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 ‘Development’ Category

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Delphi TVirtualMethodInterceptor like magic: some links of useful stuff made with it

Posted by jpluimers on 2021/01/13

I think TVirtualMethodInterceptor is a really nice things added to Delphi XE: it allows you to overwrite virtual methods of a class.

Since the documentation from that era cannot be saved in the WayBack machine, here is some more recent documentation:

Over the years, the underlying RTTI has been improved, so it can now do more than in the past, but is still cumbersome to use, see for instance [WayBack] tutorial script delphi Changing component class at run-time on demand – CODE Q&A Solved and [WayBack] TVirtualMethodInterceptor (Delphi) – RAD Studio Code Examples and [WayBack] Entropy Overload: Virtual method interception and [WayBack] Playing around with TVirtualMethodInterceptor | Delphi Haven with TVirtualMethodLogger.

Luckily there are more powerful alternatives based on the same ideas and/or underlying implementationIn fact, it can do so much for instance on the Spring4D and DSharp frameworks.

A demo is at [WayBack] Delphi sorcery: Pimp your unit tests using mock objects or [WayBack] Delphi sorcery: AOP and duck typing in Delphi.

The demo of the mocking framework was at code.google.com/archive/p/delphisorcery, but now is part of bitbucket.org/sglienke/dsharp at bitbucket.org/sglienke/dsharp/src/master/Source/Testing.

Some relevant directories:

Basically it is a playground for the more often updated and stable Spring4D where these directories and files are relevant:

–jeroen

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

Not all language packs are created equal… 

Posted by jpluimers on 2021/01/12

[WayBack] Why don’t I get properly translated program output after installing the corresponding language pack? – The Old New Thing.

It means you cannot fully cover all translations when writing software.

More on translating your software at [WayBack] Where can I get the glossary of Microsoft’s standard translations for computer terms? – The Old New Thing « The Wiert Corner – irregular stream of stuff.

–jeroen

Posted in Development, Software Development, The Old New Thing, Windows Development | Leave a Comment »

TODO: if weerslag hasn’t supported https yet, dig deeper into ProxyPass / ProxyPassReverse

Posted by jpluimers on 2021/01/12

I’ve this page for my brother: https://martijn.pluimers.com/agenda-month-weather.html.

It serves his agenda plus a few weather widgets.

The weerslag widget fails to load as it’s in an iframe pointing to http but the page is https. That’s not allowed as shown in this nice table at [WayBack] ssl – Insecure content in iframe on secure page – Stack Overflow by amol-ghotankar and richard:

page  - iframe - status
----- - -----  - -----------
http  - http   - allowed
http  - https  - allowed
https - http   - not allowed
https - https  - allowed

So I put it behind a simple Apache reverse proxy: https://www.pluimers.com/maps.weerslag.nl/GratisRadar/1201/864/verwacht?zoom=10:


<Location /maps.weerslag.nl>
ProxyPass http://maps.weerslag.nl
ProxyPassReverse http://maps.weerslag.nl
Require all granted
</Location>

view raw

maps.weerslag.nl.conf

hosted with ❤ by GitHub

If they still haven’t fixed their https access, I need to dig deeper into this.

When writing this [Arhive.is] https://maps.weerslag.nl/GratisRadar/1201/864/verwacht?zoom=10 gave a 404 and http://maps.weerslag.nl/GratisRadar/1201/864/verwacht?zoom=10 misbehaved behind the proxy:

–jeroen

Posted in *nix, Apache2, Development, Power User, Web Development | Leave a Comment »

Debugging a Delphi – Format and Pointers/Hex Values (Memory Overwrite) – Stack Overflow

Posted by jpluimers on 2021/01/12

A long time ago (Delphi XE2 era), David Dubois and I helped out Doug find either the cause or a workaround of a memory overwrite in a 32-bit application.

The problem was that a call to Format for a pointe or hex value would give corrupt results, but with a regular integer value it would succeed.

Doug created an example [WayBack] overwriting some memory to simulate the problem.

I provided some steps [WayBack] to help trace such cases down.

In the and a rebuild – first withut madExcept, later with madExcept turned on again – solved the problem.

Likely this was the Delphi IDE becoming corrupt, something which I have seen intermittently over the last two decades.

