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

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Archive for June, 2017

Why I care about QC and the Delphi community.

Posted by jpluimers on 2017/06/09

QC now forwards to QP and it is no longer possible to see your older open QC posts. Since the RAD Studio IDE still appear to report issues to QC – how can we now keep track of our submitted issues?

When will the internal error reporting in RAD Studio file reports to QP instead of QC?

[WayBack] – Lars Fosdal – Google+

in a response to

[WayBackQuality Keeps Moving Forward – Community Blogs – Embarcadero Community

A few people wondered about my (QC) criticism and some mistakenly see this as frustration.

Not being an MVP any more allows me to continue voicing these, as I get these from fellow other Delphi developers and clients.

I’m not frustrated. I voice criticism on social media as I still deeply care about the Delphi community. They are entitled to excellent products and easily searched/obtained information, especially for less than current products as these are the ones that are still widely used and made Delphi great and Borland/Inprise/Embarcadero/Idera earn a lot of money. QC is an important part of that as it has input from a lot of knowledgeable people inside the Delphi community.

Of course I know that the Delphi team has lost a lot of valuable people and resources, their infrastructure is having difficulties (hence deleting forum posts, shutting down services and even suffer from outages every now and then for which I usually warned them shortly after they happened) and they have a truckload of things on their hands. But I hardly see them reach out to the community for any help, so there is not much I can guess on how they want to be helped.

Criticism that canalizes sentiments from parts of the community at least gives them a place to respond and help set things straight.

The reason I care about the Delphi community is that they still give me a big feeling of a kind of family helping each other.

Even being in the field for well over 20 years, I still find that there are lots of Delphi things I do not know or have forgotten. Asking around in the community in a proper way usually gets me going very quickly for the former. For the latter, I have wiert.me/category/development/software-development/delphi/ and Google Search.

I spent almost a day investigating which QC links I had already archived and which I didn’t. That’s the dedication I expect from the Delphi team as well.

BTW:

This is yet another reason to keep QC: even the Tokyo release notes refer to them: [WayBackList of new features and customer reported issues fixed in RAD Studio 10.2 Tokyo.

–jeroen

Posted in Delphi, Development, QC, Software Development | 3 Comments »

Mikrotik – splitting your local LAN so you can assign different gateways and DNS servers by the DHCP server

Posted by jpluimers on 2017/06/09

When you want your Mikrotik DHCP Server handout different gateways (or DNS/WINS/NTP/.. servers and other settings), many of the answers tell you to fiddle with the DHCP networks like DHCP Server different gateways – MikroTik RouterOS [WayBack] but lack concrete examples, so here we go elaborating a lot on DHCP server with static leases – MikroTik RouterOS [WayBack]:

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Internet, MikroTik, Power User, routers | Leave a Comment »

Repair a Broken Ethernet Plug – All

Posted by jpluimers on 2017/06/09

The locking tab of RJ45 plugs breaks very easily. Replace it by two nylon cable ties (aka zip ties), in minutes. IMPORTANT NOTES: – This must be regarded as a temporary “Mac Gyver” solution, for home usage. – Definitely not for IT staff! (no crimper? asking for one in the budget won’t get you fired!) – Before the tab breaks, consider protecting the plug.

Source: Repair a Broken Ethernet Plug – All

via:  Now that’s very cool!! – Joe C. Hecht – Google+

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in LifeHacker, Network-and-equipment, Power User | Leave a Comment »

curl Statistics Made Simple: httpstat

Posted by jpluimers on 2017/06/08

curl Statistics Made Simple: httpstat is a single file Python script that has no dependency and is compatible with Python 3.

Source: curl Statistics Made Simple: httpstat [WayBack]

via: Using curl to get the HTTP header, and httpstat script to add connection stats (timings) to it. – Jean-Luc Aufranc – Google+ [WayBack]

Source: Using curl to get the HTTP header, and httpstat script to add connection stats…

Posted in *nix, cURL, Development, Power User, Python, Scripting, Software Development | Leave a Comment »

Mikrotik scripting language: a list of questions I had linking to the forum messages having answers

Posted by jpluimers on 2017/06/08

The RouterOS scripting language you can use on Mikrotik device immediately shows it’s origin: the console.

  • It is a statement oriented language where statement separators can be both semicolons and new-lines.
  • You can use the \ at the end-of the line as line-continuation character effectively spreading statements over multiple lines.

