The Wiert Corner – irregular stream of stuff

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

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When monitoring Windows service memory consumption from Zabbix and you get zeros

Posted by jpluimers on 2020/02/17

This is a small reminder to myself that when monitoring Windows service memory consumption from Zabbix and you get zeros, it means you need to monitor the Windows process instead of the service. The process will give you actual memory usage.

–jeroen

Posted in *nix, Monitoring, Power User, Zabbix | Leave a Comment »

Sometimes your day is brightened by a tweet that is much too kind

Posted by jpluimers on 2020/02/15

Tuesday was a day that got brightened. Thanks Elisabeth!

[Archive.is] Elisabeth met bgh Wendy en Minthe pensionada on Twitter: “@jpluimers Hallo Jeroen, al lang like jij mijn tweets. Vandaag heb ik mij in jou verdiept. Wat ik lees vind ik schokkend, triest, liefdevol en mooi tegelijk. Je bent een geweldig mens, een super broer en je bent ernstig ziek. Je vrouw die met de gevolgen van kanker moet leven. Respect 🌸❤️”

Translated:

Hello Jeroen, you have long liked my tweets. Today I immersed myself in your tweets. What I read is shocking, sad, loving and beautiful at the same time. You are a wonderful person, a super brother and you are seriously ill. Your wife who has to live with the effects of cancer. Respect.

–jeroen

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Posted in About, Personal | Leave a Comment »

multi-headed

Posted by jpluimers on 2020/02/14

A long time ago, I named a tool Cerberus after the mythical multi-headed dog that guards the gates of the Underworld, as it was to inspect client systems configurations to prevent they would enter a bad state.

Since I need a multi-headed tool later on, below are some links on multi-headed (Polycephaly – Wikipedia) creatures to give me inspiration.

Some of them are centered around war, others around hell, are dragons or monsters, and a few are guardians. Later I will try to put a classification in a table or so.

The idea is to replace my current Apache TLS offloading (that uses letsencrypt/certbot for the certificates) with something else like an nginx one, and maybe even make the internal part TLS too (so it becomes TLS upstreaming) so these will come in useful too:

Instead of nginx, HAproxy might be a an option too, especially as it understands TCP traffic other than http much better than nginx:

This means I should first look into nginx vs haproxy – Google Search, for instance these posts:

–jeroen

Posted in Geeky, History, Infrastructure | 2 Comments »

Happy Delphi 25th anniversary: follow hash tags #Delphi25 and #Delphi25th

Posted by jpluimers on 2020/02/14

I wish I could have prepared something more substantial for the 25th Delphi birthday.

Alas: life has been tough (see below), so please keep an eye on these search terms, hash tags and start posts from past Delphi team key members:

Search term: “Interview with Anders Hejlsberg and Chuck Jazdzewski #Delphi25th”; highlights from it:

