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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Delphi 2006 Hidden COM Registry Entries

Posted by jpluimers on 2025/04/29

Somewhere in the drafts was a note to refer to an old Chris Bensen blog post on the Embarcadero server: blogs.embarcadero.com/cbensen/2005/12/07/22388

Alas, a lot of Embarcadero stuff is gone, some because of Idera not caring, others because as of Codegear, the team never was good at keeping infrastructure alive, nor cater for proper archiging at the Wayback Machine.

Luckily, the Borland days were different, as I found by browsing web.archive.org/web//http://blogs.borland.com/: almost 10k archived pages!

Searching for cbensen or 22388 then got me the actual post [Wayback/Archive] Delphi 2006 Hidden COM Registry Entries (the last link is dead, the others not indexed by search engines) and quoted below while adding some formatting: Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Delphi, Delphi 2006, Development, Software Development | Leave a Comment »

DB Browser for SQLite: cross platform, reasonably sized, versatile

Posted by jpluimers on 2025/04/29

I found [Wayback/Archive] DB Browser for SQLite via [Wayback/Archive] In z’n leren frakske | Tech45 Podcast (thanks [Wayback/Archive] Toon Van de Putte (@toonvandeputte)!).

It is a standalone reasonably sized database browser for the single-process SQLite database (which is itself a file storage replacement for highly table structured data, see below).

With SQLite gaining more and more popularity in standalone application usage (you can even host it inside a web browser session!), I bump in it more often to fix things (more on that in a future blog post), which means that besides the standard console support in SQLite, having a versatile browser is really useful.

DB Browser for SQLite, or in short sqlitebrowser, fulfills that need better than I expected. It’s cross-platform so it works on Mac OS, Windows and Linux (and sort of on WSL2 on Windows, see links below).

Hopefully I can show you how I used it in future blog-posts. For now, and for my link archive, below are just some links to get started.

Oh and the comment: as always with files containing structured data that is randomly accessed you should be really careful when opening them over file-shares or virtual drives like cloud storage.

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Chrome, Chrome, Database Development, Development, Google, Power User, Software Development, SQLite, Web Browsers | Tagged: , , , , , , | Leave a Comment »

“NAMED_CONF_INCLUDE_FILES” has been gone from /etc/sysconfig/named since OpenSuSE 15.4

Posted by jpluimers on 2025/04/28

In the past, I used to modify /etc/sysconfig/named and add entries to the NAMED_CONF_INCLUDE_FILES setting, then run /usr/share/bind/createNamedConfInclude
to generate /etc/named.conf.include.

As of OpenSuSE 15.4, /usr/share/bind/createNamedConfInclude has become an empty file and NAMED_CONF_INCLUDE_FILES got removed and NAMED_INITIALIZE_SCRIPTS introduced.

So now I changed my playbooks to manually generate /etc/named.conf.include and include it form /etc/sysconfig/named.

Since I hardly perform these new installations, it took a few years for me to find out about this change. Upgrading existing systems somehow kept the generated file and included it.

Related links with quotes as it was hard to find out what changed and how to work around and I wasn’t the only one bump into issues:

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in *nix, *nix-tools, bash, bash, bind-named, Development, DNS, LEAP, Linux, openSuSE, Power User, Scripting, Software Development, SuSE Linux | Tagged: | Leave a Comment »

Finding most recent forks of gists and github repositories

Posted by jpluimers on 2025/04/24

A while ago I found out that gist.github.com/lynatan/673e574faa8343fa01d7a91e75065c54 which I mentioned before in Delphi analog to C# ?? null-coalescing operator and Light Table like debugger evaluation and I wanted to

  1. find it back
  2. find the most recent forks of it

The reason was that I was working on the [WaybackSave/Archive] bit Time Professionals on X: “Live now: “Hidden Gems of Delphi Language: Operator Overloading and Class/Record helpers” @jpluimers” session which I presented at [Wayback/Archive] ITDevCon 2024 | Home where I also could enjoy the company of the other [Wayback/Archive] ITDevCon 2024 | Speakers and the famous [Wayback/Archive] IT DevCon 2024 speaker dinner (which attendees can also join for a slight surcharge).

The presentation is at [Wayback/Archive] ITDevCon2024/delphi_language_hidden_gems/delphi_language_hidden_gems.md at main · jpluimers/ITDevCon2024 · GitHub and pictures of the event at [Wayback/Archive] ITDevCon2024 – Google Photos.

