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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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use vmrun – via How do I find the IP address of a virtual machine using VMware Fusion? – Super User

Posted by jpluimers on 2017/04/20

Note this works only when the VMs have VMware Tools installed (more on that below):

VMWare provides, not surprisingly, a built in tool for this, vmrun. It’s under /Applications/VMware Fusion.app/Contents/Library/vmrun although it has moved around in other Fusion releases a bit.

🍺 vmrun list Total running VMs: 1 .docker/machine/machines/myvm.vmx
🍺 vmrun getGuestIPAddress ~/.docker/machine/machines/myvm.vmx 172.16.213.128

via: How do I find the IP address of a virtual machine using VMware Fusion? – Super User [WayBack]

vmrun [WayBack] is barely documented and most of is in PDF of which this is the most recent I could find: www.vmware.com/pdf/vix180_vmrun_command.pdf [WayBack]

Based on the above path, I added this to my ~/.bash_profile file:

alias vmrun='/Applications/VMware\ Fusion.app/Contents/Library/vmrun'
alias vmrun-list-running-VMs='vmrun list | grep vmx'
vmrun-list-ipv4-of-running-VMs()
{
  vmrun-list-running-VMs | while read line ; do echo $line && vmrun getGuestIPAddress $line; done
}

Now I can do this:

$ vmrun-list-ipv4-of-running-VMs
/Users/jeroenp/VM/W81Entx64DelphiRegression.vmwarevm/W81Entx64.vmx
172.16.172.135
/Users/jeroenp/VM/diaspore-opensuse-Tumbleweed-x64.vmwarevm/diaspore-opensuse-Tumbleweed-x64.vmx
Error: The VMware Tools are not running in the virtual machine: /Users/jeroenp/VM/diaspore-opensuse-Tumbleweed-x64.vmwarevm/diaspore-opensuse-Tumbleweed-x64.vmx
$ vmrun-list-ipv4-of-running-VMs
/Users/jeroenp/VM/diaspore.opensuse-Tumbleweed-x64/diaspore.opensuse-Tumbleweed-x64.vmx
Error: Unable to get the IP address
/Users/jeroenp/VM/W81Entx64DelphiRegression.vmwarevm/W81Entx64.vmx
172.16.172.135
$ vmrun-list-ipv4-of-running-VMs
/Users/jeroenp/VM/diaspore.opensuse-Tumbleweed-x64/diaspore.opensuse-Tumbleweed-x64.vmx
Error: Unable to get the IP address
/Users/jeroenp/VM/W81Entx64DelphiRegression.vmwarevm/W81Entx64.vmx
172.16.172.135
$ vmrun-list-ipv4-of-running-VMs
/Users/jeroenp/VM/diaspore.opensuse-Tumbleweed-x64/diaspore.opensuse-Tumbleweed-x64.vmx
172.16.172.134
/Users/jeroenp/VM/W81Entx64DelphiRegression.vmwarevm/W81Entx64.vmx
172.16.172.135
$ vmrun-list-ipv4-of-running-VMs
/Users/jeroenp/VM/diaspore.opensuse-Tumbleweed-x64/diaspore.opensuse-Tumbleweed-x64.vmx
172.16.172.134
/Users/jeroenp/VM/W81Entx64DelphiRegression.vmwarevm/W81Entx64.vmx
172.16.172.142

These are the messages I observed:

Error: The VMware Tools are not running in the virtual machine: /Users/jeroenp/VM/diaspore-opensuse-Tumbleweed-x64.vmwarevm/diaspore-opensuse-Tumbleweed-x64.vmx
Error: Unable to get the IP address
172.16.172.135

The first one means a machine is running but has no VMware Tools installed. For an OpenSuSE machine you can install it with zypper install open-vm-tools, for other Linux systems read VMware Tools auf Ubuntu, Mint, CentOS oder openSUSE installieren | ITrig [WayBack]

Some more examples of vmrun for VMware Fusion are at Control VMware Fusion from the Command Line | James Reuben Knowles [WayBack]

–jeroen

Posted in *nix, bash, Development, Fusion, openSuSE, Power User, Scripting, Software Development, SuSE Linux, Tumbleweed, Virtualization, VMware | Leave a Comment »

Dark corners of Unicode / fuzzy notepad

Posted by jpluimers on 2017/04/20

You think you know Unicode? Think again, then read [Wayback] Dark corners of Unicode / fuzzy notepad.

