Posted by jpluimers on 2014/10/31
Complaint Friday…
A long time ago, I complained about the (now old!) WordPress.com editor being wrong, wrong, wrong: Another example of the editor eating line breaks « WordPress.com Forums.
The promise then was that the new editor would be better.
The big news: the new editor is just as bad in this respect (and far worse in other respects).
Just watch the text around my signature and PS in the texts below and shiver.
Lets start with the original text of my GoToWebinar blog post today:
Posted in Power User, Software Development, Web Development, WordPress, WordPress | 1 Comment »
Posted by jpluimers on 2014/09/22
A while ago, i came across this interesting question: Are there optimal days/hours to post questions in order to get visibility and answers? – Meta Super User.
The recommended time 1400 UTC is related to my blog post scheduling behaviour.
Virtually all my blog posts are either (when both apply at the same time, that is pure coincidence):
I schedule posts on Monday through Friday:
So why the time difference of about 8 hours between 0600 UTC and 1400 UTC?
That has to do with the public I generally interact with: software developers speaking English, mainly living in European and USA, with a minority in India, Asia and down-under.
Posted in Facebook, G+: GooglePlus, LifeHacker, LinkedIn, Power User, SocialMedia, Twitter, WordPress | Leave a Comment »
Posted by jpluimers on 2014/09/05
On the StackExchange network, I try to keep track of the questions I asked, and answers I gave in order to see if they need follow up.
For instance, questions with answers that have no accepted answer usually indicate there is room for improvement.
On my own questions, it means I could accept an answer, or give out more information on how to better answer that question.
On mu answers to questions from others, it might mean I need to improve my answer, or comment on his question to explain it better.
The first category can be queried easily by the built in search capabilities:
http://stackoverflow.com/search?q=user%3ame%20is%3aanswer%20hasaccepted%3ano
The second category requires the Stack Exchange Data Explorer (SEDE) to execute some SQL:
My answers to questions that have no accepted answer – Stack Exchange Data Explorer.
Note some questions (like Wiki: Current state of the art of Delphi 3rd party TCP/IP components libraries – Stack Overflow) are not suited to have one ‘best’ answer.
Note the SEDE can be addictive. If it is starting to become that way, perform a Jon Skeet comparison.
Note the SEDE data is usually at least a few days older than the live data.
--jeroen
Posted in Development, Jon Skeet, Pingback, Power User, SocialMedia, Software Development, Stackoverflow | Leave a Comment »
Posted by jpluimers on 2014/07/18
Interesting for people that do not trust Cloud Storage providers: BitTorrent Labs’ BitTorrent Sync.
I’ve tried an early version, and it works “OK”. Not yet as well-integrated like for instance DropBox, but stable and fast enough.
Important thing for me: works on *nix, OS X and Windows. Hopefully mobile devices will follow soon.
At the time of writing (May 2013), it is the only cross platform freeware entry in Comparison of file synchronization software – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
In the mean time, Thomas Mueller (dummzeuch)wrote a nice blog post with background information on this: Bittorrent Sync, a secure DropBox alternative » twm’s blog.
–jeroen
Posted in *nix, Apple, DropBox, Linux, Mac, Mac OS X / OS X / MacOS, MacBook, MacBook Retina, MacBook-Air, MacBook-Pro, OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion, Power User, SocialMedia, SuSE Linux | Leave a Comment »
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 »
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 »
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: flickr, sizes | Leave a Comment »
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).
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
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 »
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.
–jeroen
via: feedly: your news. delivered..
Posted in Feedly, Power User, SocialMedia | Leave a Comment »
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.
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.
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
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 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
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.
Currently there are the categories Tutorials, Technical Articles and Support.
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:
–jeroen
Posted in Appmethod, Delphi, Development, Missed Schedule, QC, SocialMedia, Software Development, WordPress | Leave a Comment »
The Wiert Corner - irregular stream of stuff 