Even seemingly simple data structures are worth explaining, especially when debugging. So I was glad with the explanation of [Wayback/Archive] Julia Evans on Twitter: “integer overflow”:
Archive for the ‘Conference Topics’ Category
b0rk (Julia Evans) on Twitter: “integer overflow”
Posted by jpluimers on 2025/10/16
Posted in Conference Topics, Conferences, Debugging, Development, Event, Software Development | Leave a Comment »
From 2023: It’s Time For A Change: datetime.utcnow() Is Now Deprecated – miguelgrinberg.com
Posted by jpluimers on 2025/10/14
I forgot how I bumped into this, but a while ago I found this interesting 2023 post: [Wayback/Archive] It’s Time For A Change: datetime.utcnow() Is Now Deprecated – miguelgrinberg.com explaining naive (without time zone) and aware (with time zone) date time objects.
It reminded me of Delphi, where NowUTC – as Delphi does have neither naive or aware date time objects – returns a floating point value (yes, it has a separate TDateTime type, but it represents the number of days that have passed since December 30, 1899 which in face stems from the Windows OLE Automation era* (OLE Automation is a subset of COM), see [Wayback/Archive] DateTime.ToOADate Method (System) | Microsoft Learn.
That method is mentioned in [Wayback/Archive] Why You Should Use NowUTC Instead of Now in Delphi: A Quick Guide – YouTube and Delphi deserves a way better infrastructure of date and time handling.
So this post is also a reminder to myself: figure out if there is an object oriented DateTime library for Delphi yet, and if not see if there is interest to create one similar to [Wayback/Archive] Noda Time | Date and time API for .NET by Jon Skeet.
Delphi references
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Posted in .NET, .NET Framework, .NET Standard, C#, Conference Topics, Conferences, Delphi, Development, Event, Jon Skeet, Python, Scripting, Software Development | Leave a Comment »
Algorism and algorithm are named after Muhammad ibn Musa al-Khwarizmi, founder of algebra (via @annefleurdd)
Posted by jpluimers on 2025/10/14
I was in my 50s when I learned that both algorism and algorithm are named after the 9th-century Persian mathematician Muhammad ibn Musa al-Khwarizmi who founded algebra.
Related:
Via:
- [Wayback/Archive] Anne Fleur Dekker on Twitter: “Een leuk wiskundefeitje voor op feesten en partijen: het woord ‘algoritme’ heeft helemaal niets te maken met een ritme oid. Het komt letterlijk van Meneer Algoritme, of eigenlijk ‘Al Choritme’, heel erg vernederlandst. Zijn hele naam in het Perzisch was:” (start of a thread, saved at [Wayback/Archive] Thread by @annefleurdd on Thread Reader App)
- Al-Chwarizmi – Wikipedia
–jeroen
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Posted in Algorithms, Conference Topics, Conferences, Development, Event, History, Software Development | Leave a Comment »
Question got closed in May 2025 due to bureaucrazy: Sites for beginning Delphi programmers – Stack Overflow
Posted by jpluimers on 2025/10/01
The whole idea of “community questions” was to create collective topics or references about important material without gaining any “points”.
Stack Exchange has left that concept in the dark by closing questions like this 2010 one that still contains relevant links: [Wayback/Archive] Sites for beginning Delphi programmers – Stack Overflow
The next step by their moderators is to delete the question, which will lose the valuable material forever.
Stack Exchange also dislikes humour.
And Embarcadero keeps deleting useful sites.
So for posterity, here is the question plus answers in full, amended with archived versions of each link when still available (I used † to mark the dead ones):
Read the rest of this entry »
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Posted in Conference Topics, Conferences, Delphi, Development, Event, Pingback, Software Development, Stackoverflow | 1 Comment »
I why I always use light mode: it’s easier on the eyes, as explained by Kristian Kohntopp
Posted by jpluimers on 2025/09/19
In a German thread, Kristian Köhntopp perfectly explained why I too always use light mode, so I put the English translations here:
- Dark mode is a strain on the eyes and useless.
- Specific: In darkness (and in dark mode) your pupils widen, the diaphragm opens. This reduces the depth of field and the eye muscles have to do more work and precision when focusing.
- Conversely, with light and a bright background you have a smaller pupil, a small aperture and more depth of field. This means that everything is automatically sharp, even if the eye has not readjusted.
The German thread:
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Posted in accessibility (a11y), Conference Topics, Conferences, Development, Event, LifeHacker, User Experience (ux) | Leave a Comment »
linux – Get final URL after curl is redirected – Stack Overflow (plus some Twitter scraping tricks)
Posted by jpluimers on 2025/08/06
Sometimes I need [Wayback/Archive] Redirect Checker | Check your Statuscode 301 vs 302 on the command-line, so cURL to the rescue: [Wayback/Archive] linux – Get final URL after curl is redirected – Stack Overflow. The relevant portions of answers and comments further below.