  • “The men in this video are responsible for an incalculable amount of software, in one way or another. It boggles the mind to think about their impact on our industry.
    I know, right? If you aren’t using software they were directly involved in, then you are using software inspired by their software.”
  • Delphi 1 being postponed 6 months to ensure the visual designer and live data worked properly; the side effect was top notch quality of other product areas
  • Shipping the RTL and VCL code was very important
  • “If it was done right, we wouldn’t have a job” – had me truly LOL! It is so true! The Windows API was powerful, but hard to use – slightly better today, but still Delphi run circles around any other UI for Win32 tool – VB included.
  • Method Pointers changed the perspective of a lot of software development, even outside the Delphi world
  • Peter Sollich working on the compiler (Wish Peter Sollich was mentioned more; he was instrumental to the compiler.)
  • Garbage Collection is beautiful, but adds a truckload of complexity interfacing to the non-garbage collected underlying Windows API
  • The power of the VCL component model working irrespective of the state (having a Windows Class, Window Handle, etc) of the underlying Windows controls
  • The automatic recreation of underlying controls when certain component properties change is still important today on the supported platforms, for instance when switching from landscape to portrait mode
  • Reference counting (which was already with large strings) only gets you so far, as it can leave isolated islands that never get collected; mark and sweep was hardly used in any other environment
  • The beta/field-test/code names (like Delphi, Wasabi, Mango) depended on the group of people they were sent to
  • “Very important was that the Delphi 2.0 compiler and VCL was long underway before Delphi 1 was released. That made the transition from Win16 to Win32 so much easier.
    Yes, and really interesting in terms of strategic planning”
  • “I think Monet was ObjectVision 1.0 I think -and ObjectVision 3.0 was bundle with TurboC as I remenber it – I was PM on that in Scandinavia. :)”
  • Chuck is now working at Google on a new framework for Android Development called “Compose”.
  • Anders worked for a short while on Visual J++, then on C# and .NET, then adding TypeScript, and helped Microsoft move from inward oriented company to opening up to open source. He now spends his time committing code to github (github.com/ahejlsberg) because he wanted to go back to coding instead of managing.
  • “If playback doesn’t begin shortly, try restarting your device.” It stopped playing as soon as you switched to YouTube.
    Sorry. Must be a network issue. We will send out a replay link.”
  • “The first time I used Pascal, it was Compas Pascal – also written by Anders Heijlsberg. Now he is behind C# and TypeScript – he surely is leaving a major mark on the runestones of software development!”
  • DogFood is important; Turbo Pascal and Delphi were among the first; C# and TypeScript now do this too.
  • “Will the anniversary page Delphi.embarcadero.com be available in future also ?
    Yes, that is the plan. We made it Delphi.embarcadero.com instead of Delphi25. so we can keep it around. Plus we have more content comming on there.”
  • The Delphi compiler version actually started at 1.0 for Turbo Pascal 1.0
  • “Official MS Windows Me image for Virtual Box can be found at https://archive.org/details/win_me_archive_vdi“
  • DavidI: Special respect to my “Twin separated at birth” Charlie Calvert for training the world on Delphi !!!
  • [WayBack] (PDF) Borland Software Craftsmanship: A New Look at Process, Quality and Productivity
    A:This is a great paper. By coincidence I actually saw it less than two days ago!
  • “Don’t forget Cary Jensen, I have met him at the first Delphi courses in Amsterdam ~24 years ago. I hope he is well!”
  • “Don’t forget InterBase has been there all the time along the way too! And still going strong, and across all the same target platforms!”
  • “How about a line profiler built-in, rather than having to purchase and install AQTime?”
  • “This site has VirtualBox virtual machine images for all legacy versions of Windows, including “Window 3.1” … http://virtualdiskimages.weebly.com/virtualbox.html“
  • “I agree with the very useful feature of being able to make Windows versions of the mobile apps. This is one, that is being used exactly for that… multipurpose. https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.danvaegt.SmartWeighClient“

A few of my recent tweets:

 

Delphi 25th pages

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

Use Preview to combine PDFs on your Mac – Apple Support

Posted by jpluimers on 2020/02/14

From [WayBack] Use Preview to combine PDFs on your Mac – Apple Support :Learn how to combine PDFs and reorder, rotate, and delete pages.

Before editing your files: ensure you have a backup!

Combine two PDFs

  1. Open a PDF in Preview.
  2. Choose View > Thumbnails to show page thumbnails in the sidebar.
    (keyboard shortcut: Alt–Command–2)
  3. To indicate where to insert the other document, select a page thumbnail.
  4. Choose Edit > Insert > Page from File.
  5. Select the PDF that you want to add, then click Open.
  6. To save, choose File > Export.

You can also drag/drop from one thumbnail to the other, but this is tricky as you can easily modify the wrong file.

–jeroen

Posted in Apple, iMac, Mac, Mac OS X / OS X / MacOS, MacBook, MacBook Retina, MacBook-Air, MacBook-Pro, MacMini, Power User | Leave a Comment »

Our Intuition Says… Instead, Try… – Hacker Noon

Posted by jpluimers on 2020/02/14

Recommended 2 minute reading: [WayBack] Our Intuition Says… Instead, Try… – Hacker Noon.

