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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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 »

In the WordPress classic editor, avoid the SyntaxHighlighter Code Block

Posted by jpluimers on 2023/10/25

When you use the WordPress classic editor (which for me still works far better than the Gutenberg one), avoid at all cost the use of the [Wayback/Archive] SyntaxHighlighter Code Block – Page 2 – WordPress.com Support.

Each time you switch between from Text View back to Visual, some characters are html-encoded, like:

  • & becomes &amp;
  • > becomes &gt;

Switching twice makes & into &amp;&gt.

Switching three times makes & into &amp;&amp;&amp;gt.

I already explained why to avoid the Gutenberg editor in Bookmarklet to force WordPress classic-editor.

Via:

–jeroen

Posted in Classic editor, Development, Gutenberg editor, SocialMedia, Software Development, Web Development, WordPress, WordPress | Leave a Comment »

Delete (very) old tweets obtained from a twitter archive

Posted by jpluimers on 2023/10/24

[Wayback/Archive] Delete (very) old tweets obtained from a twitter archive comments:

# Largely copied from http://www.mathewinkson.com/2015/03/delete-old-tweets-selectively-using-python-and-tweepy
# However, Mathew's script cannot delete tweets older than something like a year (these tweets are not available from the twitter API)
# This script is a complement on first use, to delete old tweets. It uses your twitter archive to find tweets' ids to delete
# How to use it :
#     - download and extract your twitter archive (tweet.js will contain all your tweets with dates and ids)
#     - put this script in the extracted directory
#     - complete the secrets to access twitter's API on your behalf and, possibly, modify days_to_keep
#     - delete the few junk characters at the beginning of tweet.js, until the first '['   (it crashed my json parser)
#     - review the script !!!! It has not been thoroughly tested, it may have some unexpected behaviors...
#     - run this script
#     - forget this script, you can now use Mathew's script for your future deletions
#
#  License : Unlicense http://unlicense.org/

It is by [Wayback/Archive] Anil (@TheOtherAnil), who also wrote [Wayback/Archive] @captions_please (mentioned in my earlier post Two more Twitter bots that help with inclusion and accessibility (a11y): @get_altText and @captions_please), see:

[Wayback/Archive] Anil on Twitter: “@captions_please @jazzthefraz ah sorry the bot didn’t run earlier because of a bug. Should be fixed now.”

–jeroen

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

Remember Excel import issues causing a change in Guidelines for human gene nomenclature | Nature Genetics

Posted by jpluimers on 2023/10/23

Remember [Wayback/Archive] Guidelines for human gene nomenclature | Nature Genetics?**

You might not, but this was what pointed me to it back in 2020: [Wayback/Archive] Scientists rename human genes to stop Microsoft Excel from misreading them as dates – The Verge.

The article was a result of Excel mangling import data for decades. Somehow finally it did get Microsoft’s attention and more than 3 years later, they issued options (with mangling still being the default) to help workaround the problems.

The 2004 article [Wayback/Archive] Mistaken Identifiers: Gene name errors can be introduced inadvertently when using Excel in bioinformatics | BMC Bioinformatics | Full Text demonstrated this import problem which had been present for quite a while already (it even has a csh Script to scan for SymbolMutation error).

The gene nomenclature people by now have moved to a different naming scheme, but maybe other people can benefit from the Excel updates of which you can find more through these links:

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

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