Be sure to read both answers at [WayBack] delphi – Format and Pointers/Hex Values (Memory Overwrite) – Stack Overflow

–jeroen

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

🔎Julia Evans🔍 on Twitter: “ssh tips… “

Posted by jpluimers on 2021/01/08

Great work by [WayBack]  🔎Julia Evans🔍 on Twitter: “ssh tips… “

[WayBack] ssh tips JPG

Via:

Some more tips:

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in *nix, *nix-tools, Communications Development, Development, Internet protocol suite, Power User, SSH, ssh/sshd | Leave a Comment »

Roderick Gadellaa on Twitter: simple app that (re)sets the volume of the TV to 8% of the max volume every time you turn it on.

Posted by jpluimers on 2021/01/08

[WayBack] Roderick Gadellaa on Twitter: “In case anyone who owns an Android TV is interested: I’ve built a (very, very) simple app that (re)sets the volume of the TV to 8% of the max volume every time you turn it on.  #androidtv #tools…”

[WayBack] Roderick Gadellaa on Twitter: “Some instructions: – You have to sideload it (google is your friend: “how to sideload app on android tv”) – You have to start the app once. It won’t show up on Home, so go to Settings > Apps > TvVolsetr > Open – Android TV 7.0 Nougat or higher required”

[WayBack] Roderick Gadellaa auf Twitter: “Some instructions: – You have to sideload it https://t.co/8aK0bmXXFl – You have to start the app once. It won’t show up on Home, so go to Settings > Apps > TvVolsetr > Open – Android TV 7.0 Nougat or higher required”

Follow only the images links from [Archive.is] “how to sideload app on android tv” – Google Search, as the others point to phishing sites.

This image link for instance is useful: [WayBack] How to Sideload Apps on Android TV: Android TV is an excellent product for anyone who wants to expand their current living room setup—it makes easy work of streaming most content, has a slew of games (that are actually worth playing), and is relatively inexpensive. But what happens when an app you want on your TV isn’t available for your device?

Download: [WayBack] tvVolsetr.apk

–jeroen

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Posted in Android, Android Devices, Mobile Development, Power User, Software Development | Leave a Comment »

Why a study with only 7 respondents can be good – from Dutch paper “De Volkskrant”

Posted by jpluimers on 2021/01/07

[Archive.is] Waarom een onderzoek met maar 7 respondenten toch goed kan zijn | De Volkskrant: Denkfouten in het hedendaags ontwerp gefileerd door innovatie-expert (en cabaretier) Jasper van Kuijk. Deze week: gebruikstest.

Google translated in English.

TL;DR

Quantitative studies often require large numbers of respondents, but quantitative studies can be done with a very small group.

While quantitative studies often will get you just one result (I rate this application a 7 out of 10, or with this A/B change, click through increases by 5%), qualitative studies will get you much more specific comments like “the main menu is cluttered”, or “the design is slick” (translated from the Image in the article).

Extensive research was done for a 2003 published paper [Archive.is] Beyond the five-user assumption: Benefits of increased sample sizes in usability testing which you can read as PDF [WayBack].

Via

[WayBack] Jasper van Kuijk on Twitter: “Mijn ‘Hoe moeilijk kan het zijn?’ van vandaag. Waarom voor gebruiksgemak een gebruikstest met 7 participanten nuttiger is dan een enquête met 1500 respondenten. #HMKHZ via de @volkskrant”

Related

[WayBack] Ionica Smeets on Twitter: “Hear, hear! Aldus een wiskundige die heel wat jaren nodig had om waarde van kwalitatief onderzoek in te zien…”

and

and

–jeroen

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Posted in Development, Software Development, Testing, Usability, User Experience (ux) | Leave a Comment »

Named Pipes unit for Delphi | Mick’s Mix

Posted by jpluimers on 2021/01/07

[WayBack] Named Pipes unit for Delphi | Mick’s Mix  by Russell Libby, for which (Apr 7, 2013) Francoise Piette has updated this source code for Delphi XE3 and put it on his website at [WayBack] OverByte – Blog Source Code as [WayBack] IpcUsingPipes.zip.

–jeroen

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

Automating the closing of the Creative Cloud signing and ABBY FindReader for ScanSnap 5.0 dialogs

Posted by jpluimers on 2021/01/06

Every time my scan VM logs on I get the dialog on the right.

Every time I finish an OCR scan, I get the dialog below.

There are two reasons I want to close the ABBY dialog:

  1. While open, it will keep both the original PDF and OCR PDF files alive.When after a while, Windows updates auto-reboots the machine, before clicking the OK buttons I have to manually check if the conversion succeeded before removing the non-OCR PDF.This is time consuming.
  2. While open, it still consumes a lot of system resources: about 100 megabyte for a simple single monochrome A4 page. Much more for complex, multi-page or colour documents.When scanning a lot of document this causes the system to run out of memory, after becoming much much slower because the truckload of Window handles and underlying threads drags Windows down.

