The Wiert Corner – irregular stream of stuff

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

  • My badges

    Mastodon

  • Twitter Updates

  • My Flickr Stream

    20140508-Delphi-2007--Project-Options--Cannot-Edit-Application-Title-HelpFile-Icon-Theming20140430-Fiddler-Filter-Actions-Button-Run-Filterset-now20140424-VMware-Fusion-6.0.3.-no-reclaimable
    More Photos

  • Pages

  • All categories

  • Enter your email address to subscribe to this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email.

    Join 1,860 other subscribers

Archive for April, 2016

« Previous Entries

windows update cannot currently check for updates because the service is not running window 7 – when the official fixes don’t work

Posted by jpluimers on 2016/04/29

Sometimes the solution is soooo simple:

The fix for me was to:

  1. go into Windows Update and
  2. change the settings to “Never check for updates (not recommended)”,
  3. click OK, and
  4. then change it back to “Install updates automatically”.

I’m sure that switching it off this way and then choosing any option that enables windows updates would have had the same effect. As soon as I did this, windows update went from having a red X to a green check mark that said “Windows is up to date” (even though it was not – but this signified that the service was now working properly). I clicked check for updates and was successful – several updates were ready to be downloaded and installed.

Source: windows update cannot currently check for updates because the service is not running window 7 HELP

–jeroen

Posted in Power User, Windows, Windows 7 | Leave a Comment »

LSI sense codes

Posted by jpluimers on 2016/04/29

A while ago, I had RAID arrays suddenly drop out with unexpected sense codes.

I had a hard time tracking down what was wrong (it ended up being a faulty LSI Multi-lane Internal SFF-8087  to SATA/SAS Cable).

This caused all sorts of unexpected failures, hard to track down to any specific sense code.

As drives are bound to fail, and finding sense codes is a bit difficult, here are a few links that might help if I ever run into trouble again:

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in LSI/3ware, Power User, RAID, SAS/SATA, SFF-8087 | Leave a Comment »

vSphere HTML5 client shortcut tricks in Chrome for Windows – unclutter your browser-based UIs so they look like native apps! – TinkerTry

Posted by jpluimers on 2016/04/28

Great tips from Use Chrome for VMware-related taskbar shortcuts, unclutter your browser-based UIs so they look like native apps! | TinkerTry IT @ Home

Use these links to jump to each section’s step-by-step instructions for:

  1. vSphere Client – legacy Win32 C# client, likely to be deprecated soon
  2. ESXi Embedded Host Client – HTML5/JavaScript UI for ESXi
  3. vSphere HTML5 Web Client – HTML5/JavaScript UI for vCenter, released just 5 days ago!
  4. vSphere Web Client – comprehensive (and sluggish Adobe Flash) vCenter admin browser UI
  5. VAMI – occasional-use browser UI for back-end vCSA sysadmin
  6. Video showing how to create all 5 shortcuts – Step-by-step thorough YouTube video

–jeroen

Posted in ESXi6, Power User, Virtualization, VMware, VMware ESXi | Leave a Comment »

reStructuredText notes (.rst file extension)

Posted by jpluimers on 2016/04/28

Thanks to Eric Grange who asked Which lightweight markup language? I learned about reStructuredText (no cap R!) from a few comments Joseph Mitzen made.

It looks like reStructuredText has been around for much longer than Markdown, has better features (#1 for me: it is unambiguous, : native support on GitHub), but isn’t as popular. I think the latter is because finding editors supporting a live preview for it is a bit hard and tools are scattered around the net.

So here are a few notes on how I got reStructuredText to work on my Mac using OS X.

The hardest part was getting the reStructuredText preview for Atom to work:

  1. Verify you have recent apm/npm
  2. Download, then install the latest Mac Pandoc release (filename like “pandoc-*-osx.pkg”).
  3. Open Atom
  4. Menu “Atom” -> “Preferences” to open a “Settings” tab in the Atom user interface
  5. In the list “Settings”, “Keybindings”, “Packages”, “Themes”, “Updates”, “Install”, choose the last one: “Install”
  6. In the “Search packages” textbox, type “language-restructuredtext”, then hit Enter
  7. Wait a few seconds until “language-restructuredtext” appears in the list, then click the “Install”  button next to it
  8. In the “Search packages” textbox, type “rst-preview-pandoc”, then hit Enter
  9. Wait a few seconds until “rst-preview-pandoc” appears in the list, then click the “Install” button next to it
  10. To enable spell checking:
    1. In “Settings”, go to “Packages”
    2. Search for “spell-check”
    3. Click “settings”
    4. Add “gfm.restructuredtext” to the “Grammars” list
    5. Note you get “gfm.restructuredtext” from the “language-restructuredtext” package as described in Spell check in Atom – Atom quick tip #3 – Atom Editor Tips and Tricks.
  11. Restart Atom from the command-line (otherwise it will not find pandoc *)
  12. Open a reStructuredText file
  13. Press Ctrl-Shift-e to show the preview
  • pandoc error:

