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

1984 RULES OF NETNEWS DEBATING at We are ALL Rich Rosen…

Posted by jpluimers on 2026/08/06

A while ago, I got reminded of the [Source:/Archive] 1984 RULES OF NETNEWS DEBATING at We are ALL Rich Rosen… that was posted in Newsgroups: net.flame, net.jokes (which had many ROT13 jokes) back more than 40 years ago by the (in)famous – depending on your point of view – Rich Rosen on his site [Wayback/Archive] neurozen.com – Rich Rosen’s web site (which is in a subfolder, I think because of humour, see [Wayback/Archive] Apache Tomcat/7.0.62 – Error report – this Apache Tomcat version 7 is has been end-of-life since the end of March 2021 :).

I regard is as both fun and insightful, fun for instance as all rules are rated “RULE #1”, and insightful for instance as this is a great quote for on a T-shirt:

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Posted in BITNET Relay, Chat, Development, DuckDuckGo, eMail, Fun, gist, GitHub, Google, GoogleSearch, History, Internet, Java, Java Platform, Meme, Power User, Quotes, SearchEngines, SocialMedia, Software Development, Tomcat | Leave a Comment »

memory spy by b0rk (Julia Evans): visualise how C how variables are represented in memory

Posted by jpluimers on 2026/08/06

[Wayback/Archive] memory spy

It is universal for most other programming languages too as explained in [Wayback/Archive] New playground: memory spy

why is it useful to look at C?

You might be wondering – I don’t write C! Why should I care how C programs represent variables in memory?
In this playground I’m mostly interested in showing people how integers and floats are represented. And low-level languages generally all represent integers and floats in the same way – a 32-bit unsigned int is going to be the same in C, C++, Rust, Go, Swift, etc. The exact name of the type is different, but the representation is the same.
In higher-level languages like Python it’s a little different, but under the hood a float in Python contains a C double, so the C representation is still pretty relevant.

Via

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Posted in C, Conference Topics, Conferences, Development, Event, Software Development | Leave a Comment »

Windows XP activation algorithm cracked, keygen updated • The Register

Posted by jpluimers on 2026/08/05

20260805: edits as since scheduling, some links suffered link rot and a new tool appeared.

For my link archive because – for offline usage – sometimes Windows XP is still useful to run tools that have never been made compatible with less ancient hardware/software combinations.

The xp_activate32.exe mentioned below emulates the phone-activation response and is the important bit for me as I can re-use existing Windows XP license keys that I already have.

The WindowsXPKg generates new Windows XP license keys.

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Posted in C, C++, Development, Power User, Software Development, Windows, Windows Development, Windows XP | Leave a Comment »

UNIX V4 tape successfully recovered

Posted by jpluimers on 2026/08/04

I forgot to schedule this post, but it was great news: a 50+ year old Unix V4 tape that was discovered in November 25 and digitally restored in December 25.

This was a big step forward in restoring the History of Unix.

There was a lot of coverage, but I think this thread was was the coolest part. It starts at [Wayback/Archive] Rob Ricci: “While cleaning a storage room,…” – discuss.systems.

An archive of the tape is now at for instance UNIX V4 tape from University of Utah (raw) : Computer History Museum : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive.

Not just the tape was found back, also the 1974 letter accompanying it: Letter to Martin Newell on UNIX delivery to University of Utah : Ken Thompson : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive.

If you want to play around with it yourself, then try [Wayback/Archive] UNIX v4 (1973) – Vintage Terminals (which I found through the thread I mentioned above).

Two of the many articles that covered the recovery (pun intended):

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Posted in *nix, C, Development, History, Power User, Retrocomputing, Software Development, Unix | Leave a Comment »

No, the Delphi IfThen functions do perform do lazy evaluation

Posted by jpluimers on 2026/07/30

Ever since introduction of the IfThen functions introduced in Delphi Delphi 2007 in both the Math and StrUtils units (see WayBack radstudio2007 HUpdate4 EN delphivclwin32.pdf ¹), I have been telling people that these do not perform lazy evaluation of the then and else parts which the if/then/else statement provides.

The newly introduced if/then/else ternary conditional operator in Delphi 13 ² (of which I am not a fan, not even of the generic workaround³) – despite the unlucky number – luckily also provides lazy evaluation of the then and else parts.

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Posted in Conference Topics, Conferences, Delphi, Development, Event, Software Development | Leave a Comment »

GitHub – yoeo/guesslang: Detect the programming language of a source code

Posted by jpluimers on 2026/07/29

I wanted to detect the programming language of some code I wasn’t sure what it was written in.

A quick search found [Wayback/Archive] GitHub – yoeo/guesslang: Detect the programming language of a source code

Apps powered by Guesslang

 

Microsoft Visual Studio Code, automatic language detection

That was cool, as I always have vscode installed.