As promised some links to questions I asked:

Some questions by others that were also extremely useful:

And a few observations:

  • Functions do not need to be global. The RouterOS Scripting Manual paragraph on functions shows an example with :global that works just as fine with :local
    :local myFunc do={:put "hello from function"} 
    $myFunc
     
    # output: 
    # hello from function
  • a

–jeroen

Posted in Development, Internet, MikroTik, Power User, RouterOS, routers, Scripting, Software Development | 1 Comment »

Functions over read-only properties: you cannot mark a property as deprecated in delphi – via Stack Overflow

Posted by jpluimers on 2017/06/07

I learned one of the reasons you might want to use functions instead of read-only properties from properties – How can I mark a property as deprecated in delphi? – Stack Overflow [WayBack]:

Delphi hinting directives: deprecated, experimental, library and platform cannot be used on properties but can be on other members (like fields, procedures and functions).

Since a read-only property is very much like a read-only field, but fields cannot be read-only it can make sense to replace the read-only property with a function. Then on the function you can place hint directives.

This can help enormously refactoring large code bases where – because of size – you cannot perform a certain replacement in one step.

–jeroen

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

APC 7xxx models, DHCP Option 43 and Mikrotik DHCP servers

Posted by jpluimers on 2017/06/07

When switching my DHCP to a Mikrotik CCR1009, both the AP7920 and AP7921 failed to get IP addresses. The APC7921 would look bounce between waiting and offered states like this:

The cause is the need of DHCP Option 43 (Vendor Class Identifier) specified in RFC2132 – based on [WayBack] RFC 2131 – Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol and [WayBackRFC 1533 – DHCP Options and BOOTP Vendor Extensions – which I found first via these links:

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Development, Internet, MikroTik, Power User, RouterOS, routers, Scripting, Software Development | 3 Comments »

Fiddler2 direct download

Posted by jpluimers on 2017/06/06

For automated installs that cannot have UI interaction:

The install is “per user” as it is a user-local application; it installs in %LocalAppData%\Programs\Fiddler\Fiddler.exe.

Docs

Note that Fiddler acts as a HTTP proxy. When Fiddler starts, it hooks itself into the default WinINET proxy (which is used by any tool using the WinINET API, including Edge, Internet Explorer, Chrome, but not FireFox).

If you kill your Windows machine before stopping Fiddler, it cannot restore the WinINET proxy, so you have to do that by hand (otherwise you cannot browse web pages any more).

Manual restore:

  1. Run "C:\Windows\System32\rundll32.exe" shell32.dll,Control_RunDLL inetcpl.cpl,,4
  2. Press “LAN settings” (Dutch: “LAN-Instellingen”)
  3. Uncheck the proxy server checkbox “Use a proxy server for your LAN” (Dutch “Een proxy-server voor uw LAN gebruiken”)
  4. Confirm
  5. Close the control panel wizard

–jeroen

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Development, Fiddler, Software Development, Web Development | Leave a Comment »

Reminder to self: when your PPTP server is behind a NAT, forward both GRE protocol and TCP port 1723

Posted by jpluimers on 2017/06/06

The WAN sides of my Mikrotik CCR1009 are partly behind Fritz!Box routers that do NAT and contain a truckload of port-forwards.

A while ago, I wanted the CCR1009 to do PPTP as Fritz!Box 7360 and 7490: static routes over VPN don’t work (so I could only VPN to the WAN side of the CCR1009). However, it would not pass through the Fritz!Box from the outside.

It appears you need to forward both:

Maybe one day I will ditch the Fritz!Box 7490 and directly hookup the Mikrotik to the NTU: xs4all ftth en Mikrotik router – Google Groups.

But preferably I should follow Don’t use PPTP, and don’t use IPSEC-PSK either (via: CloudCracker blog)

–jeroen

via: VPNs einrichten mit PPTP – administrator.de: Achtung mit PPTP VPN Servern hinter NAT Firewalls !

Forward both PPTP TCP port 1723 and the GRE protocol

Forward both PPTP TCP port 1723 and the GRE protocol

Posted in Fritz!, Fritz!Box, Fritz!WLAN, Internet, IPSec, MikroTik, Network-and-equipment, Power User, PPTP, routers, VPN | Leave a Comment »

FRITZ!Box tuning part 1: Enable remote access over ssh

Posted by jpluimers on 2017/06/05

Interesting:

As I always try to maximize the usage of new hardware I started to explore what is possible with this combination. In this post I will explain how you get access to your FRITZ!Box using ssh.

Source: FRITZ!Box tuning part 1: Enable remote access over ssh [WayBack]

–jeroen

Posted in Fritz!, Fritz!Box, Internet, Power User | Leave a Comment »