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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Via Chris Oldwood on Twitter: the real meaning of various C++ character types wchart_t, char, tchar and varchar

Posted by jpluimers on 2024/02/21

A while ago there was this great thread of various C++ character types:

And since most above talk about character width:

–jeroen

Posted in C++, Conference Topics, Conferences, Development, Event, Fun, Software Development | Leave a Comment »

Convert TSV to HTML Table Online | WTOOLS

Posted by jpluimers on 2024/02/20

Great for converting tab separated data (for instance when copied from Excel) into HTML:

[Wayback/Archive] Convert TSV to HTML Table Online | WTOOLS

–jeroen

Posted in Development, Excel, HTML, Office, Power User, Software Development, Web Development | Leave a Comment »

In memory of Matthias Eißing (Embarcadero, formerly Borland/Inprise/Borland/CodeGear)

Posted by jpluimers on 2024/02/16

Earlier today, I got the sad news that my friend Matthias Eißing suddenly passed away in the night from Tuesday to Wednesday.

Valentines day will never be the same.

Rest in Peace dear Matthias Eißing. Hope you will virtually keep drinking beer and keep the great conversations that made you so many friends going.

🕯️

[Wayback/Archive] Eine sehr traurige Nachricht – Delphi-PRAXiS

Mit einer Mischung aus blankem Entsetzen und großer Trauer muss ich Euch leider mitteilen, dass unser langjähriges Community-Mitglied Matthias Eißing in der Nacht zu Mittwoch plötzlich und völlig unerwartet verstorben ist.

…

Helping others with is technical knowledge was what Matthias loved doing so much: in person (see [Wayback/Archive] Matthias Eißing – Entwickler Konferenz and [Wayback/Archive] Programm | EKON 27 – Die Entwickler Konferenz für Delphi & more), virtual (watch  [Wayback/Archive] Magdeburger Developer Days 2021 03.09.2021 – Matthias Eißing “Delphi Community Edition” – YouTube), individually (uncountable chat messages, phone and video calls, e-mails and in-company meetings), white papers / blog posts (like [Wayback/Archive] HighDPI Entwicklung unter Windows) and forum messages (just see the list at [Wayback/Archive] Delphi-PRAXiS – Ergebnis der Suchanfrage).

I had hoped to meet at EKON28 again, as our story goes back to the very first [Wayback/Archive] EKON – The Conference for Delphi & More in 1997 @ the Raunheim Astron Hotel Rhein-Main organised by Masoud Kamali ([Wayback/Archive] Massi Kamali (@MasoudMassi) / Twitter).

EKON was the first conference by Masoud/S&S. It and later conferences helped the Astron Hotels in the southern Frankfurter area (a few years Raunheim, Rüsselsheim and many years Mörfelden) grow a lot and it was the base were Matthias and a lot of other developers kept meeting up and started to know about each others personal lives as well.

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in About, borland, Delphi, Development, History, Personal, Software Development | Leave a Comment »

Web-Design user experience: if you replace actual characters with images or empty styled items you will exclude screen-readers and make visually impaired unhappy (and others too)

Posted by jpluimers on 2024/02/15

So I was on a medical site trying to copy my prescriptions trying to copy them:

Before copying After copying
Image Image

In this case, the element that failed to copy was this:

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Posted in CSS, Dark Pattern, Development, Software Development, User Experience (ux), Web Development | Leave a Comment »

« The same people who say it’s too hard to write alt text are now suddenly “prompt engineers” who literally write alt text to generate images  » – Thomas Fuchs

Posted by jpluimers on 2024/02/14

As an alt-text advocate, I appreciate [Wayback/Archive] Thomas 🔭✨: “The same people who say it’s t…” – Hachyderm.io

The same people who say it’s too hard to write alt text are now suddenly “prompt engineers” who literally write alt text to generate images.

#inclusion #a11y #accessibility

In case you missed it, this is indeed a thing: Prompt engineer – Wikipedia.

--jeroen

Posted in accessibility (a11y), AI and ML; Artificial Intelligence & Machine Learning, ChatGPT, Development, GPT-3, HTML, Power User, SocialMedia, Software Development, Web Development | Leave a Comment »

jilles.com on Twitter: “Question for Dutch HAM radio amateurs, what frequencies are interesting to monitor for digital data? EG IoT/SSTV/Pocsag”

Posted by jpluimers on 2024/02/08

Some links around a question that Jilles posted in 2022: [Wayback/Archive] jilles.com on Twitter: “Question for Dutch HAM radio amateurs, what frequencies are interesting to monitor for digital data? EG IoT/SSTV/Pocsag”

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in ADS-B receivers, Development, Hardware, Power User, Software Development, USB | Leave a Comment »

C# List Patterns: csharplang/list-patterns.md at main · dotnet/csharplang

Posted by jpluimers on 2024/02/07

For my URL list:

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Posted in .NET, C#, C# 11, Development, Software Development | Leave a Comment »

Walls and Ladders when pasting e-mail on account sign-up forms: Paste It – Chrome Web Store

Posted by jpluimers on 2024/02/06

In a game of Walls and Ladders (similar to Arms Race), the Ladders usually win, see the references at the end of the post.

The actual “game” in this case is more and more sites trying to build walls prevent pasting credential related information like user IDs (often e-mail addresses) or passwords often citing “more safety” or “less security risks”, and users get taller ladders wanting to do just that because of their own security concerns:

[Wayback/Archive] Stef 🎈 on Twitter: “Dear mobile/web-apps, please never never disable copy and paste “due to security reasons”. -everybody with a password manager.”

The walls will always loose so it is better to invest the money for the walls into other security measures.

Given that most of the risks are web-sites getting that information exfiltrated, I wish they put more energy into bolting down that side of the security risk side than the hampering legitimate users entering that information in the first place.

Since so many of these sites have leaked my information in the past, any email address I use for activating an account is like 50 characters long. Something I am not going to type once (because of typing mistakes) and definitely not twice (to confirm I did not make typing mistakes).

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Posted in Authentication, Chrome, Clipboard, Development, Google, HTML, JavaScript/ECMAScript, Power User, Scripting, Security, Software Development, Web Development | Leave a Comment »

Julia Evans (b0rk on Twitter) does not just make cool zines (like the DNS one) but also cool sites (the DNS lookup one). It’ is better than Google Toolbox, IntoDNS and others

Posted by jpluimers on 2024/01/31

A while after writing notes on updating DNS info with bind DNS, b0rk (Julia Evans) posted about her DNS zine which got a reply about her DNS lookup tool. Below is part of that thread.

The reason I post is that – unlike the Google DNS ToolBox – you can bookmark her DNS tool link including the actual search part, which makes it far easier to do systems administration.

Examples:

There is a trace tool too:

The thread:

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Posted in Development, DNS, Go (golang), Internet, Power User, Software Development, Web Development | Leave a Comment »

“Oh shit git” seems to have been succeeded by “Oh shit GitHub Copilot”: ‘Downward Pressure on Code Quality’

Posted by jpluimers on 2024/01/29

Not sure about you, but when I write code I want it to be better – way beter even – than average code.

The problem with any LLM based Generative AI is that it generates text based on the average of the past corpus they were trained with at the time they were trained.

It is exactly why I have been advocating for a while: be careful when using Generative AI, as you get generated text based on the combination of averaging over the LLM corpus with the relatively small prompt you phased trying to reflect a tiny bit of the model of the reality you are trying to write software for.

So I was not at all surprised by this article: [Wayback/Archive] New GitHub Copilot Research Finds ‘Downward Pressure on Code Quality’ — Visual Studio Magazine.

Read the rest of this entry »

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

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