Archive for the ‘Software Development’ Category
Posted by jpluimers on 2026/03/11
This [Wayback/Archive] GetIt Local files – Google Docs is so much better than the [WayBack/Archive] DocWiki documentation for at least these reasons:
- it is one coherent document
- it is complete and does not cut away parts of the source code examples (especially the JSON in the DocWiki is bad)
I wish it had been a Markdown or reStructuredText document as that is far more version control friendly.
Hopefully it will stay on-line longer than [Archive] drive.google.com/file/d/1Pt0YOMfS1eJK7e-NyLrZ5dNOj6UlqN1U/view| or the DocWiki documentation of prior Delphi versions. For more on that, read this blog post: The Delphi documentation site docwiki.embarcadero.com has been down/up oscillating for 4 days is now down for almost a day..
If you are curious to the DocWiki documentation on the GetIt Local files, then read these:
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Posted in Delphi, Development, GetIt, Software Development | Tagged: CppBuilder, RADStudio | Leave a Comment »
Posted by jpluimers on 2026/03/10
TL;DR: There is no simple character that works on both MacOS and Windows.
[Wayback/Archive] sorting – Simple to enter Unicode character that would sort after Z in most cases? – Stack Overflow (thanks [Wayback/Archive] sorin and [Wayback/Archive] degenerate):
A
On Windows, none of these options work because they all sort before A.
A solution I ended up using is an Arabic character:
ٴ This folder comes after z in windows
Source
According to [Wayback/Archive] What Unicode character is this ?, the above mentioned character is U+0674 : ARABIC LETTER HIGH HAMZA.
Note that on Windows the ٴ character displays at the start of the filename, but on MacOS in Finder it ends up behind the extension (as Arabic script is right-to-left) and is very hard to remove. On the MacOS Terminal it ends up on the left and is easy to modify.
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Posted in Apple, Encoding, Mac OS X / OS X / MacOS, Power User, Unicode, Windows | Leave a Comment »
Posted by jpluimers on 2026/03/04
Cool interesting video: [Wayback/Archive] UTF-8, Explained Simply – YouTube
It covers both history from the late 1800s Baudot Code (also known as ITA1) via 1930s ITA2 and 1950’s EBCDIC / FIELDATA ages through 7-bit ASCII in the 1970s and incompatible UCS-2 (now UTF-16) of the 1990s to the current day and age of UTF-8 (which actually started out on a placemat in 1992).
Though mentioning 8-bit encoding, it skips details of extended ASCII encodings like ISO/IEC 8859 and Windows-1252.
It goes to quite some length on decoding UTF-8 and showing how forgiving the UTF-8 standard is. Yes, it is a self-synchronising code thanks to the venerable Ken Thompson.
Definitely worth watching as it also covers the Zero-width joiner which is not just important for combining Emoji, as it is used by many people nowadays, but got in fact implemented to support various scripts like Arabic script or any Indic script.
Oh, the placemat story: Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in ASCII, Development, EBCDIC, Encoding, ISO-8859, Software Development, UCS-2, Unicode, UTF-16, UTF-8, Windows-1252 | Leave a Comment »
Posted by jpluimers on 2026/03/04
Dit is net zo nalatig als de Odildo hack waar alle klantgegevens mee op straat kwamen te liggen: [Wayback/Archive] Odido-router verzamelt analytics van je huishouden
Bevindingen in het kort
- De Odido-router haalt bij een nieuwe WAN-verbinding een bash-script op over een onversleutelde HTTP-verbinding.
- Je kan dit script manipuleren om een root shell op je router te krijgen.
- Als je TLS-verkeer mitm’t zie je analytics-data over de lijn gaan; de scripters hebben TLS-validatie uitgezet (`curl -k`) dus je kan dit ‘versleutelde’ analytics-verkeer inzien.
- Je router stuurt namen en MAC-adressen van devices in je huis door naar Lifemote. Verder deelt het ding de SSID’s en MAC-adressen van WiFi-netwerken in de buurt. En wat analytics-stats over je dataverbruik. Lifemote adverteert met “AI-Powered Home Wi-Fi Solutions for ISPs”. Het voelt wat vies dat zij AI’s gaan trainen met data uit mijn huishouden. Daar vind ik wat van.
--jeroen
Posted in *nix, *nix-tools, bash, bash, Development, ISP, Odido (ex Dutch T-Mobile), Power User, Python, Scripting, Software Development | Leave a Comment »
Posted by jpluimers on 2026/03/04
Finding a reference to DASM while researching yesterday’s post @jpluimers on Twitter: “@b0rk @jilles_com Acids vs bases.”, it felt even more like a trip like memory lane as I had used it in the 1980s on Apple ][ and Apple //e after mainly using EDASM. Lisa and Merlin.
I am glad that it is still alive and kicking with home page at [Wayback/Archive] dasm – macro assembler for 8-bit machines and repository at [Wayback/Archive] dasm-assembler/dasm: Macro assembler with support for several 8-bit microprocessors.
Especially this history section on the home page rang a bell:
- Matthew Dillon started dasm in 1987-1988.
- Olaf “Rhialto” Seibert extended dasm in 1995.
- Andrew “Dr.Boo” Davie maintained dasm in 2003-2008.
- Peter Fröhlich maintained dasm in 2008-2015.
- In 2019, the dasm source code and releases were moved to GitHub.
More links from this trip down memory lane:
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Posted in //e, 6502 Assembly, Apple, Apple ][, Assembly Language, Development, History, Power User, Software Development | Leave a Comment »
Posted by jpluimers on 2026/03/03
For Some links on getting the most recent defragmentation time of a Windows volume I needed to copy back and forth some XML code back and forth between my ARM MacBook Pro to a remote Windows machine accessing via the Microsoft Windows App (the app formerly known as Microsoft Remote Desktop for Mac).
The problem with that is the copying would lose line breaks, which for XML meaning is no problem, but for human understandability while editing the XML in the Event View query dialog was.
So I decided to go to the “Code” view in my Classic WordPress editor (did I ever tell you much I dislike – especially the accessibility of – the not so new but still haughty named Gutenberg editor?), copied the HTML encoded form and wanted to convert it to unencoded XML text.
Well, here I got to naming confusion land, on which I will talk further below, but first two of the potential solutions:
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Posted in Cyberchef, Development, Encoding, HTML, Software Development, URL Encoding, Web Development | Leave a Comment »
Posted by jpluimers on 2026/03/03
A few years back I tweeted [Wayback/Archive] Jeroen Wiert Pluimers @wiert@mastodon.social on Twitter: “@b0rk @jilles_com Acids vs bases.”

It was a kind of tongue-in-cheek reaction (with a way better picture below) to a very valuable post by b0rk (Julia Evans) on both Twitter and Mastodon [Wayback/Archive] Julia Evans on Twitter: “bases” / [Wayback/Archive] Julia Evans: “bases title: bases # we usually…” – Mastodon for two reasons:
- There are various interpretations of bases
- Octal is very important to educate as errors introduced by its support are hard to spot even if you do know about octal.
Back to Julia’s post:
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Posted in *nix, *nix-tools, 68k, 8086, Assembly Language, bash, bash, C, C++, Chemistry, Conference Topics, Conferences, Development, EPS/PostScript, Event, Haskell, History, Java, Java Platform, JavaScript/ECMAScript, Jon Skeet, LifeHacker, Mathematics, PDP-11, Perl, PHP, Power User, Python, science, Scripting, Software Development, x86 | Leave a Comment »