TL;DR:
Since I prefer verbose command-line arguments (you can find them at the [Wayback/Archive] curl – How To Use on-line man page) especially in scripts this HTTP GET request is what works with Twitter:
% curl --location --silent --output /dev/null --write-out "%{url_effective}\n" https://twitter.com/anyuser/status/20https://x.com/anyuser/status/20
This failed (twitter dislikes HTTP HEAD requests):
% curl --head --location --silent --output /dev/null --write-out "%{url_effective}\n" https://twitter.com/anyuser/status/20https://twitter.com/anyuser/status/20
Notes
Given so many of my scripts now run on zsh, I added the new-line because of command line – Why does a cURL request return a percent sign (%) with every request in ZSH? – Stack Overflow. You can strip that bit.
Note that these do not perform client side redirects, so they do not return the ultimate originating URL https://x.com/jack/status/20 (which was the first ever Tweet on what was back then called twttr) as Twitter on the client-side overwrites window.location.href with the final URL. Similar behaviour for getting the Twitter user handle of a Twitter user ID, more on Twitter tricks below.
Tweet by TweetID trick via [Wayback/Archive] Accessing a tweet using only its ID (and without the Twitter API) – Bram.us.
Further reading (thanks [Wayback/Archive] vise, [Wayback/Archive] Daniel Stenberg, [Wayback/Archive] Ivan, [Wayback/Archive] AndrewF, [Wayback/Archive] Roger Campanera, and [Wayback/Archive] Dave Baird):
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Posted in *nix, *nix-tools, bash, Batch-Files, Bookmarklet, Communications Development, Conference Topics, Conferences, CSS, cURL, Development, Event, HTTP, Internet protocol suite, JavaScript/ECMAScript, Power User, Scripting, SocialMedia, Software Development, TCP, Twitter, Web Browsers, Web Development | Tagged: 76 | Leave a Comment »
Some notes on testing locally modified chocolatey packages
Posted by jpluimers on 2025/08/01
A few notes after I helped updating [Wayback/Archive] Chocolatey Software | SetACL (Portable) 3.0.6.0 to version 3.1.2.0 and [Wayback/Archive] Updates glab from 1.22.0 to 1.24.1; fixes #2 by jpluimers · Pull Request #3 · corbob/ChocoPackages.
As the burden on maintainers (not just Chocolatey ones) is high, not all packages get updated soon after new underlying software versions arrive.
Which means the maintainers are often very happy when an occasional user helps and preferably sends in a pull request.
That brings me to the an important point IN DOCUMENTATION DO NOT LIMIT EXAMPELS TO ONLY ABBREVIATED PARAMETERS OR VERBS as that scares away occasional and novice users of your software.
Chocolatey documentation is no exception on this, hence this blog post meant for people other than maintaining chocolatey packages on a day to day base.
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Posted in CertUtil, Chocolatey, CommandLine, Conference Topics, Conferences, Development, Event, Power User, PowerShell, PowerShell, Scripting, Software Development, Windows | Tagged: 2, 2850, 3, 309, 561 | Leave a Comment »
From @forrestbrazeal: Boilerplate code through ChatGPT or Google slows development teams down similar to technical debt
Posted by jpluimers on 2025/07/30
Via [Wayback/Archive] Angie Jones on Twitter: “Chart by Forrest Brazeal” I found the original at [Wayback/Archive] Forrest Brazeal on Twitter: “Just saying. “ Read the rest of this entry »
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Posted in AI and ML; Artificial Intelligence & Machine Learning, Conference Topics, Conferences, Development, Event, Software Development, Technical Debt | Leave a Comment »
Important debugging strategy from b0rk: “after the bug is fixed: write a postmortem”
Posted by jpluimers on 2025/07/24
[Wayback/Archive] Julia Evans on Twitter: “after the bug is fixed: write a postmortem”
–jeroen
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Disabling the ever returning screens after Windows install/upgrade, and advertisements/feeds
Posted by jpluimers on 2025/07/21
This started out ad a post to make things easier for my mentally brother, but then I figured it makes it so much easier for myself as well: getting rid of the evern returning Windows nag screens. Not just the ones after logon during initial Windows install that get back about every other Windows 20H update (thank god they stepped away from 19## version numbering that felt so, ehm, last millennium), but also the various “suggestions” in start menu, on the taskbar and elsewhere.
I understand that basically giving Windows 10 and 11 for free to many Windows 7/8 licensed machines or Windows-preinstalled machines induces Microsoft to see Windows as an advertising environment, but hey: many users can do without these distractions.
It is hard to solve, as even the underlying registry settings seem to be reset every once in a while, and solving it globally is not an option: the settings are a per-user one. Which means you need to run script early during every Windows logon to overwrite these settings.
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Posted in Batch-Files, CommandLine, Conference Topics, Conferences, Development, Event, Power User, PowerShell, PowerShell, Registry Files, Scripting, Software Development, Windows, Windows 10, Windows 11, Windows Development | Tagged: 48 | Leave a Comment »
The Wiert Corner - irregular stream of stuff 