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 ‘Encoding’ Category

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I learned: MacOS has a Unicode Hex Input keyboard

Posted by jpluimers on 2023/05/25

A while ago, I learned that MacOS has had a Unicode Hex Input keyboard since ages.

It is not installed by default, so you have to manually add it:

  1. Start the System Preferences.app
  2. Open the Keyboard icon
  3. Choose the Input Sources tab
  4. Click the plus (+) icon
  5. Search for Unicode or Hex to get so Unicode Hex Input is the only entry in the list
  6. Click the Add  button
  7. Choose the Keyboard tab
  8. Enable Show keyboard and emoji viewers in menu bar

Now in the menu bar, you can select the Unicode Hex Input.

After that, when holding the Option key, any 4-digit Unicode sequence will get you a Unicode character.

Read the rest of this entry »

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

Berlin Typography on Twitter: “The best of #TypeInBerlin: The tʒ and ſʒ ligatures, together at last.” / Güntʒelstraſʒe == Güntzelstraße

Posted by jpluimers on 2023/04/17

Learned a new thing a while ago: I knew about the ſʒ ligature (that nowadays usually is written as ß), but the tʒ ligature was new to me.

So: Güntʒelstraſʒe == Güntzelstraße.

References:

Source: [Archive.is] Berlin Typography on Twitter: “The best of #TypeInBerlin: The tʒ and ſʒ ligatures, together at last. …” / Twitter

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Development, Encoding, LifeHacker, Power User, Software Development, Unicode | Leave a Comment »

A while ago I bumped into some GPI Mojibake examples, but soon found out I should use the ftfy test cases

Posted by jpluimers on 2022/11/22

I have been into more and more Mojibake example pages like [Wayback] Mojibake: Question Marks, Strange Characters and Other Issues | GPI

Have you ever found strange characters like these ���  when viewing content in applications or websites in other languages?

They made me realise that all these (including the Mojibake examples on my blog) are just artifacts, but the real list of examples is the set of ftfy test cases at [Wayback/Archive.is] python-ftfy/test_cases.json at master · LuminosoInsight/python-ftfy

I got reminded when Waternet moved from paper mail using “Pyreneeën” to email using “Pyreneeën“. Not as bad as Waterschap AGV did earlier: they took it one level further and made “Pyreneeën” out of it, see Last year, a classic Mojibake was introduced when Waterschap Amstel, Gooi en Vecht redesigned their IT systems.

This seems like a trend where newer systems perform worse than older systems. I wonder why that is.

BTW: the trick on the [Wayback/Archive] Python.org shell to run ftfy (which is not installed by default) is first dropping to the shell (see my post How do I drop a bash shell from within Python? – Stack Overflow), then starting python again:

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in CP850, Development, Encoding, ftfy, ISO-8859, Mojibake, Python, Scripting, Software Development, Unicode, UTF-8, UTF8 | Leave a Comment »

History of ASCII Art

Posted by jpluimers on 2022/09/01

Geocities is long dead, but luckily a lot has been archived: [Wayback] Archive.is: History of ASCII Art with a very comprehensive history ranging from ancient old hand painted art to contemporary computer made illustrations.

Via: [Wayback/Archive.is] ASCII art: The roots of ASCII art

–jeroen

Posted in ASCII, Development, Encoding, History, Power User, Software Development | Leave a Comment »

Hardware MAC address formats (which I need for Wake-on-LAN.ps1)

Posted by jpluimers on 2022/07/06

Early june, I blogged about Wake-on-LAN from a Windows machine.

My plan was to adopt [Wayback/Archive.is] Wake.ps1 into Wake-on-LAN.ps1 (as naming is important).

One of the goals was to support multiple hardware MAC address formats, especially as Wake.ps1 had the below comment, but did support the AA-BB-CC-DD-EE-FF, though not the AA:BB:CC:DD:EE:FF hardware MAC address format:

<#
...
.NOTES
Make sure the MAC addresses supplied don't contain "-" or ".".
#>

A colon separated hardware MAC address would result in this error inside the call to the [Wayback/Archive.is] PhysicalAddress.Parse Method (System.Net.NetworkInformation) | Microsoft Docs:

Send-Packet : Exception calling "Parse" with "1" argument(s): "An invalid physical address was specified."

