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 ‘Scripting’ Category

Any YouTube ID is a YouTube ID which means you can use any shorts ID and music ID to watch as a YouTube URL (adding functionality shorts and music URLs lack)

Posted by jpluimers on 2025/01/24

YouTube has diversified its content separating out YouTube Shorts and YouTube Music.

The main YouTube viewing experience has a few advantages over the other two experiences:

  1. content can be monetised
  2. content can arranged into lists (including Watch Later)
  3. auto-play can be turned off

All below links have the same ID, but the ones with checkmarks can use all the above features whereas the ones with crosses cannot.

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Posted in Development, Google, JavaScript/ECMAScript, Power User, Scripting, Software Development, Web Development, YouTube, YouTubeMusic | Leave a Comment »

Install an old version with homebrew for macOS · GitHub

Posted by jpluimers on 2025/01/21

Fork of a repository that shows how to do this with normal Homebrew installs [Wayback/Archive] Install an old version with homebrew for macOS · GitHub has my notes to do a similar thing with Homebrew cask installs.

Fork of: [Wayback/Archive] Install an old version with homebrew for macOS · GitHub.

TODO: check notes to ensure they really work on a different system and were not a lucky shot.

Notes:

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Posted in Apple, Development, DVCS - Distributed Version Control, gist, GitHub, Home brew / homebrew, Mac OS X / OS X / MacOS, Power User, Ruby, Scripting, Source Code Management | Tagged: | Leave a Comment »

XKCD to ExplainXKCD Bookmarklet

Posted by jpluimers on 2025/01/21

Sometimes the XKCD episodes are hard to get, so I wanted a Bookmarklet to navigate to [Wayback/Archive] explain xkcd.

Here is the regular expression to change the domain name part if it matches: [Wayback/Archive] regex101: build, test, and debug regex: VI34VW with this generated sed code:

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Posted in *nix, *nix-tools, Bookmarklet, Development, JavaScript/ECMAScript, Power User, Scripting, sed, Software Development, Web Browsers, Web Development | Leave a Comment »

Converting Power Point

Posted by jpluimers on 2025/01/15

I have a lot of old Power Point slide decks that I want to reuse in current presentations. By now however, I learned prepare all my presentation stuff in either Markdown or reStructuredText: far easier to publish and put under version control.

After searching, I could only find one tool that is still maintained doing a decent job doing a PowerPoint to Markdown conversion: [Wayback/Archive] GitHub – ssine/pptx2md: a pptx to markdown converter. The tools which works great, in big part of PowerPoint content being highly structured with styles like title, subtitle and various heading levels and content types.

The thing it does not document is the prerequisites, which are these:

Future enhancements

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Posted in Development, Lightweight markup language, MarkDown, Office, Power Point, Power User, Python, Scripting, Software Development, venv | Leave a Comment »

Adding entries to the PATH persistently (be aware of the 1024 character limit of SETX)

Posted by jpluimers on 2025/01/08

Directly after a new Windows installation, I want to have my cloned git repository of batch files in the PATH persistently so that it gets searched after rebooting or opening a new console window.

At that moment, there is not much of a 1024 PATH character limitation, but be aware about that limit if you try this yourself.

This is my add-current-directory-to-path-at-end.persistent-and-limit-to-1024-characters.bat:

:: https://serverfault.com/questions/664180/can-i-permanently-add-to-path-in-windows-using-batch
:: https://superuser.com/questions/812754/how-to-recover-from-path-being-truncated-to-1024-characters-by-setx
:: global environment
setx PATH "%PATH%;%CD%"
:: local process
:: https://superuser.com/questions/975605/add-current-directory-to-path
set PATH=%PATH%;%CD%

I execute it from within the cloned git directory.

Oh: you need to double-quote the SETX parameters, otherwise you get an error message: “ERROR: Invalid syntax. Default option is not allowed more than '2' time(s).“.

More links than the above ones from the batch file, especially on the 1024 character limitation:

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Posted in Batch-Files, Development, Power User, Scripting, Software Development, Windows | Leave a Comment »

On Windows, `arp -d` sometimes fails but `netsh` comes to the rescue

Posted by jpluimers on 2025/01/08

(All below statements were run elevated as Administrator)

I had arp -d fail with any parameter combination on one of my systems always throwing the error The ARP entry deletion failed: The parameter is incorrect..

