The Wiert Corner – irregular stream of stuff

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

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Archive for the ‘Software Development’ Category

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Automation can’t fix broken security basics – Help Net Security

Posted by jpluimers on 2026/03/25

[WaybackSave/Archive] Automation can’t fix broken security basics – Help Net Security reveals nothing new: like in many places, automation isn’t the solution for bad processes or bad behaviour. Automation just assists getting things done (even in security), only marginally leading people to getting these things right in addition to done.

Leadership often focuses on broad resilience goals while the day-to-day work that supports them remains inconsistent and underfunded.

This is especially true when the day-to-day activities mainly consists clicking on links and other user-interface elements.

Yes, dark patterns are being used by adversaries, but a lot of day to day user experiences are based on dark patterns.

Improve those experiences by designing better processes amended by better automation, not the other way around.

Oh, and get your foundations right. For example by having processes in place that ease timely patching, even if that requires deployment on fridays.

--jeroen

Posted in Dark Pattern, Deployment, Development, DevOps, Infrastructure, Software Development, UI Design, User Experience (ux) | Leave a Comment »

nvaccess/nvda: NVDA, the free and open source Screen Reader for Microsoft Windows

Posted by jpluimers on 2026/03/25

On my research list: [Wayback/Archive] nvaccess/nvda: NVDA, the free and open source Screen Reader for Microsoft Windows

A bit more background is in NonVisual Desktop Access – Wikipedia

NonVisual Desktop Access (NVDA) is a free and open-source, portable screen reader for Microsoft Windows. The project was started by Michael Curran in 2006.

NVDA is programmed in Python. It currently works exclusively with accessibility APIs such as UI Automation, Microsoft Active Accessibility, IAccessible2 and the Java Access Bridge, rather than using specialized video drivers to “intercept” and interpret visual information. It is licensed under the GNU General Public License version 2.

It opens a ton of possibilities to use during software development for instance for automation or GUI testing.

It is an open source alternative for JAWS (screen reader) – Wikipedia.

Via this remark in [Wayback/Archive] Angrynerds 086 – Gone in 37 minutes – YouTube (around the 29:30 and 30:30 time marks)

#08 Windows11 gaat 32bit systemen kapotslopen. Dat is niet leuk voor bepaalde toegankelijksopties.

–jeroen

Posted in C++, Development, Python, Scripting, Software Development, Testing | Leave a Comment »

The mastodon boop sounds are called boop and were created by Josef Kenny

Posted by jpluimers on 2026/03/24

You can find the binary files sound files of the Mastodon beep sound at

They were created by [Wayback/Archive] Josef Kenny (blog: [Wayback/Archive] josef.one; Mastodon “i made that mastodon boop sound”: [Wayback/Archive] josef (@jk@mastodon.social) – Mastodon) early 2017 and updated with metadata later that year. In 2022 it became clear that using the sound is allowed as long as there is credit:

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Audio, Development, DVCS - Distributed Version Control, git, GitHub, Mastodon, Media, Power User, SocialMedia, Software Development, Source Code Management | Tagged: , | Leave a Comment »

sjinzh/awesome-yolo-object-detection: 🚀🚀🚀 A collection of some awesome public YOLO object detection series projects.

Posted by jpluimers on 2026/03/24

On my research list: [Wayback/Archive] sjinzh/awesome-yolo-object-detection: 🚀🚀🚀 A collection of some awesome public YOLO object detection series projects.

YOLO (You Only Look Once) is a series of computer vision algorithms and libraries based on training data that does ultra-fast object recognition. Most of it is written in Python with the more recent versions all using Pytorch, though interface from various other languages and environments are available. The above article lists them all.

A long time ago I gave a presentation on a few conferences using computer vision of which I blogged about the first one: Spoken @ DevDays 2009 NL – download is online: .NET & hardware – capture video & control servos, in a fun application

My presentation (.NET & hardware – capture video & control servos, in a fun application) was as a GeekNight session.
That imposed geeky stuff, but in addition it addressed an important point: there will be many more means of interaction.
In particular, my ‘geek’ combination of hardware and software would react on movements seen by the webcam by pointing the beam of the laserpointer towards the largest area that moved.

So it is cool to revisit the topic by for now a link dump: Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in .NET, AI and ML; Artificial Intelligence & Machine Learning, Development, Python, Scripting, Software Development | Leave a Comment »

ISO8601 Date Converter Online – DenCode

Posted by jpluimers on 2026/03/19

A while ago, I needed to check if 20251120T0700Z was a valid ISO 8601 timestamp. [Archive] ISO8601 Date Converter Online – DenCode showed it was.

It can even be called directly: [Archive] ISO8601 Date Converter Online – DenCode: 20251120T0700Z Europe/Amsterdam .

Not sure what language it was developed in (it runs server side), but it is a great tool to do some occasional testing of timestamp values.