On basics, sorting, comparison, decomposition, composition, width, whitespace, encoding, emoji, interesting code planes and dark corners. Lots of dark corners.

The examples are in Python, but hold for almost any programming language

–jeroen

via: Kristian Köhntopp

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

When BRCC32 throws `Fatal error Illegal macro definition in command line or defines page.` in a DUnitX project

Posted by jpluimers on 2017/04/19

I had a Fatal error Illegal macro definition in command line or defines page. thrown by BRCC32.exe in one of my Delphi projects.

As cgrc.exe could build the .rc file [source in Russian; WayBack], I reproduced it from the console with an Empty.rc file that has no content. That way I could rule out file content: now it had to be command-line arguments which is a different cause than any of the search results I found before.

My project was based on one of the DUnitX test projects. It ran in Delphi XE8, but the Delphi version doesn’t matter as BRCC32 hasn’t been updated since 1999.

Further below are the failure/success examples; this went wrong:

  1. DUnitX uses the DUNITX-DEBUG define to enable debugging of DUnitX itself in DUnitX.inc which also supports the DUNITXDEBUG define in the same area.
  2. Delphi will translate a .RC file in a project into a BRCC32.exe call adding the project conditional defines and search paths
  3. BRCC32.exe doesn’t like hyphens in conditional defines throwing a non-descriptive error Fatal error Illegal macro definition in command line or defines page.

So either removing DUNITX-DEBUG or changing it into DUNITXDEBUG solves the problem. Hence my pull-request.

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Delphi, Development, Resource Files and Scripts (.res/.rc), Software Development, Windows Development | Leave a Comment »

When your markdown README files on GitHub are broken as of lately

Posted by jpluimers on 2017/04/18

Basically below gist tells it all.

Many repositories on GitHub do not have whitespace between the # and headings. This is against the specs, so GitHub fixed their rendering engine. Which means now many files do not render nicely any more.

So if you have headings like this:

##text

Fix them to be like:

## text

If your GitHub repository has less than 50 starts, you did not get an automatic pull request to fix it from https://github.com/bryant1410/readmesfix so you can either:

–jeroen

Recently, GitHub introduced the change in how atx
headers are parsed in Markdown files.

##Wrong

Correct

While this change follows the spec, it breaks many existing repositories. I took the
README dataset which we created
at source{d} and ran a simple
regexp PySpark job.
It appeared that more than 500,000 repositories have README files which are rendered
with invalid headers.

Among those 0.5mm, there are more than 10,000 which have more than 50 stars. They were
uploaded to data.world.

view raw

github_markdown_headers_disaster.md

hosted with ❤ by GitHub

Posted in Development, DVCS - Distributed Version Control, git, GitHub, Software Development, Source Code Management | Leave a Comment »

Jan Barendregt is Looking for programmers to maintain existing Excel add-in software

Posted by jpluimers on 2017/04/18

Jan Barendregt is Looking for programmers to maintain existing Excel add-in software.

The reason is no fun (cancer without curative treatment and prognosis till death likely months).

Please follow-up on the forum if you can be of help: [WayBack] Embarcadero Discussion Forums: Looking for programmers to maintain existing Excel add-in software

–jeroen

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

Bash that JSON (with jq) — Librato Blog

Posted by jpluimers on 2017/04/18

Glueing together APIs requires working with JSON: parsing it, extracting it, transforming it. JQ is a fast, lightweight, flexible, CLI JSON processor, that does the job well. Learn how to use it by getting your hands dirty with a JSON blob that represents the open issues in the public Docker GitHub repository.

via: http://blog.librato.com/posts/jq-json – Joe C. Hecht – Google+

–jeroen

Source: http://blog.librato.com/posts/jq-json

Posted in bash, Development, JavaScript/ECMAScript, jq, JSON, Scripting, Software Development | Leave a Comment »

Delphi and the joy of Compiler Intrinsics – I cant use “Length” as a TFunc…

Posted by jpluimers on 2017/04/18

One of the reasons I favour using RTL based functionality over Delphi Intrinsic Routines like Length, Abs and others is that you cannot use compiler intrinsics in Generics. For instance Length is not compatible with TFunc<string, Integer> unless you declare it yourself like function StringLength(value: string): Integer; as otherwise you get en E2029 error (in this case the cryptic '(' expected but ';' found).

