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 ‘Event’ Category
b0rk (Julia Evans)Â 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 .NETÂ by Jon Skeet.
Delphi references
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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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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 VERBSÂ 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 »
Not just for Delphi, but any environment: Why You Should Use NowUTC Instead of Now in Delphi: A Quick Guide
Posted by jpluimers on 2025/07/30
The video is from a while back, but very relevant and shows in Delphi what I have been advocating to software developers for a very long time:
- when timestamping use UTC
- when storing the timestamp store both the UTC timestamp and optionally the UTC timezone/offset and optionally daylight saving indicator of the region it was recorded from
This holds for any environment, so .NET / C#, Python, Delphi and many others as well:
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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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Today, very briefly, Tweakers.net leaked the WHY2025 badge: a Konsool/Tanmatsu remix with two ESP32s, a LORA module, screen, keyboard and sensors
Posted by jpluimers on 2025/07/24
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The leak was short enough for Google to index the imagery and this text:
WHY2025 nam het zekere voor het onzekere door een ESP32-controller, een lora-chip en een kraakhelder scherm in zijn badge te verwerken. Tweakers …
Edit 20250727: two days later the page got reinstated without in their “Gathering of Tweakers” portion of the site a clarification why it was taken off-line for two days. It is still at the same URL, so I re-archived it: [Wayback/ArchiveBad] Dit is de WHY2025-badge met twee ESP32’s en een loramodule (need to re-archive in Archive.is as their IP got blocked)
The page now is a nice 404: [Wayback/Archive] Dit is de WHY2025-badge met twee ESP32’s en een loramodule
Not sure why the page got retracted, as the specs got released on LinkedIn a month ago at [Wayback/Archive] 🚀 Officially public launched: the WHY2025 Badge! | Jelmer Lopes Terto:
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The Wiert Corner - irregular stream of stuff 