Back to the problem at hand

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Conference Topics, Conferences, Delphi, Development, DVCS - Distributed Version Control, Event, gist, GitHub, ITDevCon, Software Development, Source Code Management | Leave a Comment »

TIL you can run SQL queries directly against CSV files as a one-liner using the default sqlite3 command line utility

Posted by jpluimers on 2025/04/24

[Wayback/Archive] One-liner for running queries against CSV files with SQLite | Simon Willison’s TILs

I figured out how to run a SQL query directly against a CSV file using the sqlite3 command-line utility:
sqlite3 :memory: -cmd '.mode csv' -cmd '.import taxi.csv taxi' \
  'SELECT passenger_count, COUNT(*), AVG(total_amount) FROM taxi GROUP BY passenger_count'
This uses the special :memory: filename to open an in-memory database. Then it uses two -cmd options to turn on CSV mode and import the taxi.csv file into a table called taxi. Then it runs the SQL query.
Instead of setting the mode with .mode you can use .import -csv like this (thanks, [Wayback/Archive] Mark Lawrence):
sqlite3 :memory: -cmd '.import -csv taxi.csv taxi' \
  'SELECT passenger_count, COUNT(*), AVG(total_amount) FROM taxi GROUP BY passenger_count'

Via [Wayback/Archive] Simon Willison on Twitter: “TIL you can run SQL queries directly against CSV files as a one-liner using the default sqlite3 command line utility”

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in CSV, Database Development, Development, Software Development, SQLite | Leave a Comment »

Windows event log querying from the command line: wevtutil (with XPath query parameters and XML output)

Posted by jpluimers on 2025/04/23

A while ago, I needed to investigate reboot events on some Windows 10 systems. I wanted to use the console instead of the eventvwr GUI Event Viewer.

There is a tool for that called wevtutil which – like eventvwr – uses XPath query parameters and produces XML output.

Postprocessing XML can be a thing, but since .NET has great XML support, you can use PowerShell for that (which for me often is way easier than going the XSLT route, for instance because Windows lacks built-in console XSLT tooling).

Based on the help and the below links, my query command then on these machines turned out to be this: Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Batch-Files, CommandLine, Development, PowerShell, PowerShell, Scripting, Software Development, XML, XML/XSD, XPath, XSLT | Leave a Comment »

Ook Nederlandse web-pagina’s vervuilen met AI-gegenereerde pagina’s zoek-resultaten (en daarmee de AI generatoren)

Posted by jpluimers on 2025/04/22

Waar velen al over waarschuwden gebeurt ook in het Nederlandstalige gebied: AI-gegenereerde web-pagina’s komen hoog in de zoekresultaten en vervuilen daarmee Large Language Models van nieuwe AI-tools.

Voorbeelden die ik tegenkwam:

Ze zijn echt heel makkelijk te ontkrachten, ondanks dat de tekst er heel mooi en netjes uitziet: de inhoud klopt gewoon, en juist dat de tekst er zo mooi en netjes uitziet maakte het voor mij verdacht.

De eerste site is het oude domain van [Wayback/Archive] Baarnse Onafhankelijke Partij wat al heel snel na het opheffen van die partij (zie Baarnse Onafhankelijke Partij – Wikipedia) werd overgenomen.

De domains behoren beide tot SEO sites.

Queries die zowel laten zien hoe hoog sommige pagina’s komen als hoe eenvoudig hun inhoud te ontkrachten is:

--jeroen

Posted in AI and ML; Artificial Intelligence & Machine Learning, Development, LLM, Software Development | Leave a Comment »

VSoft Technologies – Vincent Parrett on “Code Signing with USB Tokens”

Posted by jpluimers on 2025/04/17

It has been quite a while since I had to do code signing, but sooner or later that will change. When that happens, I need to re-read these:

--jeroen

PS:

  1. [Wayback/Archive] Post by @guidoleenders.emp.invantive.com — Bluesky (by running this in the cloud)
  2. [Wayback/Archive] Post by @guidoleenders.emp.invantive.com — Bluesky )by running this on a Raspberry Pi)

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

A signal of the future WebAssembly/emscripten is giving us: a database served on a static web page

Posted by jpluimers on 2025/04/17

From a quite a while back; apparently it ended up in the drafts in stead of the blog queue:

[Wayback/Archive] Ian Miell on Twitter: “A signal of the future WebAssembly/emscripten is giving us: a database served on a static web page: … The possibilities are dizzying. Also, I’ve thought for a while that if I had to put money on it, SQLite will outlast every other database out there.”

The combination of Emscripten and WebAssembly is cool as it allows you to run C/C++ based code in most Web Browsers at near-native speed (though the standard is open and can just as easily outside that realm).

[Wayback/Archive] Hosting SQLite databases on Github Pages – (or any static file hoster) – phiresky’s blog:

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Assembly Language, Database Development, Development, JavaScript/ECMAScript, Scripting, Software Development, SQLite, Web Development, WebAssembly | Leave a Comment »

Delphi “array of const” to “varargs” – Stack Overflow

Posted by jpluimers on 2025/04/16

Just in case I ever think “oh, I might try want to go the Variadic function arguments way in Delphi” again, I must remember “maybe not a good idea” and re-read these posts:

Note that this example, despite the description indicates it is, it is actually not varargs by array of const (which requires using TVarRec as under the hood it is an open array of TVarRec): [Wayback/Archive] How to create functions that can accept variable number of parameters such as Format().

Then some Free Pascal links, which is different from, but also similar to Delphi:

Queries:

--jeroen

Posted in .NET, C, C#, Delphi, Development, FreePascal, Pascal, Software Development | Leave a Comment »

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