The Wiert Corner – irregular stream of stuff

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

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Archive for May, 2024

Script alternatives to the Windows-L keyboard shortcut (SwitchUser / LockWorkstation)

Posted by jpluimers on 2024/05/23

More than a decade ago I wrote about Programmatic alternatives to Windows-L keyboard shortcut (SwitchUser / LockWorkstation).

Still, I see many scripts invoke rundll32.exe or  to call the [Wayback/Archive] LockWorkStation function (winuser.h) inside user32.dll. Don’t!

The BOOL LockWorkStation()function has a calling convention that is incompatible with rundll32.exe () which will corrupt the call stack likely will lead to random problems as after two decades, this post from Raymond Chen still holds: [Wayback/Archive] What can go wrong when you mismatch the calling convention? – The Old New Thing

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Posted in .NET, Batch-Files, C#, CommandLine, Development, Power User, PowerShell, PowerShell, Scripting, Security, Software Development, Windows, Windows 10, Windows 11, Windows 7, Windows 8, Windows 8.1, Windows Server 2016 | Leave a Comment »

User Inyerface – A worst-practice UI experiment

Posted by jpluimers on 2024/05/22

Forgot that this site has been there for like 6 years now: [Wayback/Archive] User Inyerface – A worst-practice UI experiment.

Related: [Wayback/Archive] How I experience the web today

Via among others:

 

Posted in Conference Topics, Conferences, Development, Event, Power User, Software Development, User Experience (ux) | Leave a Comment »

Lots of interesting git links via b0rk on Twitter

Posted by jpluimers on 2024/05/22

A few years back [Wayback/Archive] 🔎Julia Evans🔍 (@b0rk) / Twitter asked for tips on learning git which resulted in a wealth of resources.

Related: [Wayback/Archive] xkcd: Git

So the below are for my link archive.

Yes, I have removed most of not all Unicode emojis as they are a pain for visually impaired to listen to from screen readers.

Future

Later I want to categorise all these, maybe using categories like these:

  • Videos
  • Stories/narrations
  • Levels (beginner/intermediate/advance)
  • Direction (inside-out vs outside-in)
  • (Rough) reimplementations
  • Perspectives from different version control systems
  • Failures: learning from or preventing them

I need to contemplate about that for a while.

--jeroen

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Posted in Algorithms, Conference Topics, Conferences, Development, DVCS - Distributed Version Control, Event, git, Software Development, Source Code Management | Leave a Comment »

Watch “Felienne Hermans: How patterns in variable names can make code easier to read” on YouTube

Posted by jpluimers on 2024/05/21

A while ago, various sources pointed me to the great video below by [Wayback/Archive] Felienne Hermans: How patterns in variable names can make code easier to read – YouTube.

I responded to the first Tweet with a series of tweets describing my two pet-peeves that I see going wrong when teaching new programmers how to name things (the examples are in Delphi, but I have seen similar shortcuts being taken in C#, VB.NET, and JavaScript being taught in both courses and conference sessions).

The two pet-peeves are:

  • avoid abbreviations as those are context sensitive; given software development already mixes technical context (it’s software development!) and domain/semantic context it makes it extra hard to decipher abbreviations
  • if you want/need to mix technology and semantics in names (most often you do), start with the most meaningful semantics and end with the least meaningful technology
    • if you don’t need technology in your names, at least put the most meaningful semantics and end with the least meaningful technology

Both very well amend what Felienne – a university professor – states in her research backed video:

“Their results show that ‘linguistic code smells’ actually increase cognitive loads,” she said. “Your brain has to work harder to process code that has these type of code smells. So that’s not what we want.”

