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

Exporting Chrome History (with the “new” configuration and state file structure), and Epoch dates on various systems

Posted by jpluimers on 2025/05/02

Quite a while ago, Chrome moved from a structure based on “Current Session“, “Current Tabs“, “Last Session” and “Last Tabs” into “Session_#################” and “Tabs_#################” stored in a “Sessions” folder (and similar migrations for other state and configuration files).

The numbers in the “Session_*” and “Tabs_*” files are time stamps of those sessions, for instance one needs to figure out what the “13310808970819630” in “Session_13310808970819630” and “Session_13310808970819630” means.

Lot’s of web-pages with tips and tricks around the old structures are still around, often surfacing high in Google Search results.

I was interested in a particular trick to export Google Chrome browsing history and had a hard time figuring out the easiest solution.

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Apple, Batch-Files, Chrome, Chrome, Database Development, Development, Google, JavaScript/ECMAScript, Mac OS X / OS X / MacOS, NirSoft, Polyglot, Power User, Scripting, SQLite, Web Browsers, Windows, Windows 10, Windows 11 | Tagged: | Leave a Comment »

GitHub – randomaccess3/googleURLParser: parser for Google search strings

Posted by jpluimers on 2025/05/01

Back when I observed the Google Search sei parameter which I hadn’t seen before yet, I bumped into [Wayback/Archive] GitHub – randomaccess3/googleURLParser: parser for Google search strings

It covers a truckload of parameters, including the sei one, which isn’t as new as I thought, as it was at least 2017 old: [Wayback/Archive] [Neat URL] Yet another Google parameter… · Issue #25 · Smile4ever/firefoxaddons · GitHub

Links referred from the parser tool for further reading:

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Posted in Development, Google, GoogleImageSearch, GoogleSearch, Perl, Power User, Python, Scripting, Software Development | Tagged: | Leave a Comment »

Some SQLite things I recently learned a while ago

Posted by jpluimers on 2025/04/30

More on the reason why I learned a few SQLite things soon, but for my link and documentation archive, below is what I learned.

Most commands use the database file C:\temp\History which has no extension as that is how I got the file in the first place (spoiler: it’s a Chrome browser History from one of my user profiles).

Let’s get started:

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Posted in *nix, *nix-tools, bash, CommandLine, Conference Topics, Conferences, Console (command prompt window), Database Development, Development, Event, Power User, PowerShell, PowerShell, Software Development, SQL, SQLite | 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:

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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 »

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 »

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:

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

From Turbo Pascal to Delphi to C# to TypeScript, an interview with PL legend Anders Hejlsberg – YouTube

Posted by jpluimers on 2025/04/09

Nice historic perspective: [Wayback/Archive] From Turbo Pascal to Delphi to C# to TypeScript, an interview with PL legend Anders Hejlsberg – YouTube

Via [Wayback/Archive] Zack Urlocker on Twitter: “Great interview with @ahejlsberg on the evolution of programming languages, the rise of TypeScript and more. Anders is one of the best programmers I ever worked with. …”

--jeroen

Posted in .NET, Borland Pascal, C#, Delphi, Development, History, JavaScript/ECMAScript, MS-DOS, Pascal, Scripting, Software Development, Turbo Pascal, TypeScript, Windows Development | Leave a Comment »

git on Windows: figuring out SID mismatch

Posted by jpluimers on 2025/03/31

A few years back I had an error happen a while on one of my Windows machines after a git pull: fatal: detected dubious ownership in repository at 'C:/versioned/repository' followed by a few lines with Windows SIDs (Security Identifiers) that I had to map to actual users.

I thought I had it scheduled, but my notes were in a draft post, so when I bumped into it again when upgrading an old virtual machine with new versions I finished it and scheduled it for now.

The first time I got the error was after git for Windows fixed security vulnerability [Wayback/Archive] CVE-2022-24765 and included the quote from [Wayback/Archive] Uncontrolled search for the Git directory in Git for Windows · Advisory · git-for-windows/git:

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Posted in CommandLine, Development, DVCS - Distributed Version Control, git, Power User, PowerShell, PowerShell, Scripting, Software Development, Source Code Management, Windows, Windows 10, Windows 11, Windows 7 | Tagged: | Leave a Comment »

Note for future self if .NET hash calculations from `ComputeHash()` are slower than expected

Posted by jpluimers on 2025/03/26

Normally when calculating hashes in .NET you use the [Wayback/Archive] HashAlgorithm.ComputeHash Method (System.Security.Cryptography) | Microsoft Learn.

This can be slow as [Wayback/Archive] cmcginty showed while answering the question [Wayback/Archive] How to get an MD5 checksum in PowerShell – Stack Overflow by [Wayback/Archive] Luke101 posing a faster solution (in this case for md5, but it can be generalised):

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Posted in .NET, C#, Chocolatey, CommandLine, Development, Power User, PowerShell, PowerShell, Scripting, Software Development, Windows | Tagged: | Leave a Comment »

Workaround for “embedding” external scripts in JavaScript bookmarklets (thanks @ben_alman).

Posted by jpluimers on 2025/03/25

Bookmarklets are basically URLs that execute a JavaScript function.

Sometimes you want to rely on external JavaScript files (for instance jQuery), but Bookmarklets themselves cannot do that.

Bookmarklets can modify the current page though, and use those to load a script, wait until it is loaded, then continue executing.

Often that is OK as you want to operate the Bookmarklet on that page anyway, but be careful though that you do not mess up the page by loading an incompatible script: test, test, test!

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