Query: [Archive] datetime parse iso 8601 online at DuckDuckGo

I didn’t have time to check all the links from the Query in depth, but one seems to be JavaScript and another one is server side:

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Algorithms, Date and Time algorithms, Development, ISO 8601, Power User, Software Development | Leave a Comment »

RADProgrammer Style Guide · radprogrammer/radteam Wiki

Posted by jpluimers on 2026/03/19

I missed the below repository as when it got introduced early 2021 I was very much coping with recovering from a truckload of procedures curing my rectum cancer and its metastases.

Anyway, [Wayback/Archive] RADProgrammer Style Guide · radprogrammer/radteam Wiki is yet a new style guide which unlike the others hopefully will be maintained.

Also unlike the others it stresses not to use a specific Delphi feature, in this case inline variables (introduced in 2018) because in 2021 the internal IDE tooling and run-time around it still had not caught up.

I have always generalised this to refrain from using new features until they are broadly supported in the product. The reasoning is that  as for more than the last decade, the R&D team has a tendency to introduce features half baked, ticked a marketing feature in the product matrix then goes on with new features deferring work needed to actually make the feature useful towards the indefinite feature, so here is something you can quote me on

In Delphi, refrain from using new language features until the product fully supports it including at least these bits:

  • documentation
  • code generation / code completion
  • run-time behaviour (like memory leaks)
  • editor support (navigation, selection, expansion)
  • code refactoring
  • code formatting
  • debugger support

They refer to it from [Wayback/Archive] RADProgrammer Style Guide Other Guidance · radprogrammer/radteam Wiki:

Read the rest of this entry »

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

The Strange Math That Predicts (Almost) Anything – YouTube

Posted by jpluimers on 2026/03/18

Relatively old mathematics that is still relevant: Markov Chains.

It is about predictability of events based on the current state of affairs (and not past state of affairs). Lot’s of AI have been about Markov Chains for a long time: spam filters, text prediction while typing, search engine results, language recognition by letter-pairs, and many more.

A nice video about it is [Wayback/Archive] The Strange Math That Predicts (Almost) Anything – YouTube

Related are many foundations in information technology, of which Markov and Shannon are mentioned in the video:

Read the rest of this entry »

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

delphi – How to have both VCL and FMX in one application? – Stack Overflow

Posted by jpluimers on 2026/03/18

From a long while back, but I forgot to add it as a blog post.

The answer to [Wayback/Archive] delphi – How to have both VCL and FMX in one application? – Stack Overflow (thanks [Wayback/Archive] Gad D Lord for asking and [Wayback/Archive] Aleksey Timohin for commenting) is actually straightforward so Gad wrote a blog post on it back then [Wayback/Archive] MTG Studio: How to create and application which compiles both for Firemonkey and VCL.

It follows my answer closely, so here it is:

Read the rest of this entry »

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

Wisp.place Documentation | Wisp.place Docs

Posted by jpluimers on 2026/03/17

During a Cloudflare outage¹, I learned about [Wayback/Archive] Wisp.place Documentation | Wisp.place Docs

Decentralized static site hosting on the AT Protocol.

Wisp.place enables you to host static websites directly in your AT Protocol repository. Your Personal Data Server (PDS) holds the cryptographically signed manifest and files as the authoritative source of truth, while hosting services index and serve them with CDN-like performance.

This is the documentation of [Wayback/A] wisp.place by [Wayback/Archive] Ana (@nekomimi.pet) — Bluesky.

Related:

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in CDN (Content Delivery Network), Cloud, Cloudflare, Development, DVCS - Distributed Version Control, git, Hosting, Infrastructure, Power User, Software Development, Source Code Management | Leave a Comment »

MaxiHuHe04/iTunes-Backup-Explorer: A graphical tool that can extract and replace files from encrypted and non-encrypted iOS backups

Posted by jpluimers on 2026/03/17

I will need this one day: [Wayback/Archive] MaxiHuHe04/iTunes-Backup-Explorer: A graphical tool that can extract and replace files from encrypted and non-encrypted iOS backups which is based on [Wayback/Archive] How to decrypt an encrypted Apple iTunes iPhone backup? – Stack Overflow (thanks [Wayback/Archive] Aidan Fitzpatrick and [Wayback/Archive] andrewdotn) which has this very important remark:

decrypting your iOS device’s backup removes its encryption. To protect your privacy and security, you should only run these scripts on a machine with full-disk encryption.

Via [Wayback/Archive] Jilles Groenendijk on Twitter: “iTunes-Backup-Explorer: Want to extract data from an iTunes backup? Forget all the expensive tools that trick you an a monthly fee and limit you to a few phones. Use this: …”

Note: Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Development, iOS, iPad, iPhone, Java, Java Platform, Power User, Software Development | Leave a Comment »

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