Posted by jpluimers on 2026/02/04
Yes, I know that Windows XP SP3 and Windows 7 SP1 have been end-of-life for a long time, but in the wild they are still being used so here is for posterity:
[Wayback/Archive] msxml – Error when loading valid Windows-1252 document “System error: -2146697210” – Stack Overflow (thanks [Wayback/Archive] Rob Kennedy for the comment):
Posted in .NET, Delphi, Development, History, Power User, Software Development, Windows, Windows 7, Windows Development, Windows XP, XML, XML/XSD | Leave a Comment »
Posted by jpluimers on 2026/01/07
SVG can be beautifully crafted XML representing vector graphics with full support for CSS while also supporting raster graphics. [Wayback/Archive] A Friendly Introduction to SVG • Josh W. Comeau explains how you can do that.
Note that in practice most tools generate horrible SVG and CSS.
Via [Wayback/Archive] I finally get how SVGs work – YouTube
--jeroen
[Wayback/Archive] I finally get how SVGs work – YouTube
Posted in Development, Software Development, SVG, Web Development, XML, XML/XSD | Leave a Comment »
Posted by jpluimers on 2025/08/08
Chocolatey extends the NuGet file format .nuspec based XML files as base for their packages with at the time of writing very sparse and limited documentation in what it extends, why it does that and what extra limitations it imposes on the fields used inside .nuspec files.
Hopefully by now that has improved, so this post is a reminder to myself to check that out eventually.
At the time of writing, the NuGet .nuspec documentation was at [Wayback/Archive] .nuspec File Reference for NuGet | Microsoft Learn and the file format at [Wayback/Archive] NuGet.Client/nuspec.xsd at dev · NuGet/NuGet.Client. Most fields are defined as primitive data types xs:boolean, xs:string and xs:anyURI (of the 19 available primitive XML SChema (W3C) types). Some composite data types are are composed from them using local and global complexType, most using xs:all, xs:attribute or single-type unbounded xs:sequence (which all imply no particular order).
Since an XML Schema allows to both use restriction and extension on data types (the eXtensible in XML!), making them more strict is a relatively straight-forward operation and has the benefit of having these in a central place.
In the past for more than 5 years [Wayback/Archive] Is there a specification for the package format? · Issue #379 · chocolatey/choco was just pointing to the NuGet .nuspec format, but after a request to re-open new comments were made pointing to a current issue (basically a stub, but still) and a Chocolatey nuspec.xsd file, yay!
Still it was a quest to figure out the additional rules they have added, especially since the documentation was sparse and sloppy.
Posted in Chocolatey, Development, Power User, Windows, Windows 10, Windows 11, Windows 7, Windows 8, Windows 8.1, XML/XSD, XSD | Tagged: 101, 172, 205, 325, 374, 379, 4 | Leave a Comment »
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 »
Posted by jpluimers on 2025/03/18
In Visual Studio Code I already had [Wayback/Archive] C# – Visual Studio Marketplace: C# for Visual Studio Code (powered by OmniSharp) installed in (through code --install-extension ms-dotnettools.csharp), and wanted automatic XML documentation comments generation just like Visual Studio does:
[Wayback/Archive] XML documentation comments – document APIs using /// comments | Microsoft Learn
Posted in .NET, C#, Development, Hardware, Java, Java Platform, Keyboards and Keyboard Shortcuts, KVM keyboard/video/mouse, Power User, Software Development, XML, XML/XSD | Tagged: 1644, 2023, 4261, 48558, 48559, 8 | Leave a Comment »
Posted by jpluimers on 2025/03/06
Two sites that can help you out getting weather info on the console:
wttr.in is developed by [Wayback/Archive] Igor Chubin (@igor_chubin) / X and looks at the request header to figure out what kind of output it sends.
It supports various output formats, so on my TODO list is to see how they do their mapping: always an opportunity to learn (it’s based on Python and Go so I am curious what libraries they use as well).
From the documentation:
wttr.in currently supports five output formats:
- ANSI for the terminal;
- Plain-text for the terminal and scripts;
- HTML for the browser;
- PNG for the graphical viewers;
- JSON for scripts and APIs;
- Prometheus metrics for scripts and APIs.
The ANSI and HTML formats are selected based on the User-Agent string.
There are more parameters in the documentation on the main page of the repository and through this command:
curl wttr.in/:help
The idea is derived from [Wayback/Archive] GitHub – schachmat/wego: weather app for the terminal.
