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

  • Email Subscription

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

    Join 717 other subscribers

Archive for March, 2025

« Previous Entries

If your organisation still requires users to change passwords periodically, or imposes other composition rules like special characters, then you should be publicly shamed.

Posted by jpluimers on 2025/03/31

As of more than half a year ago, end of august 2024, these two NIST requirements had changed from SHOUND NOT into SHALL NOT (yup, ALL CAPS and bold!) almost 2 years ago:

  • Verifiers and CSPs SHALL NOT impose other composition rules (e.g., requiring mixtures of different character types) for passwords.
  • Verifiers and CSPs SHALL NOT require users to change passwords periodically. However, verifiers SHALL force a change if there is evidence of compromise of the authenticator.

[Wayback/Archive] NIST Special Publication 800-63B (Wed, 28 Aug 2024 20:39:12 -0500)

Even back in 2017 when they were phrased as “SHOULD NOT” , it was a strong clue that it was unwanted behaviour and for new sites/projects do better.

So if your web-site still doesn’t do better: shame on you, preferably public.

History

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Power User, Security | Leave a Comment »

git on Windows: figuring out SID mismatch

Posted by jpluimers on 2025/03/31

A few years back I had an error happen a while on one of my Windows machines after a git pull: fatal: detected dubious ownership in repository at 'C:/versioned/repository' followed by a few lines with Windows SIDs (Security Identifiers) that I had to map to actual users.

I thought I had it scheduled, but my notes were in a draft post, so when I bumped into it again when upgrading an old virtual machine with new versions I finished it and scheduled it for now.

The first time I got the error was after git for Windows fixed security vulnerability [Wayback/Archive] CVE-2022-24765 and included the quote from [Wayback/Archive] Uncontrolled search for the Git directory in Git for Windows · Advisory · git-for-windows/git:

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in CommandLine, Development, DVCS - Distributed Version Control, git, Power User, PowerShell, PowerShell, Scripting, Software Development, Source Code Management, Windows, Windows 10, Windows 11, Windows 7 | Tagged: | Leave a Comment »

Direct deep links to Amazon help pages

Posted by jpluimers on 2025/03/28

For me, it is always difficult to navigate to the Amazon help pages where you can reach their chat.

These are some of the links; follow the pattern to figure out which domain part you need to replace to get to your local ones:

--jeroen

Posted in Amazon.com/.de/.fr/.uk/..., Cloud, Infrastructure, LifeHacker, Power User | Leave a Comment »

For my link archive: 8 things you didn’t know you could do with GitHub Copilot | The GitHub Blog

Posted by jpluimers on 2025/03/28

Hopefully by now I have given GitHub Copilot so I can put this link from a while back into more perspective: [Wayback/Archive] 8 things you didn’t know you could do with GitHub Copilot | The GitHub Blog.

I saved it for my link archive as these thought processes take me a while. The conceptual thing here is if I want to pay for products that harvest profit from the enormous time and effort invested by open source authors (in this case even after the fact, as there was no way to opt out while most of the harvesting took place). See my earlier post On my list of extensions to try in vscode: tab nine.

An alternative for parts of GitHub Copilot might be the (then working title) TLDR from [Wayback/Archive] Beyond Code (German and have the domain beyondco.de). Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Development, Power User, Software Development, vscode Visual Studio Code | Leave a Comment »

ASCII art generator: GitHub – cmatsuoka/figlet: Claudio’s FIGlet tree

Posted by jpluimers on 2025/03/27

Just in case I ever need ASCII art in a document again:

[Wayback/Archive] GitHub – cmatsuoka/figlet: Claudio’s FIGlet tree

Via:

--jeroen

Posted in ASCII, ASCII art / AsciiArt, Development, Encoding, Fun, History, Power User, Retrocomputing, Software Development | Leave a Comment »

Windows: extracting CD-audio for a funeral: CDex, MP3Gain (a replaygain like implementation which modifies MP3 metadata) plus UI wrapper and audacity (for combining tracks)

Posted by jpluimers on 2025/03/27

It has been a very long time since I played around with ripping audio from audio CDs and wrote software for audio handling. I lost access to that source code some 20 years ago, so part of this post is from memory. Hopefully that is still good memory (:

Yes, I am one of those old farts that still has computing equipment with optical drives (:

Much has improved since then, so one needs to write far less code nowadays as a of tooling is now open source or has been open source for quite some time. The hardest part was finding back CDex (which I think is still very useful especially as it handles not-so-well-handled audio CDs quite OK).

Anyway: I didn’t document much of my audio history. The only post I mentioned CDex in was Streaming your mp3 collection through an Icecast server using ezstream, which does not does it justice as back then it had been reliable for such a long time.

Funeral web-site

That web-site was horrible, especially as it was picky on audio formats. In the end, it handled 128-bit fixed bit-rate MP3 files best.

CDEX

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Audacity, Audio, Development, Media, Normalisation of audio, Power User, Software Development | Tagged: | Leave a Comment »

Nartac Software – IIS Crypto

Posted by jpluimers on 2025/03/26

Not just for IIS, but for hardening any Windows system including ones running http.sys (like ADFS): [Wayback/Archive] Nartac Software – IIS Crypto

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in .NET, Communications Development, Development, Encryption, HTTP, HTTPS/TLS security, Software Development, TCP, Web Development | Leave a Comment »

Note for future self if .NET hash calculations from `ComputeHash()` are slower than expected

Posted by jpluimers on 2025/03/26

Normally when calculating hashes in .NET you use the [Wayback/Archive] HashAlgorithm.ComputeHash Method (System.Security.Cryptography) | Microsoft Learn.

This can be slow as [Wayback/Archive] cmcginty showed while answering the question [Wayback/Archive] How to get an MD5 checksum in PowerShell – Stack Overflow by [Wayback/Archive] Luke101 posing a faster solution (in this case for md5, but it can be generalised):

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in .NET, C#, Chocolatey, CommandLine, Development, Power User, PowerShell, PowerShell, Scripting, Software Development, Windows | Tagged: | Leave a Comment »

Embedding a Floppy Emu in a standard APPLE II Floppy Disk Drive – YouTube

Posted by jpluimers on 2025/03/25

Interesting modification: [Wayback/Archive] Embedding a Floppy Emu in a standard APPLE II Floppy Disk Drive – YouTube

STL: [Wayback/Archive] FermuAssembly.STL – Google Drive [Wayback] FermuAssembly.STL

Buttons: [Wayback/Archive] 3/4/5-Bit Independent Button Module MCU External Button Module Micro Switch Button Board Bluetooth-compatible Power Amplifier – AliExpress 502

--jeroen

Posted in //e, 6502, Apple, Apple ][, Development, Hardware Interfacing, History, Power User, Retrocomputing | Leave a Comment »

Workaround for “embedding” external scripts in JavaScript bookmarklets (thanks @ben_alman).

Posted by jpluimers on 2025/03/25

Bookmarklets are basically URLs that execute a JavaScript function.

Sometimes you want to rely on external JavaScript files (for instance jQuery), but Bookmarklets themselves cannot do that.

Bookmarklets can modify the current page though, and use those to load a script, wait until it is loaded, then continue executing.

Often that is OK as you want to operate the Bookmarklet on that page anyway, but be careful though that you do not mess up the page by loading an incompatible script: test, test, test!

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Bookmarklet, Development, JavaScript/ECMAScript, jQuery, Power User, Scripting, Software Development, Web Browsers | Leave a Comment »

« Previous Entries