The error you get when pandoc cannot be found is this one:

‘pandoc’ could not be spawned. Is it installed and on your path? If so please open an issue on the package spawning the process.

It is easy to solve by modifying the Atom startup shell script and then don’t start Atom.app, but start atom from the command-line in a terminal window:

atom

For Windows:

  1. Install Chocolatey Gallery.
  2. Follow the steps at Hello Windows.
  3. Fails horribly: “The term ‘Install-ChocolateyPackage’ is not recognized as the name of a cmdlet”.
    1. Split-Path bug preventing Chocolatey to install a package · Issue #686 · chocolatey/chocolatey · GitHub.

A later try to get Pandoc installed on Windows was much easier: there is a Pandoc for Windows installer now.

Settings changes

I made a few, for instance:

  1. Ensure Tab to expands to spaces: See Soft Tabs and Tab Length under Settings > Editor Settings. via github – Atom – Change indentation mode – Stack Overflow.

Tables

Tables are always a hard thing in any markup. Luckily truben.no/table/ has a good table editor (it’s the same as table-editor.com) and can emit reStructuredText, Markdown, HTML and other formats.

More in the future

Give me some time, and I will post more about using the format and how it compares to my Markdown past.

Note that pandoc does not fully support reStructuredText (for instance not all table features are supported), but docutils rst2html.py does and also gives better warning/error information when parsing.

Here are some links about the reStructured syntax and how they can be rendered by rst2html.py:

For now, I’ll end with the goals of reStructuredText which I really like:

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Development, MarkDown, Perl, PHP, Power User, Python, reStructuredText, Scripting, Software Development | Leave a Comment »

400+ Free Resources for DevOps & Sysadmins

Posted by jpluimers on 2016/04/27

400+ Free Resources for DevOps & Sysadmins ranging from bitbucket/gitbub via letsencrypt through loggly to cloudflare and all soorts of *aaS online IDEs, payment services and more.

via: Mary Tee referred to by Joe Hecht.

–jeroen

Posted in Development, Encryption, Let's Encrypt (letsencrypt/certbot), Power User, Security, Software Development | Leave a Comment »

findstr as alternative for recursive grep search

Posted by jpluimers on 2016/04/27

Usually I use the old Borland grep.exe that still ships with Delphi. Too bad it is 16-bit app which does not recognise Unicode.

FindStr does. Though much slower and with limited regular expression capabilities, can do recursive searches too:

findstr /spin /c:"string to find" *.*

The /spin is a shortcut for these case insensitive command-line options (the full list of possible options is below):

  /S         Searches for matching files in the current directory and all
             subdirectories.
  /I         Specifies that the search is not to be case-sensitive.
  /N         Prints the line number before each line that matches.
  /P         Skip files with non-printable characters.

Sometimes I leave out the /P to include binary files.

–jeroen

via:

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Batch-Files, Development, Power User, RegEx, Scripting, Software Development, Windows, Windows 7, Windows 8, Windows 8.1, Windows NT, Windows Server 2000, Windows Server 2003, Windows Server 2003 R2, Windows Server 2008, Windows Server 2008 R2, Windows Server 2012, Windows Server 2012 R2, Windows Vista, Windows XP | Leave a Comment »

O RLY Parody Book Generator for Slack

Posted by jpluimers on 2016/04/26

Oh yes, someone finally did it!

Insult your co-workers with snarky O RLY parody book covers!

Source:

via: O RLY Cover Generator: Create parodies of the iconic O’Reilly book covers

URL example:

https://orly-appstore.herokuapp.com/generate?title=Finding%20your%20own%20G%2B%20posts%20on%20Google&top_text=Your%20off-line%20memory%20organised.&author=Kanye%20West&image_code=13&theme=12

–jeroen

Posted in Development, Software Development | Leave a Comment »

XSD enumerations: key value pairs

Posted by jpluimers on 2016/04/26

One of the things you cannot do in XSD, is have string enumerations contain both a key and a value.

