Posted by jpluimers on 2022/03/16
Last year, Waterschap Amstel, Gooi en Vecht sent me a paper letter notifying the yearly water bill was going to be late as they were redesigning their IT systems.
Their letter introduced a classic Mojibake that had not been present in all their older paper letter communication.
"Pyreneeën":
"Pyreneeën":
Posted in Development, Encoding, ftfy, Mojibake, Python, Software Development, Unicode, UTF-8, UTF8 | Leave a Comment »
Posted by jpluimers on 2022/03/16
Jilles posted a small script to show offline/online status based on ping in [Archive.is] Jilles on Twitter: “#!/bin/bash HOST={1ST HOP HERE} while true;do p=$(ping -c1 $HOST) if [ $? -ne 0 ];then s=offline else s=online\ fi echo $(date +%F\ %T) $s – $(echo $p | sed -e ‘s/^PING.*— 1/1/g’) sleep 10 done”
#!/bin/bash HOST={1ST HOP HERE} while true;do p=$(ping -c1 $HOST) if [ $? -ne 0 ];then s=offline else s=online\ fi echo $(date +%F\ %T) $s - $(echo $p | sed -e 's/^PING.*--- 1/1/g') sleep 10 done
The reason was that his ISP had connection problems for the block of homes where Jilles lives.
–jeroen
Posted in *nix, *nix-tools, bash, bash, Development, grep, Power User, Scripting, sed, Software Development | Leave a Comment »
Posted by jpluimers on 2022/03/15
This is cool: [Wayback] Cryptosense Discovery:
Free tool that discovers security configuration errors in SSH and TLS servers and explains how to fix them. Supports STARTTLS and can also scan HTTPS, POP3, IMAP and SMTP servers.
It gives you a list of servers a target domain uses (for purposes like web, email, etc) that can have external encryption enabled, then allows you to test these.
The list by default has only servers within that target domain enabled, but you can optionally include other servers (for instance if a domain uses a third party for their SMTP handling).
Basically it is the web-counterpart of a tool like testssl.sh (which I have written about before).
Found while checking out how to test the MX security of a domain using [Wayback] testssl.sh as I forgot the syntax, which in retrospect is dead easy as per [Wayback] tls – How to use testssl.sh on an SMTP server? – Information Security Stack Exchange (thanks [Wayback] Z.T.!):
…
testssl.sh --mx <domain name>works fine.
testssl.sh -t smtp <ip>:25and
testssl.sh -t smtp <ip>:587also work fine.
Note that not specifying the port assumes port 443, despite specifying protocol
smtp. That doesn’t work.…
Also, you might try discovery.cryptosense.com which does the same thing only better
That website is made by the cool people at [Wayback] Cryptosense.
Both are a lot easier than the alternatives described in [Wayback] Blog · How to test SMTP servers using the command-line · Halon MTA: using nslookup and dig for determining the affected hosts, using nc or telnet for testing basic connectivity, using [Wayback/Archive.is] openssl s_client to test TLS, and [Wayback/Archive.is] smtpping for measuring throughput.
In addition to the above tools mentioned in the blog, I’ve also used
sendEmail(note case sensitivity),ehlo-size, andswaks.
This is what I tested:
We found these machines for
clientondersteuningplus.nl. Select those you would like to scan:
clientondersteuningplus.nl185.37.70.68localhost.clientondersteuningplus.nl127.0.0.1pop.clientondersteuningplus.nl5.157.84.75These machines are also used by
clientondersteuningplus.nl. They seem to be managed by a third party:…
–jeroen
Posted in *nix, *nix-tools, Awk, bash, bash, Communications Development, Development, DNS, Encryption, grep, HTTPS/TLS security, Internet, Internet protocol suite, Power User, Scripting, Security, SMTP, Software Development, SSH, ssh/sshd, TCP, testssl.sh, TLS | Leave a Comment »
Posted by jpluimers on 2022/03/10
When writing this, [Wayback/Archive.is] ftfy · PyPI:history indicates ftfy was already at 6.0.3.
It is still my goto tool for figuring out the cause of Mojibake. I remember writing about it the first time in 2016 (see the ftfy category) when it was already at version 3.0, discovering it after a few Mojibake posts.
By now it even understands right-to-left Mojibake garbage: 
[Archive.is] Elia Robyn Speer on Twitter: “ftfy 5.8 is out! … A user reported that Hebrew text wasn’t being fixed, and this made me think about how to expand some of the trickier cases to non-Latin alphabets.”
Mojibake mishaps still happen a lot, so by now I hope I will have done a Mojibake themed Delphi talk at one or more conferences.
Posted in !!con (bangbangcon), About, Autistic Spectrum/Autism, Cancer, Conference Topics, Conferences, Development, Encoding, Event, ftfy, Mojibake, Personal, Python, Rectum cancer, Scripting, Software Development, Unicode | Leave a Comment »
Posted by jpluimers on 2022/03/09
Not sure why, but most of my Visual Studio configurations have the “PowerShell: Launch Current File w/Args” debug configuration template. So here is the JSON you need to add in your launch.json configuration file.
{ "type": "PowerShell", "request": "launch", "name": "PowerShell Launch Current File w/Args Prompt", "script": "${file}", "args": [ "${command:SpecifyScriptArgs}" ], "cwd": "${file}" }
The trick is the bold part that prompts Visual Studio for the arguments.
