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 ‘SocialMedia’ Category

Interesting try by Tame.it: Your Twitter timeline

Posted by jpluimers on 2014/07/07

I tried Tame.it for a while to condense my twitter timeline and separate noise from information.

It looks like my tweeps are so disparate that Tame finds it hard to distill the information.

But if you have a similar tweeps, Tame.it could do a much better job.

–jeroen

via Tame | Your Twitter timeline.

Posted in Power User, SocialMedia, Twitter | 2 Comments »

Building URLs to Old WordPress.com Stats (from a date in the past; via: Planet Botch)

Posted by jpluimers on 2014/04/28

Every once in a while you want to browse back to WordPress visitor stats from a while ago.

Well, you can hand-build your URLs like this:

Stats at the end of last year for the default WordPress.com blog:

The Old WordPress.com Stats – How to Access Them | Planet Botch post explains how to do this for non-default blogs as well.

–jeroen

via: Old WordPress.com Stats – How to Access Them | Planet Botch.

Posted in Power User, SocialMedia, WordPress | Leave a Comment »

Flickr: The Help Forum: Can’t view my original sizes; solve this manually with a simple URL workaround

Posted by jpluimers on 2014/04/17

In every new update, Flickr either seems to hide, or move useful options away.

About a month ago, this was the case with the “View All Sizes” of a photo. Having multiple sizes of a photo is one of the key features when Flickr was introduced. There is even a naming scheme for these resized photos.

A very useful option when you need thumbnails (for instance when you write a blog).

It later got resolved, but now the option is tucked away like 4 mouse clicks (on various areas of your screen) deep:

When selecting ‘download/all sizes’ a ‘view all sizes’ link now appears.

If there is nothing wrong with your typing skills, this is a very quick workaround: add `/sizes` at a specific part of the photo URL.

For instance, these URLs:     Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Flickr, Power User, SocialMedia | Tagged: , | Leave a Comment »

Fiddler2 to the max: inserting proxy authentication to use DropBox (or other app) behind a corporate firewall

Posted by jpluimers on 2014/04/16


A while ago, I was working with a not so cooperative corporate firewall. All web browsers would work fine, but most other applications would not go through the proxy in a nice way.

For instance, DropBox would show the dreadfull “Connection Error” dialog shown on the right.

That dialog basically means “Dropbox has no clue what happens, try fiddling with your proxy or account settings, then press Reconnect Now” to retry.

Many other applications had issues (for instance Visual Studio connecting to Team Foundation System was very unreliable and the workarounds clumsy).

CNTLM: not the solution

I got inspired by the [WayBack] I code and code: Tutorial: How to use Dropbox behind a corporate proxy server using CNTLM, even though I was pretty sure the corporate firewall was not NTLM based.

And indeed, CNTLM -v -M http://google.com -c CNTLM.INI would give errors like this:

cntlm: Proxy returning invalid challenge!
headers_send: fd 4 warning -999 (connection closed)
Connection closed

HTTP Fiddler: looks promising

So I fired up my old buddy [WayBack] Fiddler 2 HTTP debugging proxy.

Further on, you will learn that Fiddler2 is much more, but right now it is enough to know that it basically sits as a local proxy between your applications and the outside world. Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in .NET, .NET 2.0, .NET 3.0, .NET 3.5, .NET 4.0, .NET 4.5, base64, Cntlm, Development, DropBox, Encoding, Fiddler, JavaScript/ECMAScript, NTLM, Power User, Scripting, SocialMedia, Software Development, Web Development, Windows, Windows 7, Windows 8, Windows Server 2000, Windows Server 2003, Windows Server 2003 R2, Windows Server 2008, Windows Server 2008 R2, Windows Vista, Windows XP, Windows-Http-Proxy | Leave a Comment »

Why every now and then the “Is feedly blocked?” message dat https://feedly.com? (via: feedly: your news. delivered.)

Posted by jpluimers on 2014/04/10

Anyone know why every now and then Feedly displays the message below, but running it a couple of minutes later, it just loads fine?

No changes on my system whatsoever: it even repeats at various systems that do not have Adblock or other tools installed.

Error message:

Is feedly blocked?

Feedly is not able to load. It is probably because one of your extensions is blocking it. If you run Adblock, HTTPSEverywhere, Awesome screenshot etc.. please make sure that feedly.com is white listed.

Ask a question

–jeroen

via: feedly: your news. delivered..

Posted in Feedly, Power User, SocialMedia | Leave a Comment »

My initial thoughts on the new Community sites

Posted by jpluimers on 2014/04/06

(I just found out this post was marked “missed schedule” since April 6, 2014. It’s a [WayBack] known WordPress bug that on wordpress.com still raises it’s head every now and then. Sorry for that.)

The introduction of AppMethod wasn’t only introducing a new product based on the Object Pascal language and Firemonkey framework, it also shows which direction Embarcadero is taking with their community sites all hosted on community.embarcadero.com some of which replace parts of the EDN (Embarcadero Developer Network) sites.

These already saw the light:

Here is my initial impression on them. So below, phrasings like “it is” phrase how I feel about them.

The UI looks clean

Whereas most of the EDN sites look cluttered (some of which just look like a big landing page), the new sites look much cleaner. Less fuzz, more aimed towards their goal.

