leave a Comment »