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

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Some notes on testing locally modified chocolatey packages

Posted by jpluimers on 2025/08/01

A few notes after I helped updating [Wayback/Archive] Chocolatey Software | SetACL (Portable) 3.0.6.0 to version 3.1.2.0 and [Wayback/Archive] Updates glab from 1.22.0 to 1.24.1; fixes #2 by jpluimers · Pull Request #3 · corbob/ChocoPackages.

As the burden on maintainers (not just Chocolatey ones) is high, not all packages get updated soon after new underlying software versions arrive.

Which means the maintainers are often very happy when an occasional user helps and preferably sends in a pull request.

That brings me to the an important point IN DOCUMENTATION DO NOT LIMIT EXAMPELS TO ONLY ABBREVIATED PARAMETERS OR VERBS as that scares away occasional and novice users of your software.

Chocolatey documentation is no exception on this, hence this blog post meant for people other than maintaining chocolatey packages on a day to day base.

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Posted in CertUtil, Chocolatey, CommandLine, Conference Topics, Conferences, Development, Event, Power User, PowerShell, PowerShell, Scripting, Software Development, Windows | Tagged: , , , , | Leave a Comment »

command line – Why does a cURL request return a percent sign (%) with every request in ZSH? – Stack Overflow

Posted by jpluimers on 2025/07/31

I try to stay on the default shells of environments as much as possible, especially as that makes life easier when needing to work on an non-customised system.

Apple switched back from an ancient latest GPLv2 version 3.2 of bash (they regard newer GPLv3 as toxic to their revenue stream¹), introduced MIT-license based zsh and introduced a bash nag screen a few years ago forcing users to switch. Suppressing that message reliably is trickier than you might think².

After so many years of bash, I still stumble over things that zsh does differently: [Wayback/Archive] command line – Why does a cURL request return a percent sign (%) with every request in ZSH? – Stack Overflow (thanks [Wayback/Archive] Travis and [Wayback/Archive] zaTricky) is a “feature” with a simple workaround for cURL:

This is a zsh feature that prints a percent-and-newline after a command completes if that command does not already include a newline at the end of its output. If zsh did not do this, you would either not ever notice the fact that the command didn’t print a newline – or you’d see zsh’s command prompt not start on the margin and think it was a bug in zsh.

…

$ curl http://api.macvendors.com/0015c7   
Cisco Systems, Inc%     
$ curl -w '\n' http://api.macvendors.com/0015c7
Cisco Systems, Inc

…

Since the above example now writes a redirect messages (good bye HTTP, welcome HTTPS), and I very much dislike short command-line parameters, here is version with the long form of the [Wayback/Archive] curl -w or --write-out parameter :

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in *nix, *nix-tools, Apple, bash, bash, Development, Mac OS X / OS X / MacOS, macOS 14 Sonoma, macOS 15 Sequoia, Power User, Scripting, Software Development, zsh | Leave a Comment »

Kevlin Henney on “configuration is code” in his essay “Out of Control. An essay on paradigms, refactoring…”

Posted by jpluimers on 2025/07/31

For my link archive [Wayback/Archive] Out of Control. An essay on paradigms, refactoring… | by Kevlin Henney | Dec, 2020 | Medium.

Neither because Kevlin describes how to refactor a basic algorithm to convert Roman numerals into Hindu-Arabic numerals (in part by using the fact that an if statement can be considered a bounded case of a while loop), nor because he splits the resulting algorithm in coded data and coded statements, or because he mentions the [Wayback/Archive] Gilded Rose Kata but because well, you should just read it in full.

Remember though: Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Configuration Management, Development, DevOps, Power User, Python, Scripting, Software Development | Leave a Comment »

Not just for Delphi, but any environment: Why You Should Use NowUTC Instead of Now in Delphi: A Quick Guide

Posted by jpluimers on 2025/07/30

The video is from a while back, but very relevant and shows in Delphi what I have been advocating to software developers for a very long time:

  • when timestamping use UTC
  • when storing the timestamp store both the UTC timestamp and optionally the UTC timezone/offset and optionally daylight saving indicator of the region it was recorded from

This holds for any environment, so .NET / C#, Python, Delphi and many others as well:

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Conferences, Delphi, Development, EKON, Event | Leave a Comment »

From @forrestbrazeal: Boilerplate code through ChatGPT or Google slows development teams down similar to technical debt