But there is a little appinfo trick inside annotation that you can user under some circumstances, for instance when you interpret the XSD:


<xs:simpleType name="event_result">
<xs:restriction base="xs:string">
<xs:enumeration value="101">
<xsd:annotation><xsd:appinfo>Syntax error</xsd:appinfo></xsd:annotation>
</xs:enumeration>
<xs:enumeration value="102">
<xsd:annotation><xsd:appinfo>Illegal operation</xsd:appinfo></xsd:annotation>
</xs:enumeration>
<xs:enumeration value="103">
<xsd:annotation><xsd:appinfo>Service not available</xsd:appinfo></xsd:annotation>
</xs:enumeration>
</xs:restriction>
</xs:simpleType>

view raw

xs:annotation-xs:appinfo.xsd

hosted with ❤ by GitHub

appinfo is the application counterpart of documentation: both can contain any xml, but appinfo is aimed at machines, whereas documentation is aimed at humans.

–jeroen

via:

Posted in Development, Software Development, XML, XML/XSD, XSD | Leave a Comment »

Happy birthday .nl top-level domain for getting 30 today

Posted by jpluimers on 2016/04/25

I remember this happening when I was almost starting the studies at University: the Netherlands getting their country code top-level domain in 1986: at first mostly universities and research institutions were getting their .nl domains.

Today 30 years ago .nl came into existence and the first research institution domain here was cwi.nl (the research institution for math and informatics) as it handled the registrations (for years Piet Beertema did that, even before he hooked CWI to NFSnet in 1988).

This was the era of uucp – way before the web – which handled a lot of the mail traffic, but not the only one as back-then my HLERUL5.bitnet email address wasn’t even tied to the .nl dmain back then: it ran over DECnet based Mail-11 software. So it took a few more years before I got a .nl email address that the university and one of the reasons I still use a jeroenp account on many systems, for instance a few more years later when I got jeroenp@dragons.nest.nl at home.

This was way after the first commercial companies got their .nl toplevel domains, for instance and.nl was registered very early on (and Jos Horsmeier was very active).

So: happy birthday .nl and a bit thank you for all the people involved in getting .nl into existence.

–jeroen

Source: .nl – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Posted in History, Internet, Power User | Leave a Comment »

Mac OS X Time Machine – Stuck on “Preparing Backup”

Posted by jpluimers on 2016/04/25

For one of my USB backup drives, Time Machine was stuck showing “Preparing Backup”.

tmutil (which has a lot of undocumented parameters) helped me out.

tmutil status would not show any change for hours either:

retinambpro1tb:~ root# tmutil status
Backup session status:
{
    BackupPhase = ThinningPreBackup;
    ClientID = "com.apple.backupd";
    DateOfStateChange = "2015-05-04 19:27:31 +0000";
    DestinationID = "01AE12C7-1D3E-469E-BE7E-32DA30F0030E";
    DestinationMountPoint = "/Volumes/Elements2TB1";
    Percent = "-1";
    Running = 1;
    Stopping = 0;
}
...
retinambpro1tb:~ root# tmutil status
Backup session status:
{
    BackupPhase = ThinningPreBackup;
    ClientID = "com.apple.backupd";
    DateOfStateChange = "2015-05-04 21:13:28 +0000";
    DestinationID = "01AE12C7-1D3E-469E-BE7E-32DA30F0030E";
    DestinationMountPoint = "/Volumes/Elements2TB1";
    Percent = "-1";
    Running = 1;
    Stopping = 0;
}

So I:

  1. removed the .inProgress file found by ls -al /Volumes/Elements2TB1/Backups.backupdb/`scutil --get ComputerName`/*.inProgress
  2. rebooted with the USB drive attached
  3. waited for spotlight to complete
  4. manually started a backup
  5. verified it made progress using tmutil (you need to run that as root, for instance with sudo su -)

And it indeed made progress and finished:

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in *nix, Apple, Mac, Mac OS X / OS X / MacOS, MacBook, MacBook Retina, MacBook-Air, MacBook-Pro, MacMini, OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion, Power User, SpotLight | Leave a Comment »

« Previous Entries