I saved the [Wayback/Archive] tweets in the [Wayback/Archive] ThreadReader as this text (slightly edited for formatting):

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Posted in Agile, Code Quality, Conference Topics, Conferences, Development, Event, Software Development, Systems Architecture | Leave a Comment »

Veiligheid in de trein en op het station | Reisinformatie | NS

Posted by jpluimers on 2024/05/20

[Wayback/Archive] Veiligheid in de trein en op het station | Reisinformatie | NS

WhatsApp- of sms-bericht bij onveilige situaties

Stuur een WhatsApp of sms-bericht naar nummer 06 13 18 13 18, om overlast of onveilige situaties in de trein of op het station te melden. Hiermee kom je direct in contact met de Meldkamer NS.

Belangrijk: in situaties waarin spoedeisende hulp noodzakelijk is, bel je altijd 112.

–jeroen

Posted in Awareness, LifeHacker, Power User | Leave a Comment »

Some notes on synching Google Drive data that other accounts shared with you

Posted by jpluimers on 2024/05/17

In the past (pre-2020) syncing shared Google Drive content was easy: Google Backup & Sync was still there and the web-UI of Google Drive was straightforward.

Syncing is important for me as it allows off-line working. Not all places have 24/7 internet access and not all cloud services are up 24/7.

So in 2020, with the mandatory (and often failing!) migration of Google Backup and Sync to Google Drive File Syncing and the new web-UI, things became a lot harder: Workaround to add a Shared With Me folder to your Google Drive (Google made this a lot harder in 2020).

Further into 2022 I discovered that way had become impossible for:

  • new shares
  • old shares that you had not set up syncing for

Old shares that you had set up syncing for kept working, and I hope they will for a long time, but I doubt they will.

Note this is not about free vs paid Google Drive data: the new situation fails for both cases.

For new shares or old shares you have not set up syncing for there basically seem to be two solutions, neither of them which is nice:

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Posted in Google, GoogleAccount, GoogleDrive, Power User | Leave a Comment »

Ventoy – open source tool to create bootable USB drive for ISO/WIM/IMG/VHD(x)/EFI files.

Posted by jpluimers on 2024/05/16

For my link archive:

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Posted in Development, Hardware, Hardware Interfacing, Power User, USB, USB | Leave a Comment »

How NOT to Measure Latency

Posted by jpluimers on 2024/05/15

According to @isotopp (Kristian Köhntopp ), this is one of the most important talks to watch regarding performance issues: [Wayback/Archive.is] How NOT to Measure Latency

Gil Tene provides an in-depth overview of Latency and Response Time Characterization, including proven methodologies for measuring, reporting, and investigating latencies, and overview of some common pitfalls encountered (far too often) in the field. Tene also covers specific considerations in garbage collected environments (such as Java).

It is on YouTube (embedded below the signature) as well, but the above link as synchronised slides plus video.

More places where you can get it:

Via [Archive.is] Kristian Köhntopp on Twitter: “… Dieser Talk ist einer der wichtigsten Talks überhaupt, wenn es um das debuggen von “Performance Problemen” oder SLOs geht.”

–jeroen

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Posted in .NET, Database Development, Development, Java, Java Platform, Profiling-Performance-Measurement, Software Development | Leave a Comment »

Field Tested Systems

Posted by jpluimers on 2024/05/14

Besides a cool portable spectrometer and software (written in Delphi), [WayBack] Field Tested Systems also has a really nice poster showing the spectrogram fingerprints of all the elements:

Via Delphi: 2 things to check when FMX/VCL units are inserted when you use VCL/FMX components (G+ post by Tom Field)

–jeroen

Posted in Delphi, Development, FireMonkey, LifeHacker, Power User, science, Software Development | Leave a Comment »

Gekleurd stopcontact met randaarde

Posted by jpluimers on 2024/05/13

Eerst vond ik [Wayback/Archive] Gekleurd stopcontact met randaarde en beschermingsafsluiters en van daaruit [Wayback/Archive] Rob Kalmeijer: Stopcontacten met niet alleen de (historisch) gangbare Nederlandse stopcontacten, maar meteen ook een heel mooie tabel die de algemeen aanvaarde toepassingen van de kleuren aangeeft:

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Posted in DIY, ElectricPower, Power User | Leave a Comment »