So I did some digging, starting inside the above mentioned blog post, and adding more:

  1. Wake.ps1 uses the [Wayback/Archive.is] Parse method in the [Wayback/Archive.is] PhysicalAddress.cs source code in C# .NET,  which contains code like this:
                //has dashes? 
            if (address.IndexOf('-') >= 0 ){ 
                hasDashes = true;
                buffer = new byte[(address.Length+1)/3]; 
            }
  2. The Perl script at [Wayback/Archive.is] wakeonlan/wakeonlan at master · jpoliv/wakeonlan that started my first blog post in this series which mentions:
    • xx:xx:xx:xx:xx:xx (canonical)
    • xx-xx-xx-xx-xx-xx (Windows)
    • xxxxxx-xxxxxx (Hewlett-Packard switches)
    • xxxxxxxxxxxx (Intel Landesk)

    I should rename the first one IEEE 802, as per this:

  3. The MAC address: Notational conventions – Wikipedia

    The standard (IEEE 802) format for printing EUI-48 addresses in human-friendly form is six groups of two hexadecimal digits, separated by hyphens (-) in transmission order (e.g. 01-23-45-67-89-AB). This form is also commonly used for EUI-64 (e.g. 01-23-45-67-89-AB-CD-EF).[2] Other conventions include six groups of two hexadecimal digits separated by colons (:) (e.g. 01:23:45:67:89:AB), and three groups of four hexadecimal digits separated by dots (.) (e.g. 0123.4567.89AB); again in transmission order.[30]

    The latter is used by Cisco (see for instance [Wayback/Archive.is] Cisco DCNM Security Configuration Guide, Release 4.0 – Configuring MAC ACLs [Support] – Cisco and [Wayback/Archive.is] Cisco IOS LAN Switching Command Reference – mac address-group through revision [Support] – Cisco), so another format to add:

    • xxxx.xxxx.xxxx (Cisco)
  4. [Wayback/Archive.is] PhysicalAddress.Parse Method (System.Net.NetworkInformation) | Microsoft Docs remarks:

    The address parameter must contain a string that can only consist of numbers and letters as hexadecimal digits. Some examples of string formats that are acceptable are as follows:

    • 001122334455
    • 00-11-22-33-44-55
    • 0011.2233.4455
    • 00:11:22:33:44:55
    • F0-E1-D2-C3-B4-A5
    • f0-e1-d2-c3-b4-a5

    Use the GetAddressBytes method to retrieve the address from an existing PhysicalAddress instance.

  5. After a bit more digging via [Wayback/Archive.is] “three groups of four hexadecimal digits separated by dots” – Google Search , I found that even more hardware MAC address formats are in use as per [Wayback/Archive.is] What are the various standard and industry practice ways to express a 48-bit MAC address? – Network Engineering Stack Exchange.

    I really do not have all the sources for the various representations for 48-bit MAC addresses, but I have seen them variously used:

    AA-BB-CC-DD-EE-FF
AA.BB.CC.DD.EE.FF
AA:BB:CC:DD:EE:FF
AAA-BBB-CCC-DDD
AAA.BBB.CCC.DDD
AAA:BBB:CCC:DDD
AAAA-BBBB-CCCC
AAAA.BBBB.CCCC
AAAA:BBBB:CCCC
AAAAAA-BBBBBB
AAAAAA.BBBBBB
AAAAAA:BBBBBB

From the last list, which is far more complete than the others, I recognise quite a few from tools I used in the past, but too forgot the actual sources, so I took the full list from there and tried to name them in parenthesis after the links I found above and what I remembered:

  • AABBCCDDEEFF (Bare / Landesk)
  • AA-BB-CC-DD-EE-FF (IEEE 802 / Windows)
  • AA.BB.CC.DD.EE.FF (???)
  • AA:BB:CC:DD:EE:FF (Linux / BSD / MacOS)
  • AAA-BBB-CCC-DDD (???)
  • AAA.BBB.CCC.DDD (Cisco?)
  • AAA:BBB:CCC:DDD (???)
  • AAAA-BBBB-CCCC (???)
  • AAAA.BBBB.CCCC (Cisco / Brocade)
  • AAAA:BBBB:CCCC (???)
  • AAAAAA-BBBBBB (Hewlett-Packard networking)
  • AAAAAA.BBBBBB (???)
  • AAAAAA:BBBBBB (???)

Some additional links in addition to the ones above:

–jeroen

Posted in .NET, CommandLine, Development, Encoding, HEX encoding, Network-and-equipment, Power User, PowerShell, PowerShell, Scripting, Software Development | Leave a Comment »

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