Query: [Wayback/Archive] detect programming language of source code at DuckDuckGo

--jeroen

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

Sketchplanations on Twitter: “The curb-cut effect: when we design for disabilities we make things better for everyone. From Angela Glover Blackwell at @policylink”

Posted by jpluimers on 2026/07/29

So true in any line of work (especially web applications!):

[Wayback/Archive] Sketchplanations on Twitter: “The curb-cut effect: when we design for disabilities we make things better for everyone. From Angela Glover Blackwell at @policylink”

Image ID: The curb-cut effect: A range of people of all ages next to a crossing, road, and park show how the curb cut design for disabilities benefits everyone

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Posted in accessibility (a11y), Development, Software Development, User Experience (ux) | Leave a Comment »

PowerShell Get-WinEvent XML Madness: Getting details from event logs – Ashley McGlone – disappeared from blogs.technet.microsoft.com

Posted by jpluimers on 2026/07/28

This post originally appeared on [Wayback/Archive] PowerShell Get-WinEvent XML Madness: Getting details from event logs – GoateePFE – Archived, but due to link rot got lost including the images. I restored this post from the Wayback Machine archived version including the comments so the content gets re-indexed in search engines as this was one of the few posts detailing how to filter and extract XML from Windows Event logs using PowerShell.

I needed this content for a future blog post that is going to appear in a day or so: Some links on getting the most recent defragmentation time of a Windows volume

Queries:

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Posted in .NET, CommandLine, Development, Power User, PowerShell, PowerShell, Scripting, Software Development, Windows | Tagged: | Leave a Comment »

GitHub – Botspot/bvm: Windows 11 Virtual Machine on ARM Linux

Posted by jpluimers on 2026/07/27

This is way easier than I thought (but you need Raspberry Pi 5 or it will be dead slow on earlier models): [Wayback/Archive] GitHub – Botspot/bvm: Windows 11 Virtual Machine on ARM Linux

And yes, there are other write-ups for doing this, but this repository is so much easier and reliable than the others.

Did not test it outside of Raspbian yet, so not sure on which other distributions it runs. It will likely run on more plainDebian, but my guess is that Fedora, Ubuntu, OpenSuSE and others will be out.

Oh: better use NVMe instead of MicroSD for speed too.

Via:

--jeroen

Posted in *nix, *nix-tools, bash, CommandLine, Development, Power User, PowerShell, Scripting, sh, Sh Shell, Windows, Windows 11 | Leave a Comment »

“You need to learn to delegate” … That’s not always easy due to a variety of situations out of one’s control : @hhariri on Thread Reader App

Posted by jpluimers on 2026/07/24

A year ago, Hadi Hariri wrote this very important Tweet which I preserved through [Wayback/Archive] Thread Reader App because the Space Karen hates the Wayback Machine so much that it still can’t archive tweets ¹:

[Wayback/Archive] Thread by @hhariri on Thread Reader App

“You need to learn to delegate”

Learning to delegate is not that hard. Delegating, and doing it successfully on the other hand, requires having the right people to delegate to.

That’s not always easy due to a variety of situations out of one’s control.

Luckily, Archive.is can still archive Tweets, so here is the original one: [WaybackSave/Archive] Hadi Hariri on X: “”You need to learn to delegate” Learning to delegate is not that hard. Delegating, and doing it successfully on the other hand, requires having the right people to delegate to. That’s not always easy due to a variety of situations out of one’s control.”

 

Anyway, I responded with my story, which I archived too, but this time because Twitter does not allow viewing threads as an anonymous user since 2021: [Wayback/Archive] Twitter won’t show complete threads now without an account. :( Twitter accounts … | Hacker News.

My story [Wayback/Archive] Thread by @jpluimers on Thread Reader App

@hhariri Especially when explaining what and how to a delegatee is taking more time/energy/effort than doing it yourself.

Still training the new internal care of my brother. Costs less energy than last year, but back then the old “ambulant” care took 2 hours and then “it was OK”.

@hhariri Weekly I try to figure out what happened then hours re-explaining “treat him like he is: mentally a 3 year old with autism in a full grown body that seems to speak Dutch very well, but does not really understand what he says. So what he says is different from what he wants/needs”

@hhariri And for “normal work”, the life long job is to keep explaining that doing things right the first time saves a lot of effort.

@hhariri And yes, there is hindsight when at the time you did things, you didn’t know there was or would become a better way, or that the current situation changed.

Those are valid reasons for redoing things later, but not valid reasons for not even trying to do it right the first time.

In case you have a Twitter account, you can find the thread start at [WaybackSave/Archive] Jeroen Wiert Pluimers @wiert@mastodon.social on X: “@hhariri Especially when explaining what and how to a delegatee is taking more time/energy/effort than doing it yourself. Still training the new internal care of my brother. Costs less energy than last year, but back then the old “ambulant” care took 2 hours and then “it was OK”.”

--jeroen

¹ sometimes it archives something of the tweet, in this case the [Wayback/Archive] Tweet JSON which you normally would get through the Twitter CDN like [Wayback/Archive] Tweet JSON (I wrote about creating a JavaScript Bookmarklet for this method in Probably many more like these are needed to download Twitter videos: [extractor/twitter] Fix unauthenticated extraction by bashonly · Pull Request #7476 · yt-dlp/yt-dlp).

Posted in About, Awareness, Bookmarklet, Development, JavaScript/ECMAScript, LifeHacker, Personal, Power User, Scripting, Software Development, Web Browsers | Tagged: | Leave a Comment »