It’s one of the many areas where the Delphi compiler developers took a shortcut, but in this case I think the results are somewhat good.

Other reasons for using the RTL over compiler intrinsics have to do with scoping: the intrinsics are in the global scope which can clutter what you’re trying to work on.

So I much rather use the file and stream related functions when I’m actually working with a file or stream. For instance Assign for me has nothing to do with a file outside of a file context (it’s the reason AssignFile exists in the first place).

–jeroen

via: I cant use “Length” as a TFunc (tested in XE and XE6), but if…

Posted in Conference Topics, Conferences, Delphi, Delphi 10 Seattle, Delphi XE, Delphi XE2, Delphi XE3, Delphi XE4, Delphi XE5, Delphi XE6, Delphi XE7, Delphi XE8, Development, Event, Software Development | 1 Comment »

.bashrc generator: create your .bashrc PS1 with a drag and drop interface

Posted by jpluimers on 2017/04/13

Cool: .bashrc generator: create your .bashrc PS1 with a drag and drop interface

http://bashrcgenerator.com/

–jeroen

http://bashrcgenerator.com/ – Joe C. Hecht – Google+

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

How bad is the Windows command line really?

Posted by jpluimers on 2017/04/13

How bad is the Windows command line really?

The Windows command line is bad. Very bad.

But it took until recently for old Windows versions – that out of the box had either no or poor PowerShell versions – to have slowly died.

So only now PowerShell finally has become an option that really works across all Windows versions I use. Go PowerShell!

–jeroen

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

Hosting Grumpydev Imageflair locally – part 2 – trying to get the text and images to display

Posted by jpluimers on 2017/04/12

Blank imageFlair

Blank imageFlair

Hosting Grumpydev Imageflair locally ended with two issues left: an empty image and my wish to include more complete StackExchange bits like the current StackExchange flair does.

I thought fixing the empty image would take a rainy day. It actually took a few rainy hours.

No text

The culprit is that I didn’t have the Microsoft Core Fonts for the Web installed. Which was no coincidence as the free download of those from Microsoft terminated in 2002. The upside is that because of their licenses, they are available as open source and most linux distributions have a script package that will download these fonts. OpenSuSE has fetchmsttfonts for this.

Alternatively, you can use the web.archive.org to download manually, but that’s a tad tedious. But if you love tedious: Free downloads – TrueType core fonts for the Web.

zypper install fetchmsttfonts

That installs the fonts in:

/usr/share/fonts/truetype

The drawback of having fetchmsttfonts is that the original Microsoft versions of these fonts are downloaded from corefonts.sourceforge.net each time the fetchmsttfonts package is updated, potentially overwriting newer versions of the fonts in that directory. If you don’t want that, use the trick at  (not yet archived at the WayBack machine) font handling – install fetchmsttfonts, copy fonts, rpm -e fethmsttfonts, copy fonts back.

Having the fonts installed, I thought the only thing I needed to fix were the multiple references in config.php from that pointed to Arial.TTF. I took the poor man’s approach and just did this being in the directory of config.php:

cp /usr/share/fonts/truetype/arial.ttf Arial.TTF

Filled Imageflair

That didn’t work either: still no text showed.

So I decided to run imageFlair.php from the command line after setting $imageflair_debug = true; in config.php which then resulted in all sorts of warnings like

PHP Warning: imagettftext(): Could not find/open font

After reading I decided to build a small php-gd.tester.php script containing phpinfo(); and gd_info showing these portions for PHP GD (non-relevant bits stripped):

Additional .ini files parsed /etc/php5/conf.d/ctype.ini,
/etc/php5/conf.d/dom.ini,
/etc/php5/conf.d/gd.ini,
/etc/php5/conf.d/iconv.ini,
/etc/php5/conf.d/json.ini,
/etc/php5/conf.d/mysql.ini,
/etc/php5/conf.d/mysqli.ini,
/etc/php5/conf.d/pdo.ini,
/etc/php5/conf.d/pdo_mysql.ini,
/etc/php5/conf.d/pdo_sqlite.ini,
/etc/php5/conf.d/sqlite3.ini,
/etc/php5/conf.d/tokenizer.ini,
/etc/php5/conf.d/xmlreader.ini,
/etc/php5/conf.d/xmlwriter.ini

gd

GD Support enabled
GD headers Version 2.1.1
GD library Version 2.1.1
FreeType Support enabled
FreeType Linkage with freetype
FreeType Version 2.6.3
GIF Read Support enabled
GIF Create Support enabled
JPEG Support enabled
libJPEG Version 8
PNG Support enabled
libPNG Version 1.6.21
WBMP Support enabled
XPM Support enabled
libXpm Version 30411
XBM Support enabled
WebP Support enabled