Luckily I found out that this did clear the ARP cache correctly:

netsh interface ip delete arpcache

I found that via [Wayback/Archive] “The ARP entry deletion failed: The parameter is incorrect.” – Recherche Google:

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Posted in Batch-Files, Development, Power User, Scripting, Software Development, Windows, Windows 10, Windows 11, Windows 7, Windows Development | Leave a Comment »

Deploy .NET Framework 3.5 by using Deployment Image Servicing and Management (DISM) instead of Chocolatey and some notes on PowerShell colours

Posted by jpluimers on 2025/01/07

Since every now and then, like testing software developed with older tools, you need to run older software.

This always works: [Wayback /Archive] Deploy .NET Framework 3.5 by using Deployment Image Servicing and Management (DISM) | Microsoft Learn

DISM /Online /Enable-Feature /FeatureName:NetFx3 /All

Use /All to enable all parent features of the specified feature.

(The /All is needed because software requiring .NET Framework 3.5 also require the parent features).

Notes:

  • Tested on Windows 10 and Windows 11 in 2022.
  • It can take a really long time (more than just a few minutes!) even on fast connections.
  • Installing through Chocolatey with `choco install dotnet3.5 fails on Windows 11 (have not tried on Windows 10) with the classical red on black PowerShell default error theme*:

    ERROR: The term 'wmic' is not recognized as the name of a cmdlet, function, script file, or operable program. Check the spelling of the name, or if a path was included, verify that the path is correct and try again.
    The install of DotNet3.5 was NOT successful.
    Error while running 'C:\ProgramData\chocolatey\lib\DotNet3.5\Tools\ChocolateyInstall.ps1'.

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Posted in .NET, .NET 3.0, .NET 3.5, C#, Chocolatey, Development, Power User, PowerShell, Software Development, Windows, Windows 10, Windows 11 | Leave a Comment »

Old programming books had cool little “puns” in their references, modern lack them in their indices. On the why, and history of them.

Posted by jpluimers on 2025/01/01

I wrote a two earlier blog posts around puns in programming book indices before:

  1. the 1992 Turbo Pascal 7.0 Language Guide having both entry in the manual about Recursion (“recursive loop, see recursive loop”) which of course is similar to “infinite loop” and entries for “infinite loop See loop, infinite” and “loop, infinite See infinite loop”.
  2. infinite loop in “LaTeX: A Document Preparation System” by Leslie Lamport, printed in 1994.

In the last one, I promised to list more occurrences which I now finally had time for to do.

But let me first elaborate more on the observation that modern computer books (like for instance on C# and Delphi beyond version 1) lack these kinds of index pun.

On the Delphi side, the index entry joke for recursion got removed no later than Delphi 3 (I am still looking for a Delphi 2 version of the Object Pascal Language Guide, see further below) even before the book being fully redone electronically and the index pages generation being automated in

I think I even understand why that is: the process of creating of indices. By the start of this century, more and more indices were automatically being generated and for the last 2 decades or so, all of them are. Back in the days however, indices were mostly done by hand. Nowadays, with everything automated, it is actually pretty tricky in most environments to add such an “infinite loop” index entry like in the Turbo Pascal book, as it would require two things at once:

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Posted in .NET, C, C#, C++, Conference Topics, Conferences, Delphi, Delphi 1, Delphi 2, Development, EKON, Event, History, LaTeX, LifeHacker, LISP, Mathematics, Pascal, Perl, PL/I (a.k.a. PL/1), Power User, science, Software Development, Turbo Pascal, Typesetting | Tagged: , | 4 Comments »

Uncommon Uses of Python in Commonly Used Libraries

Posted by jpluimers on 2025/01/01

For my link archive as it will help me when ready to step up my Python skills: [Wayback/Archive] Uncommon Uses of Python in Commonly Used Libraries.

Via: [Wayback/Archive] Julia Evans on Twitter: “i love this kind of researchy blog post (“i read a bunch of python libraries, here’s what i learned!”)

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

A truckload of links which I need for some Bookmarklets work

Posted by jpluimers on 2024/12/31

A while ago, browser tabs were overflowing again so I first mad the list of links with quotes below, then discovered there is a template for many browser tabs open at [Wayback/Archive] To many browser tabs open Meme Generator – Imgflip

One of the reasons is that the WordPress “Press This” bookmarklet is very slow and also flaky at escaping HTML (for instance the below html – Why shouldn’t &amp;apos; be used to escape single quotes? – Stack Overflow sometimes becomes html – Why shouldn’t <code>'</code> be used to escape single quotes? – Stack Overflow in [Wayback/Archive] Press This – WordPress plugin | WordPress.org especially when running it from Archive Today archived pages).

So here we go: Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Bookmarklet, Development, HTML, HTML5, JavaScript/ECMAScript, Power User, Scripting, Software Development, Web Browsers, Web Development | Leave a Comment »