Posted by jpluimers on 2025/07/30

Via [Wayback/Archive] Angie Jones on Twitter: “Chart by Forrest Brazeal” I found the original at [Wayback/Archive] Forrest Brazeal on Twitter: “Just saying. “ Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in AI and ML; Artificial Intelligence & Machine Learning, Conference Topics, Conferences, Development, Event, Software Development, Technical Debt | Leave a Comment »

PowerShell: playing around with Get-PnpDevice filtering with -Class and -Status

Posted by jpluimers on 2025/07/29

I while ago I was playing around in PowerShell with Get-PnpDevice (which got introduced in Windows 10 and Windows Server 2019):

[Wayback/Archive] Jeroen Wiert Pluimers: “@jilles_com … this is the difference between only connected disks versus including ones that had been connected in the past.Output difference between Get-PnpDevice -Class DiskDrive -Status OK Get-PnpDevice -Class DiskDrive …” – Mastodon

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Posted in .NET, Batch-Files, CommandLine, Development, Power User, PowerShell, PowerShell, Scripting, Software Development, Windows, Windows 10, Windows 11 | Leave a Comment »

Discover the Google Cloud Skills Boost annual subscription benefits | Google Cloud Blog

Posted by jpluimers on 2025/07/28

Hopefully by now discounts like this are still available: [Wayback/Archive] Discover the Google Cloud Skills Boost annual subscription benefits | Google Cloud Blog

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Posted in Cloud, Cloud Development, Development, GCP Google Cloud Platform, Infrastructure | Tagged: , | Leave a Comment »

Wakamai Fondue, the tool that answers the question “what can my font do?”

Posted by jpluimers on 2025/07/24

What Can my Font do - beta pageVery cool web site that I only discovered last year, with the clever name: [Wayback/Archive] Wakamai Fondue, the tool that answers the question “what can my font do?”

Drop a font!
Fonts aren’t uploaded,
they stay on your computer

Back then I used it to investigate some properties of SMuFL (Standard Music Font Layout) fonts as sometimes editing a PDF is easier than manually entering/transcribing it in MuseScore.

Of course you can use local font tools, but this is far easier for occasional use.

The beta can do even more at the risk of bumping into bugs: [Wayback/Archive] Wakamai Fondue, the tool that answers the question “what can my font do?”

Note the colour matching of the text around the circle with the fondue background image.

Oh: it is open source too, written mainly in JavaScript, CSS and a tiny bits of HTML and Python, based on Vue.js and npm, and available as parts in the repositories of [Wayback/Archive] Wakamai Fondue · GitHub:

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Posted in CSS, Development, Font, HTML, JavaScript/ECMAScript, npm, Python, Scripting, Software Development, Vue.js, Web Development | Leave a Comment »

Important debugging strategy from b0rk: “after the bug is fixed: write a postmortem”

Posted by jpluimers on 2025/07/24

[Wayback/Archive] Julia Evans on Twitter: “after the bug is fixed: write a postmortem”

title: write a postmortem For very tricky bugs, writing up an explanation of what went wrong and how it was fixed is an amazing way to share knowledge and make sure I really understand it. Ways I've done this in the past: * complain about it in the internal chat! (so people can search for it!) * write a quick explanation in the pull request description * write a fun blog post telling my tale of woe! * for really important work bugs, write a 5-page document with graphs explaining all the weird stuff I learned along the way

–jeroen

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

Overlay of commands / shortcuts / keys pressed – Screencast Mode · Issue #981 · microsoft/PowerToys · GitHub

Posted by jpluimers on 2025/07/23

This is a reminder to check if this below late 2019 proposal inspired by Visual Studio Code Screencast mode¹ already made it: [Wayback/Archive] Overlay of commands / shortcuts / keys pressed – Screencast Mode · Issue #981 · microsoft/PowerToys · GitHub which mentions some tools that can already do this

Here is a list of FOSS apps that currently do this (sorted by stars):

To add to this list (unsorted):

In the meantime, I am using Key-n-Stroke as it is the only still supported one I found that is easily turned off/on when typing sensitive content like passwords:

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in .NET, Development, Keyboards and Keyboard Shortcuts, KVM keyboard/video/mouse, Power User, PowerToys, Software Development, vscode Visual Studio Code, Windows | Tagged: , | Leave a Comment »

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