The Wiert Corner – irregular stream of stuff

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

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Author Archive

Zet je rekeningnummer om naar IBAN met OpenIBAN.nl

Posted by jpluimers on 2022/02/11

Dit was de enige site die ik kon vinden waar je nog oude rekeningnummers naar nieuwe kon omzetten (inclusief bank-code).

[Wayback] Zet je rekeningnummer om naar IBAN met OpenIBAN.nl

Met deze webservice kun je gratis en snel je bankrekeningnummer omrekenen naar een IBAN. Een BIC of banknaam is niet nodig

–jeroen

Posted in LifeHacker, Power User | Leave a Comment »

When high SEO ranking fails to give you a reliable result: IsItDownRightNow.com failed to detect the WayBack Machine outage

Posted by jpluimers on 2022/02/11

A high SEO ranking does not automatically indicate a reliable result.

When the WayBack Machine was down a while ago (it responded to traceroute UDP requests, but would not establish TCP connections on ports 80 and 443), the first Google hit for detecting down status (searching for [Archive.is] waybackmachine down – Google Search) failed miserably because it redirected web.archive.org (which fails) to http://www.archive.org (which succeeds):

IsIdDownRightNow failing to detect web.archive.org downtime

IsIdDownRightNow failing to detect web.archive.org downtime

Luckily when asking around on Twitter:

  • others were experiencing the same problem, not just in The Netherlands, but also in other countries
  • after trying a few things, the WayBack machine got backup [Archive.is] before I could try cURL.
  • I got pointed at www.uptrends.com/tools/uptime which correctly does check the right subdomain and shows it is down from many locations:

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in *nix, cURL, Infrastructure, Internet, InternetArchive, LifeHacker, Power User, WayBack machine | Leave a Comment »

Character set reencoding link archive

Posted by jpluimers on 2022/02/10

I will likely need some of these links in the future:

–jeroen

Posted in Apple, Development, Encoding, Mac, Mac OS X / OS X / MacOS, Power User, Software Development, Unicode | Leave a Comment »

ESXi: origin of the ESX and GSX names

Posted by jpluimers on 2022/02/10

Not sure how I bumped into the below info, as it was in one of the open tabs of a VM that I had not accessed for a long time.

Tracing back, the links can be found via Wikipedia.

Here is the post content from the 2005 thread [Archive.is] Wayback “Abbreviation ESX”:

VMware: Origin of ESX and GSX names

VMware: Origin of ESX and GSX names

STSHot Shot

535 posts since
Apr 2, 2004

2. Aug 10, 2005 6:22 AM  in response to: kimono

Re: Abbreviation ESX

ESX = Elastic or Electric Sky

GSX = Ground Sky

early days west coast cali hippy advertising thinking from the boys in the states. They dont mean’t anything and the X was added for acromyn 

Related:

–jeroen

Posted in Power User, Virtualization, VMware, VMware ESXi, VMware Server (GSX) | Leave a Comment »

Legrand 7 824 94/96/97 documentation

Posted by jpluimers on 2022/02/10

Legrand 7 824 94/96/97 documentation I have found on-line:

--jeroen

Read the rest of this entry »

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

In this day and age, web sites with delivery back-ends still have Unicode issues: at least @Woonveilig, @Medireva and @PostNL still have trouble

Posted by jpluimers on 2022/02/09

Nowadays, some 35 years after the first Unicode ideas got drafted and 30+ years after the Unicode Consortium saw the light, UTF-8 is served my more than 95% of the web as shown in yesterday’s post UTF-8 web adoption is huge, closing 100%, but only soured up since around 2006..

I mentioned this:

It means that nowadays there is a very small chance you will see mangled characters (what Japanese call mojibake) when you’re surfing the web.

Serving UTF8 does not mean no unicode problems.

Below are some issues that happened not too long ago and still happen. I have reported them to all parties involved through web-care, but no response whatsoever, and this is bad: Unicode support beyond basic ASCII for the below systems are still broken even for relatively simple non-ASCII characters based in diacritics decorating a standard ASCII character.

Yes, I know the realm of encoding and code pages is a mess, especially when handling data in multiple layers of an application stack. That’s why I wrote this post in the first place, and have a whole encoding category of blog posts plus a Mojibake subset.