Existing EDN credentials are re-used

This is only part of the story. EDN has two credentials: a username and an email address. At the EDN sites, you can use either one. But not all community sites support that. I hope this means “not all community sites support that yet”.

So far, the Answers, Articles and Forums sections (which are hosted on the main site) understand authentication using either the username or email.

The Quality part

The community site is PHP based.

I have mixed feelings about this. On the plus side, PHP is used by many people, Embarcadero has a PHP based HTML5 Builder product (initially called Delphi for PHP, then RadPHP; well Delphi was almost called AppBuilder so that is still positive). On the negative side, even big PHP users like WordPress do horrible things with it (don’t get me started on their scheduling engine, or on breaking posts that contain source code).

Answers is new.

Answers does not have a predecessor within. It is a bit like a StackExchange site targeted at one product, but unlike StackOverflow, it feels more welcoming to new users. I hope that stays so, and that some people with capabilities like John Skeet will join it, and not the typical StackOverflow moderators  that think they can judge questions that are clearly out of their field of expertise.

I’m not yet sure how to maintain this in

Forums.

The forums server doesn’t keep articles forever: depending on the forum, the retention duration can be as little as a couple of months or less.

It means that valuable information gets lost as nobody puts this in the WayBack machine and the WayBack machine is not indexed by Google anyway.

Articles.

Currently there are the categories Tutorials, Technical Articles and Support.

Quality.

Quality is the future direction of QC. It is based on JIRA (from Atlassian). Whereas QC was developed in-house (initially bound to the then internal RAID) a long time before publicly accessible quality systems became widespread, JIRA is an external system.

QC is dated^w dead. Though [WayBack] it has a – for its age modern – WSDL API, the web interface is horrible as of nowadays standards, and even the [WayBack] Windows and [WayBack] Java clients mentioned on the [WayBack] QC home page are not a pleasant use (personally I still use the QC Plus client though it is not publicly available any more).

Embarcadero has used JIRA internally since at least 2009 (and presumably converted their internal RAID bug database to JIRA), so they have experience using it.

I love JIRA as it is the central piece in a lot of agile environments, has all its functionality on a web-based fashion backed with a publicly documented REST based  API so you can hook up native tools with ease and is in use by many closed and open source projects. There are options to host it yourself, or in the cloud or mix and match.

So I do welcome JIRA. But there are a few things that Embarcadero needs to fix:

  • Better integration with EDN login services (right now you can only login using the username you registered at EDN, but not with the email address you registered at EDN).
  • Making all reports of publicly available products also public just like on QC (I get it that bugs on products not publicly available are not visible to the public at large).

–jeroen

Posted in Appmethod, Delphi, Development, Missed Schedule, QC, SocialMedia, Software Development, WordPress | Leave a Comment »

When http:://Feedly.com doesn’t start with any more: start it through https://Feedly.com (via: @feedly your news. delivered.)

Posted by jpluimers on 2014/03/16

Recently when starting Feedly through http://feedly.com, I got this message in Chrome on my Retina MacBook Pro:

Is feedly blocked?

Feedly is not able to load. It is probably because one of your extensions is blocking it. If you run Adblock, HTTPSEverywhere, Awesome screenshot etc.. please make sure that feedly.com is white listed.

Ask a question

I paused AdBlock: same thing. I don’t use HTTPSEverywhere or the other tools mentioned.

Solution: start using https://feedly.com. Since I prefer https anyway, I can live with that (: Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Blogging, Chrome, Feedly, Power User, SocialMedia | Tagged: | Leave a Comment »

Fix je Facebook met Social Fixer – Lifehacking

Posted by jpluimers on 2014/03/10

Briljant! Fix je Facebook met Social Fixer – Lifehacking.

Posted in Chrome, Facebook, Google, Power User, SocialMedia | Leave a Comment »

How to Switch Google+ Stream from Multi-Column View to Single Column (via: TechnoDuet)

Posted by jpluimers on 2014/03/08

Subtle, as the “More” button got removed, but the Accessibility setting is still there:

If you also want to see the posts in ‘What’s Hot’ and Communities in single-column, then go to Account Settings -> Google + and select the Accessibility checkbox as shown below:

Enjoy the uncluttered and headache-free single-column layout of Google+ posts!

Now I can enjoy all G+ streams to be in one column format so it is easier to track the order of posts.

–jeroen

via: How to Switch Google+ Stream from Multi-Column View to Single Column – TechnoDuet.

Posted in G+: GooglePlus, Google, Power User, SocialMedia | Leave a Comment »

Formatting your G+ posts (via: Ahmed Zeeshan – Google+ – Google+ | The Early Adopter’s Guide)

Posted by jpluimers on 2014/03/07

Ever since I started G+, I was frustrated by the lack of markdown you can use.

Luckily, I found this post by Ahmed Zeeshan titled Google+ | The Early Adopter’s Guide Note.

It is not only the content of his post, but also that he made available the source template available, so it becomes much easier to start writing a G+ post.

Well done Ahmed!

Read his other posts too: highly recommended.

–jeroen

Posted in Blogging, G+: GooglePlus, Power User, SocialMedia | Leave a Comment »