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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Happy birthday Turbo Pascal! Some marketing and Borland Conference videos

Posted by jpluimers on 2023/11/20

Some of you might remember [WayBack] Borland – Wikipedia, that today in 1983 shipped the first version of Turbo Pascal [Wikipedia].

It was of great influence, leading to other Turbo languages, Delphi, and – through it’s creator Anders Hejlsberg – eventually C#, .NET and TypeScript.

From the mid 1990s until the early 2000s, the Borland organised conferences (having various names, like Borland Language Conference, Borland Conference, Borland Developers Conference, Inprise Conference) had famous opening videos, and product marketing videos.

Some of them are below the signature.

Hopefully by the time of publishing, all of them are still there.

Edit 20231202:

I scheduled this post back in Winter 2019/2020 in between radiation therapy and surgery.

By now, more information on the anniversary has appeared online.

For more Turbo Pascal history, including – in reverse chronological order – old screenshorts and the first advertisements (and how quickly they changed from the pink on white to full colour ones), see my 2021 blog post Much Turbo Pascal history (via What is a Delphi DCU file? – Stack Overflow). It had many screenshots including a Turbo Pascal 1.0 screenshot, which I have added it here to the right. By now  Turbo Pascal – Wikipedia and Borland Graphics Interface – Wikipedia are quite complete history of Turbo Pascal.

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

So what is clients6.google.com?

Posted by jpluimers on 2023/11/16

[Wayback/Archive] $7.5k Google services mix-up – Ezequiel Pereira

Luckily [Wayback/Archive] what is clients6.google.com – Google Search got me to [Wayback/Archive] $7.5k Google services mix-up – Ezequiel Pereira, which explains:

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

Trying to do my best to be “and” instead if “either, or” (plus some links to convert Instagram media id to/from shortcode)

Posted by jpluimers on 2023/11/15

[Wayback/Archive] Danielle Braun dr. on Twitter: “En en in plaats van of of.”

The image is by @thepresentpsychologist on Instagram (figured that out via Google Lens finding [Wayback/Archive] Psychological Safety Newsletter #39: Diversity and Ethical Behaviour | Psychological Safety), but and it took some effort to find the original post back as Instagram does not allow anonymous browsing.

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Posted in About, Autistic Spectrum/Autism, Development, Instagram, JavaScript/ECMAScript, Node.js, Personal, Scripting, SocialMedia, Software Development, Web Development | Leave a Comment »

Figured out why on fresh Chrome installs, iframe with embedded Google Calendar won’t work and show `(blocked:other)` in the Network Tab of Chrome Developer Tools

Posted by jpluimers on 2023/11/09

Wow, what a long title!

What happened is that I have a few dashboards for people that include various embedded Google Calendar widgets in <iframe>s.

These won’t show on fresh installs of Google Chrome that have the particular user signed on in the Chrome Settings so that settings will be synchronised, right?

Right?!

Wrong!!

Not all Chrome settings will be synchronised by Chrome. Things like [Wayback/Archive] “On startup” (with the pages shown after Chrome startup) and wich installed extensions are synchronised including the visibility of their icons. But the settings of the extensions themselves will not.

This means that odd things happen, for instance extensions like [Wayback/Archive] Privacy Badger and [Wayback/Archive] uBlock Origin being installed, but both reverting to their default settings.

That in turn leads to hard to see problems, in this case the embedded Google Calendar <iframe>s failing.

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Posted in Chrome, Development, Google, GoogleCalendar, Power User, Privacy, Software Development, Web Development | Leave a Comment »

TWINT – Twitter Intelligence #OSINT: consider Toolwoluxwolu/twint

Posted by jpluimers on 2023/11/08

Edit: I scheduled this post a long time ago, but it likely won’t work any more because of Space Karen demolsing Twitter. So for now, view this post as a how historically we had nice things on Twitter.

When writing this, the fork [Wayback/Archive] woluxwolu/twint works and the original [Wayback/Archive] twintproject/twint: An advanced Twitter scraping & OSINT tool written in Python that doesn’t use Twitter’s API, allowing you to scrape a user’s followers, following, Tweets and more while evading most API limitations. does not.

See these tweets in Dutch (Google Translate on them works well):

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Posted in Development, LifeHacker, OSINT - Open Source Intelligence, Power User, Python, Scripting, SocialMedia, Software Development, Twitter | Leave a Comment »

Case insensitivity helps with accessibility and inclusivity in both software development and software use.

Posted by jpluimers on 2023/11/06

We should do more to increase the accessibility of both software developers and users of software.