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Communications Development, CP850, Dark Pattern, Development, Encoding, ISO-8859, ISO8859, Mojibake, Software Development, Unicode, User Experience (ux), UTF-16, UTF-8, Windows-1252 | Leave a Comment »

rsync backup of your ESXi box: How to make a statically linked rsync binary

Posted by jpluimers on 2022/02/09

As promised mid last year in “fixing” ESXi “rsync error: error allocating core memory buffers (code 22) at util2.c(106) [sender=3.1.2]”, I would follow up on building a static rsync for ESXi one day.

So below a few links on how to do this, roughly in the order I found them (most via [Wayback] vmware rsync “3.1.2” static – Google Search):

Especially the last link has a great set of steps on how to build manually.

Boy I forgot how long ago CentOS 3.9 was: [Wayback] [CentOS-announce] CentOS 3.9 is released for i386 and x86_64 Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in *nix, *nix-tools, CentOS, Development, Linux, Power User, RedHat, Software Development | 2 Comments »

C# Effective way to find any file’s Encoding – Stack Overflow

Posted by jpluimers on 2022/02/09

Note: notepad cannot correctly guess the encoding, see the “old new thing”: [Wayback] Some files come up strange in Notepad | The Old New Thing (talking about ANSI a.k.a. Windows-1252, UTF-16LE, UTF-16BE, UTF-8, UTF-7 somewith and some without BOM as Notepad does not understand all permutations)

David Cumps discovered that certain text files come up strange in Notepad. The reason is that Notepad has to edit files in a variety of encodings, and when its back against the wall, sometimes it’s forced to guess.

[Wayback] C# Effective way to find any file’s Encoding – Stack Overflow shows how to detect various byte order marks in C#.

–jeroen

Posted in ASCII, Development, Encoding, Software Development, Unicode, UTF-16, UTF-32, UTF-8, UTF16, UTF32, UTF8 | Leave a Comment »

UTF-8 web adoption is huge, closing 100%, but only soured up since around 2006.

Posted by jpluimers on 2022/02/08

As a precursor to a post tomorrow showing that serving UTF8 does not mean organisations go without unicode problems, first some statistics.

The first Unicode ideas got drafted some 30 years ago in 1987. In 1991, more than 30 years ago, the Unicode Consortium saw the light. Nowadays more than 95% percent of the web-pages (close to 100% when you include plain ASCII) is served using the UTF-8 encoding.

It means that nowadays there is a very small chance you

will see mangled characters (what Japanese call mojibake) when you’re surfing the web.

Some nice graphs of unicode growth are at these locations are at these locations:

I think especially important are 2008 (when UTF-8 had outgrown all other individual encodings) and slightly after 2010, when UTF-8 alone covered more than 50% of the pages served. These exclude ASCII-only pages. Adding those would make the figures even larger.

graph showing a steep rise in the use of UTF-8 and a steep decline in other major encodings

Historical yearly trends in the usage statistics of character encodings for websites, June 2021

Historical yearly trends in the usage statistics of character encodings for websites, June 2021

–jeroen

Posted in Development, Encoding, Software Development, UTF-8, UTF8, Web Development | Leave a Comment »

ESXi: on my list to try VIC (VMware Infrastructure Client you say? Née vSphere Integrated Containers Engine)

Posted by jpluimers on 2022/02/08

On my research list: [Wayback] ESXi Host with No vCenter Server · VMware vSphere Integrated Containers 1.4 Documentation: Deploy a Virtual Container Host to an ESXi Host with No vCenter Server.

It is a small guide on [Wayback] vmware/vic: vSphere Integrated Containers Engine is a container runtime for vSphere.

vSphere Integrated Containers Engine (VIC Engine) is a container runtime for vSphere, allowing developers familiar with Docker to develop in containers and deploy them alongside traditional VM-based workloads on vSphere clusters, and allowing for these workloads to be managed through the vSphere UI in a way familiar to existing vSphere admins.

Given my virtualisation infrastructure is ESXi based, I need to contemplate on this, as there are basically two choices for me:

  • Install a docker host as a VM on the ESXi host and go all the way docker (which needs a very good thought on how many resources to allocate to the docker host)
  • Go the VIC way

Food for thought!

–jeroen

Posted in ESXi6, ESXi6.5, ESXi6.7, ESXi7, Power User, Virtualization, VMware, VMware ESXi | Leave a Comment »