Oh: Igor has more repositories at [Wayback/Archive] chubin (Igor Chubin) · GitHub (including [Wayback/Archive] GitHub – chubin/cheat.sh: the only cheat sheet you need which is hosted at [Wayback/Archive] cheat.sh; I thought I had blogged about that before, but found it only in a draft note mentioning that I got it via [WaybackSave/Archive] Nicolas Krassas on X: “The only cheat sheet you need cheat.sh“)
A 7 timer JSON usage example is at [Wayback/Archive] Get Weather from 7Timer! · GitHub
It has documentation at
Output formats can be chosen from HTML, PNG, XML and JSON.
[Wayback/Archive] Hacker Public Radio – hpr4266 :: What’s the weather?
Lee writes a script to check what the weather is like ~ The Technology Community Podcast
HPR is a great podcast series!
--jeroen
Posted in *nix, *nix-tools, ash/dash, bash, bash, Development, Go (golang), JavaScript/ECMAScript, JSON, Power User, Python, Scripting, Software Development, Web Development, XML/XSD | Leave a Comment »
Posted by jpluimers on 2025/01/17
[Wayback/Archive] Welcome to the BAG: The Dutch Building and Addresses database – Bert Hubert’s writings
Bert made a test page for it too: [Wayback/Archive] berthub.eu/pcode/2513AA/14 (postal code for “Binnenhof”)
And a repository: [Wayback/Archive] GitHub – berthubert/bagconv: Convert Dutch building/dwelling administration into a simpler format
The BAG (Basisregistratie Adressen en Gebouwen) information, which is maintained by the Dutch Kadaster (Cadastre), allows bug reporting, which is processed remarkably quickly: [Wayback/Archive] Postcode + huisnummer niet uniek in Emmen? – Datasets / BAG – Geoforum
Via: [Wayback/Archive] bert hubert 🇺🇦🇪🇺: “I’ve updated my conversion of the official Dutch address, postcode, building database (BAG) with the July 2024 release. Description in English, API, code, CSV files can be found on …” – Fosstodon
--jeroen
Posted in C++, Database Development, Development, Software Development, SQLite, XML, XML/XSD | Leave a Comment »
Posted by jpluimers on 2024/12/18
While migrating from iTunes on one machine to Apple Music on another one, I needed to migrate part of the (disorganised) playlists.
I knew there was a binary ~/Music/iTunes/iTunes Library.itl file, but that is encoded or encrypted, making it hard to parse.
Luckily there is also ~/Music/iTunes/iTunes Music Library.xml which I found via the links below.
The iTunes library xml file is in the same directory as the .itl file. The file is in Apple plist format, and Python’s standard library has a good parser for it.
Posted in Apple, Development, iTunes, Mac OS X / OS X / MacOS, Power User, Python, Scripting, Software Development, XML, XML/XSD | Leave a Comment »
Posted by jpluimers on 2024/12/17
Finally an easier way to convert Office documents (and other formats) to markdown: [Wayback/Archive] GitHub – microsoft/markitdown: Python tool for converting files and office documents to Markdown. (after Google added a Markdown export feature to Google Docs about half a year ago, and basic Markdown formatting about 2 years ago – see below):
There are quite a few dependencies in [Wayback/Archive] markitdown/pyproject.toml at main · microsoft/markitdown · GitHub, so be prepared for that.
Supported formats (added links for clarity):
The MarkItDown library is a utility tool for converting various files to Markdown (e.g., for indexing, text analysis, etc.)It presently supports:
Google was first though:
There is speculation on why Microsoft introduced it just now ranging from “they need it for AI training” to “just late to the game”. I’m with the latter. Apple is even later, so if you want to convert Apple Notes to markdown, then you can use [Wayback/Archive] Import from Apple Notes – Obsidian Help.
Via various sources, including:
Posted in CSV, Development, Excel, HTML, HTML5, JSON, Lightweight markup language, MarkDown, Office, PDF, Power Point, Power User, Software Development, Word, XML/XSD | Tagged: MarkDown, Python | Leave a Comment »
Posted by jpluimers on 2024/11/22
Somehow this post missed the schedule and for a long time I forgot to properly checked for “missed schedule” posts.
Back in 2021, suddenly systems with speedtest-cli threw a [Wayback/Archive] ValueError: invalid literal for int() with base 10: ” by tzwickl · Pull Request #768 · sivel/speedtest-cli after accessing the speedtest.net servers.
Around 7-8 April, 2021 the speedtest.net/speedtest-config.php XML configuration suddenly had changed the value for the XPath expression /settings/server-config/@ignoreids from being a list of integers into empty, see the archived files below.
Posted in Development, JavaScript/ECMAScript, Python, Scripting, Software Development, XML/XSD, XPath | Tagged: 768, 769 | Leave a Comment »
The Wiert Corner - irregular stream of stuff 