[Wayback/Archive] Serge Lachapelle 🇺🇦🇸🇪 on Twitter: “Quote of the day from @Vintharas. Don’t think of it as accessibility in your product design. Think of it as inclusivity. #a11y #i9y“

which refers to both a11y – (computer) accessibility and i9y – inclusive design.

An important aspect there is to support case insensitive environments for both software developers and software users.

This sounds strange, as it makes systems less strict, but with the diversity of people not doing so makes it less accessible and decreases inclusivity.

It all started with reading [Wayback/Archive] /Fay-lee-nuh/ on Twitter: “Totally agree with this, case sensitivity does not add a lot apart from errors. Also note that some languages (Arabic, for example) do not have uppercase letters! So the whole idea of “case sensitive” to some people is new (and thus can make learning to program a lot harder)”.

Parts of the responses there and in the tweet Felienne quoted, were from people still insisting on case sensitivity or even limiting identifiers and filenames to US 7-bit ASCII.

I totally disagree, so I wrote a long thread in response, starting with [Wayback/Archive] “@Felienne @guido_leenders Sentence 2 in your first tweet should be an eye opener to everyone….” archived at the ThreadReaderApp as [Wayback/Archive] Thread by @jpluimers on Thread Reader App:

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Posted in accessibility (a11y), Conference Topics, Conferences, Development, Event, Software Development | Leave a Comment »

Smart idea by corbosman on Twitter: he wrote a home grown DynDNS for transIP DNS changes

Posted by jpluimers on 2023/11/02

[Wayback/Archive] corbosman on Twitter: “I created a container in my private kubernetes cluster that checks if my ziggo ip address changes and if so, notifies me and makes some DNS changes through the API of my DNS provider. Last night Ziggo changed my IP and it worked flawlessly. Win!” / Twitter

His ISP: [Wayback/Archive] corbosman on Twitter: “@jpluimers transip“.

The Domain API for his ISP TransIP is at [Wayback/Archive] TransIP API: Domains (via [Wayback/Archive] transip dns api – Google Search).

–jeroen

Posted in Development, DNS, Internet, Power User, Scripting, Software Development | Leave a Comment »

Memories of the Twitter Fail Whale that got discontinued 10 years ago (HT @YiyingLu, @failwhale).

Posted by jpluimers on 2023/11/01

From 2008 to fall 2013, Twitter used the Fail Whale, a 2006 artwork by Yiying Lu originally titled “Lifting A Dreamer”, to indicate problems on their site.

Now that it is about a year after Musk burned some 44 milliard USD buying Twitter, it is also 10 years ago they phased out the Fail Whale, so it is a good time to remember it and a reminder to check out how Twitter faired during Elon’s ownership.

With Twitter down, you’d see the image from [Wayback/Archive] Yiying Lu 🐳 🥟🧋 on Twitter: “It has been 10 years since my art piece “Lifting a Dreamer” became the Twitter Fail Whale, a symbol as @Twitter’s service outrage during 2008-2013. It has inspired hundreds, probably thousands, of funny, clever & amusing homages and take-offs from users globally. Here are a few: …”:

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Posted in Delphi, Development, History, SocialMedia, Software Development, Twitter | Leave a Comment »

0x48piraj/fadblock: Friendly Adblock for YouTube: A fast, lightweight, and undetectable YouTube Ads Blocker for Chrome, Opera and Firefox.

Posted by jpluimers on 2023/10/31

[Wayback/Archive] 0x48piraj/fadblock: Friendly Adblock for YouTube: A fast, lightweight, and undetectable YouTube Ads Blocker for Chrome, Opera and Firefox.

At the time of writing, it was available in these web-browser extension/addon stores:

A 404 was returned at [Wayback/Archive] https://addons.opera.com/en-gb/extensions/details/fadblock/ which I reported in [Wayback/Archive] Extension vanished from the Opera Addons page · Issue #15 · 0x48piraj/fadblock.

Via:

–jeroen

Posted in Chrome, CSS, Development, Firefox, JavaScript/ECMAScript, Opera, Power User, Scripting, SocialMedia, Software Development, Web Browsers, Web Development, YouTube | Leave a Comment »

Python code from @baekdal (find tweets you retweeted by someone else)

Posted by jpluimers on 2023/10/26

Need to try this out: [Wayback/Archive] Code from https://twitter.com/baekdal/status/1279123542144094208 and https://twitter.com/baekdal/status/1279123544052563968 (find tweets you retweeted by someone else)

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Posted in Development, JavaScript/ECMAScript, JSON, Python, Scripting, SocialMedia, Software Development, Twitter | Leave a Comment »

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