I do not want to fully get rid of these dialogs, as often being aware of the progress is important, and I always forget how to re-enable things. If you can do without the dialogs, then try these:

Finding the Windows and controls

I did use one nice feature of AutoHotKey: their Windows Spy utility, which is implemented as a AHK script: [WayBack] AutoHotKey-scripts/WindowSpy.ahk at master · elig0n/AutoHotKey-scripts · GitHub. In the past this was a separate executable, so do not start looking for that any more. You can get it either after a full install of the [WayBack] Releases · Lexikos/AutoHotkey_L · GitHub, or by extracting from the most current AutoHotKey.zip from [Archive.is] AutoHotkey Downloads.

Related:

This gets these for the Create Cloud and ABBY windows:

Automating the click

I contemplated about using AutoIt (freeware, but closed source) or AutoHotKey_L (the current active fork of AutoHotKey).

AutoIt is now closed source, forked in the past as AutoHotKey, which has a lot of half backed – usually poorly documented – scripts needing you to learn a new API wrapper around existing Windows API functionality.

So I reverted back to using the Windows API using Delphi: a simple repeat loop, to check for the existence of the underlying processes, windows and controls, plus some logic to terminate then the user stops the application (Ctrl-C, Ctrl-Break), logs off, or Windows shuts down.

Releated Windows API  keywords and posts:

 

I could have used AutoHotKey with these hints to get it working:

MacOS

Note that when you run on MacOS, you need an alternative like for instance the video below shows via [WayBack] Stop ScanSnap From Prompting You When You Scan.

–jeroen

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Development, Fujitsu ScanSnap, Hardware, ix100, ix500, Power User, Scanners, Scripting, Software Development, Windows, Windows 10, Windows 8.1 | Leave a Comment »

Batch files: deleting first/middle/ending parts of environment variables

Posted by jpluimers on 2021/01/06

Batch files are often a pain to write, but you cannot always rewrite them in PowerShell.

The pain below is about deleting parts of environment variables in batch files.

I’ll just redirect to and quote from posts that can way better describe this than I do:

  • [WayBack] Check if Batch variable starts with “…” – Stack Overflow made me find
  • [WayBack] windows – Batch – Delete Characters in a String – Super User
  • [WayBack] CMD Variable edit replace – Windows CMD – SS64.com

    The variable _test containing 12345abcabc is used for all the following examples:

    ::Replace '12345' with 'Hello '
   SET _test=12345abcabc
   SET _result=%_test:12345=Hello %
   ECHO %_result%          =Hello abcabc

::Replace the character string 'ab' with 'xy'
   SET _test=12345abcabc
   SET _result=%_test:ab=xy%
   ECHO %_result%          =12345xycxyc

::Delete the character string 'ab'
   SET _test=12345abcabc
   SET _result=%_test:ab=%
   ECHO %_result%          =12345cc

::Delete the character string 'ab' and everything before it
   SET _test=12345abcabc
   SET _result=%_test:*ab=% 
   ECHO %_result%          =cabc

::Replace the character string 'ab' and everything before it with 'XY'
   SET _test=12345abcabc
   SET _result=%_test:*ab=XY% 
   ECHO %_result%          =XYcabc


:: To remove characters from the right hand side of a string is 
:: a two step process and requires the use of a CALL statement
:: e.g.

   SET _test=The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog

   :: To delete everything after the string 'brown'  
   :: first delete 'brown' and everything before it
   SET _endbit=%_test:*brown=%
   Echo We dont want: [%_endbit%]

   ::Now remove this from the original string
   CALL SET _result=%%_test:%_endbit%=%%
   echo %_result%

    All the examples on this page assume the default Expansion of variables, if you are using DelayedExpansion then you can choose to change the variable references to !_variable! instead of %_variable%

    One advantage of DelayedExpansion is that it will allow you to replace the % character, it will still have to be escaped as %% but the replace action will then treat it like any other character:

    Replace the letter P with a percent symbol:
    Setlocal EnableDelayedExpansion
    _demo=somePdemoPtextP
    _demo=!_demo:P=%%!

    Remove spaces from a text string

    To delete space characters use the same syntax as above:

    SET _no_spaces=%_some_var: =%

–jeroen

Posted in Batch-Files, Development, Scripting, Software Development | Leave a Comment »

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