And the gd_info dump:


<?php
echo "<h1>gd_info</h1>";
$gdInfo = gd_info();
echo "<table>";
foreach($gdInfo as $key=>$value) {
echo "<tbody>";
echo "<tr>";
echo "<td class='e'>" . $key . "</td>";
echo "<td class='v'>" . $value . "</td>";
echo "</tbody>";
}
echo "</table>";
?>

view raw

php-convert-gd_info-to-html.html

hosted with ❤ by GitHub

GD Version 2.1.1
FreeType Support 1
FreeType Linkage with freetype
T1Lib Support
GIF Read Support 1
GIF Create Support 1
JPEG Support 1
PNG Support 1
WBMP Support 1
XPM Support 1
XBM Support 1
WebP Support 1
JIS-mapped Japanese Font Support

Too bad though: no information on where it sources the fonts from.

No image

Having no solution for the font rendering yet, I focussed at the lack of profile picture.

In the past, the images were generated with gravatar information in the JSON, but now that is empty. See for instance the output of http://superuser.com/users/flair/1.json versus his image http://superuser.com/users/flair/1.png


{
"id": 1,
"gravatarHtml": {
},
"profileUrl": "http:\/\/superuser.com\/users\/1\/jeff-atwood",
"displayName": "Jeff Atwood",
"reputation": "14,561",
"badgeHtml": "<span title=\"24 gold badges\"><span class=\"badge1\">&#9679;<\/span><span class=\"badgecount\">24<\/span><\/span><span title=\"79 silver badges\"><span class=\"badge2\">&#9679;<\/span><span class=\"badgecount\">79<\/span><\/span><span title=\"109 bronze badges\"><span class=\"badge3\">&#9679;<\/span><span class=\"badgecount\">109<\/span><\/span>"
}

view raw

1.json

hosted with ❤ by GitHub

That reveals quite a change in the JSON that imageFlair expects. Actually there is a lot of HTML in there.

So decided to try http://superuser.com/users/flair/1 in addition to http://superuser.com/users/flair/1.json with this result:


<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd"&gt;
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"&gt;
<head>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" />
<style type="text/css">
.valuable-flair .userInfo .username a, .valuable-flair .mod-flair
{
color: #1086A4;
}
</style>
<link rel="stylesheet" href="//sstatic.net/flair-Default.css" />
</head>
<body>
<div class="valuable-flair">
<div class="gravatar">
<a title="See my profile on Super User" target="_blank" href="http://superuser.com/users/1/jeff-atwood"><div class="gravatar-wrapper-50"><img src="https://www.gravatar.com/avatar/51d623f33f8b83095db84ff35e15dbe8?s=50&amp;d=identicon&amp;r=PG&quot; alt="" width="50" height="50"></div></a>
</div>
<div class="userInfo">
<span class="username"><img src="http://superuser.com/favicon.ico&quot; width="16" /><a href="http://superuser.com/users/1/jeff-atwood&quot; target="_blank">Jeff Atwood</a><span class="mod-flair" title="moderator">&#9830;</span></span>
<br />
<span class="reputation-score" title="reputation score">14,561</span>
<br />
<span title="24 gold badges"><span class="badge1">&#9679;</span><span class="badgecount">24</span></span><span title="79 silver badges"><span class="badge2">&#9679;</span><span class="badgecount">79</span></span><span title="109 bronze badges"><span class="badge3">&#9679;</span><span class="badgecount">109</span></span>
</div>
</div>
</body>
</html>

view raw

1.html

hosted with ❤ by GitHub

Two downsides here:

  1. This doesn’t work for the combined stackexchange flair: http://stackexchange.com/users/flair/1.png works, but http://stackexchange.com/users/flair/1 gives a 404.
  2. Rendering HTML servers side to PNG requires a lot of work.

Time for another rainy day (:

–jeroen

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in *nix, *nix-tools, bash, Development, Linux, openSuSE, PHP, Pingback, Power User, Scripting, Software Development, Stackoverflow, SuSE Linux | Leave a Comment »

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