Note: in order to have such a file, you need to have opened a folder in Visual Studio Code first, then open a PowerShell script file from that directory second.
Related:
–jeroen
Posted in .NET, CommandLine, Development, PowerShell, PowerShell, Scripting, Software Development | Leave a Comment »
Posted by jpluimers on 2022/03/09
I needed this for my blog post tomorrow:
import os os.system('sh') # or bash, tcsh, zsh, whatever. :-P
[Wayback] How do I drop a bash shell from within Python? – Stack Overflow
Thanks [Wayback] Chris Jester-Young!
This trick works at the Python shell.
–jeroen
Posted in Development, Python, Scripting, Software Development | Leave a Comment »
Posted by jpluimers on 2022/03/08
The [Wayback/Archive] Embarcadero/IDERA Documentation Wiki has been mostly down since March 3rd, 2022 (not the main page, but almost all other pages are).
I modified [Wayback/Archive] Docwiki https – EmbarcaderoMonitoring to show the actual status of a deeper page as the (mostly static) top page is up, so monitoring that is useless as the deeper pages are down.
The deeper pages are dynamic and require a functioning MySQL database connection. That connection is mostly down (the error message is not clear, so this could be a network or a database server problem, or maybe even a loadbalancer gradually entering bit heaven).
Since it had been down for like 6 days in February*, I’d expect Idera to keep an eye on it and prepare for more downtime. Apparently that’s either not a 24×7 thing for them or they missed the “pre” in preparation as it is dead-silent on .
It also runs on an unsupported version of Mediawiki 1.31** which by itself does not explain the outage, but does indicate that their idea of handling their internal lifetime management is different than what they advocate to clients in their software subscription model, see [Wayback/Archive] Delphi – Embarcadero store, [Wayback/Archive] Update Subscription – Embarcadero and [Wayback/Archive] Special Offers on RAD Studio, Delphi & C++Builder – Embarcadero:
Posted in *nix, Bookmarklet, Delphi, Development, JavaScript/ECMAScript, Lightweight markup language, MediaWiki, Monitoring, Power User, Scripting, SocialMedia, Software Development, Twitter, Uptimerobot, Web Browsers | Leave a Comment »
Posted by jpluimers on 2022/03/03
Cool, I didn’t realise how readlink operated, but found out a bit more in the answers to [Wayback] symlink – How to get full path of original file of a soft symbolic link? – Unix & Linux Stack Exchange, thanks to [Wayback] daisy, [Wayback] Peter.O and [Wayback] Gilles ‘SO- stop being evil’:
- Try this line:
readlink -f `which command`If
commandis in your$PATHvariable , otherwise you need to specify the path you know.
-fwill return a path to a non-existent final target, so long as the intermediate link targets exist… Use-eto avoid this, ie.-ewill return null if the final target does not exist. – Peter.O- Under Linux,
readlinkreads the contents of a symlink, andreadlink -ffollows symlinks to symlinks to symlinks, etc., until it finds something that isn’t a symlink.
–jeroen
Posted in *nix, *nix-tools, ash/dash, bash, bash, Development, Power User, Scripting, Software Development | Leave a Comment »
Posted by jpluimers on 2022/03/03
This is sooooo cool: [Wayback] Git Explorer
GitExplorer: Find the right git commands you need without digging through the web
What I like is the simple clean UI with a two step selection of what git functionality you want to use followed by a simple usage and explanation.
Very well suites for both referencing and interactive learning.
Bonus: it is open source at [Wayback/Archive.is] summitech/gitexplorer: Find the right git commands without digging through the web..
Via: [Archive.is] Marko ⚡ Denic on Twitter: “You can find the right git commands without digging through the web. “
–jeroen
Posted in Development, DVCS - Distributed Version Control, git, GitHub, Software Development, Versioning | Leave a Comment »
Posted by jpluimers on 2022/03/02
This is a follow on the below TomTom HOME complaint: Know where your application should store its data.
I know this can be tough, especially for applications that were developed before Windows Vista came around: that’s when CSIDL were introduced. But still: Windows XP already had %APPDATA% (the environment variable equivalent to CSIDL_APPDATA, it pointed to %USERPROFILE%\\Application Data)
Applications should store data under either of below locations. Values are KNOWNFOLDERID constants with CSIDL constants in parenthesis where available. Some have .NET equivalents in the System.Environment.SpecialFolder enumeration:
FOLDERID_LocalAppData (CSIDL_LOCAL_APPDATA)The file system directory that serves as a data repository for local (nonroaming) applications.
FOLDERID_LocalAppDataLow (n/a)The file system directory that serves as a data repository for local (nonroaming) applications that run under “low integrity” (like in a web browser).
FOLDERID_RoamingAppData (CSIDL_APPDATA)The file system directory that serves as a common repository for application-specific data.
Do not use FOLDERID_Documents (CSIDL_MYDOCUMENTS) as this is specific to user documents, not application data.
The virtual folder that represents the
My Documentsdesktop item. This value is equivalent toCSIDL_PERSONAL.
Basically use FOLDERID_LocalAppData for data that is machine specific and FOLDERID_RoamingAppData for data that should travel to other machines when the user logs on to them.
Be very careful how much you store as potentially roamed data as these can go over slow networks (both low bandwidth and low latency).
Posted in .NET, Development, Software Development, Windows Development | Leave a Comment »
The Wiert Corner - irregular stream of stuff 