It so much remind me of two proverbs. An ancient Chinese one where I only have the Dutch translation for (“Heeft U haast? Ga dan zitten”) that tells you to “sit down” when hurried and an even nicer Swedish one “Skynda långsamt” which literally translates into “Hurry slowly”.

When you’ve seen something work, you tend to view it as more “intuitive”. It’s easy to forget how counterintuitive it might have felt…

Via:

–jeroen

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

Use the Visual Studio Code mssql extension for SQL Server | Microsoft Docs

Posted by jpluimers on 2020/02/13

Since I really want to switch most of my SSMS usage to a tool being less resource intensive, as a truckload of my work is just running scripts, not browsing through data: [WayBack] Use the Visual Studio Code mssql extension for SQL Server | Microsoft Docs

This tutorial shows how to use the mssql extension for VS Code. This extension allows you to edit and run Transact-SQL scripts in VS Code.

This will also make it a lot easier to run my code from a Mac.

–jeroen

Posted in .NET, Database Development, Development, Software Development, SQL Server, Visual Studio and tools, vscode Visual Studio Code | Leave a Comment »

When a team uses IntegrationTest – always ask what they mean with the term

Posted by jpluimers on 2020/02/13

Since Integration Tests have been around since the 1980s (yes, that long!), better ask what they mean in your teams.

If they are broad, you might want to re-consider and switch to narrowly scoped ones (but mind your pace).

A while ago, I landed another team, they were doing various kinds of test, but  nobody had a good definition of which was what, so I dug up the below article.

Integration tests see if independently developed units of software work correctly when connected. Traditionally broad they are now better narrowly scoped.

Source: [WayBack] IntegrationTest

–jeroen

Posted in Agile, Development, Software Development, Unit Testing | Leave a Comment »

Reminder to self: be aware of implicit setup/tear down code in methods

Posted by jpluimers on 2020/02/13

If a part of a method requires implicit setup/tear-down code (for instance when using managed types like arrays, strings, etc), especially in rarely taken execution paths, then consider putting that code in a separate method.

I bumped into this recently, and found out it does not just hold for Delphi, it can happen in other languages too.

A Delphi example I found back is this one: [WayBack] Delphi Corner Weblog: Speed problems caused by code that never ran.

The problem with Delphi is that the language does not have local scope (variables are at the start of the method) which means the penalty is for the full method.

I bumped into this in C# where a piece of legacy code had the variables declared away from the block where they finally were used.

This historically grew, because originally they were used in more placed of the code.

The refactoring limiting the scope just never put the declaration close to the usage hence violating the proximity principle.

Via: [WayBack] Ouch! Code that doesn’t get executed can still cause other code in the same procedure to become much slower. Of course, in retrospect, once you know the… – Thomas Mueller (dummzeuch) – Google+

–jeroen

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

Alex Thissen @ Techorama Netherlands 2018: Building real world production-ready Web API’s with .NET Core

Posted by jpluimers on 2020/02/12

[WayBack] Alex Thissen @ Techorama Netherlands 2018: Building real world production-ready Web API’s with .NET Core

Follow [WayBack] Alex Thissen(@alexthissen) on Twitter

Pictures taken during session (likely in reverse order; needs cleanup of duplicates/blurs).

Many more [WayBack] Techorama 2018 Netherlands stuff at:

More pictures I took during sessions:

They are in reverse order of the what I attended of the [WayBack] Techorama Netherlands 2018: Schedule: Pathé, Ede, The Netherlands – See the full schedule of events happening Oct 2 – 3, 2018 and explore the directory of Speakers & Attendees.

Sessions I could archive, or find recordings of:

--jeroen

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Posted in .NET, .NET Standard, ASP.NET, Conferences, Development, Event, Software Development | Leave a Comment »

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