The Wiert Corner – irregular stream of stuff

Jeroen W. Pluimers on .NET, C#, Delphi, databases, and personal interests

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The things I didn’t notice during cancer survival: ftfy 6.0 and more versions got released during my recovery (including the poem “Ode to a Shipping Label”)

Posted by jpluimers on 2022/03/10

When writing this, [Wayback/Archive.is] ftfy · PyPI:history indicates ftfy was already at 6.0.3.

It is still my goto tool for figuring out the cause of Mojibake. I remember writing about it the first time in 2016 (see the ftfy category) when it was already at version 3.0, discovering it after a few Mojibake posts.

By now it even understands right-to-left Mojibake garbage: [Archive.is] Elia Robyn Speer on Twitter: “ftfy 5.8 is out! … A user reported that Hebrew text wasn’t being fixed, and this made me think about how to expand some of the trickier cases to non-Latin alphabets.”

Mojibake mishaps still happen a lot, so by now I hope I will have done a Mojibake themed Delphi talk at one or more conferences.

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Posted in !!con (bangbangcon), About, Autistic Spectrum/Autism, Cancer, Conference Topics, Conferences, Development, Encoding, Event, ftfy, Mojibake, Personal, Python, Rectum cancer, Scripting, Software Development, Unicode | Leave a Comment »

bimmer.work : VIN Decoder for BMW

Posted by jpluimers on 2022/03/09

For my link archive: [Wayback/Archive.is] bimmer.work : VIN Decoder for BMW

–jeroen

Posted in About, cars, E61 530xd touring, LifeHacker, Personal, Power User | Leave a Comment »

PowerShell debugging in Visual Studio Code: “PowerShell: Launch Current File w/Args” configuration template is missing

Posted by jpluimers on 2022/03/09

Not sure why, but most of my Visual Studio configurations have the “PowerShell: Launch Current File w/Args” debug configuration template. So here is the JSON you need to add in your launch.json configuration file.

        {
            "type": "PowerShell",
            "request": "launch",
            "name": "PowerShell Launch Current File w/Args Prompt",
            "script": "${file}",
            "args": [
                "${command:SpecifyScriptArgs}"
            ],
            "cwd": "${file}"
        }

The trick is the bold part that prompts Visual Studio for the arguments.

Note: in order to have such a file, you need to have opened a folder in Visual Studio Code first, then open a PowerShell script file from that directory second.

Related:

–jeroen

Posted in .NET, CommandLine, Development, PowerShell, PowerShell, Scripting, Software Development | Leave a Comment »

How do I drop a bash shell from within Python? – Stack Overflow

Posted by jpluimers on 2022/03/09

I needed this for my blog post tomorrow:

import os
os.system('sh') # or bash, tcsh, zsh, whatever. :-P

[Wayback] How do I drop a bash shell from within Python? – Stack Overflow

Thanks [Wayback] Chris Jester-Young!

This trick works at the Python shell.

–jeroen

Posted in Development, Python, Scripting, Software Development | Leave a Comment »

Download pfSense Community Edition: pfSense-CE-2.5.1-RELEASE-amd64.iso.gz

Posted by jpluimers on 2022/03/08

Since this is what I use to VPN home:

pfSense is a free and open source firewall and router that also features unified threat management, load balancing, multi WAN, and more

[Wayback] Download pfSense Community Edition: [Wayback] pfSense-CE-2.5.1-RELEASE-amd64.iso.gz

–jeren

Posted in Internet, pfSense, Power User, routers | Leave a Comment »

The Delphi documentation site docwiki.embarcadero.com has been down/up oscillating for 4 days is now down for almost a day.

Posted by jpluimers on 2022/03/08

The [Wayback/Archive] Embarcadero/IDERA Documentation Wiki has been mostly down since March 3rd, 2022 (not the main page, but almost all other pages are).

I modified [Wayback/Archive] Docwiki https – EmbarcaderoMonitoring to show the actual status of a deeper page as the (mostly static) top page is up, so monitoring that is useless as the deeper pages are down.

The deeper pages are dynamic and require a functioning MySQL database connection. That connection is mostly down (the error message is not clear, so this could be a network or a database server problem, or maybe even a loadbalancer gradually entering bit heaven).

Since it had been down for like 6 days in February*, I’d expect Idera to keep an eye on it and prepare for more downtime. Apparently that’s either not a 24×7 thing for them or  they missed the “pre” in preparation as it is dead-silent on .

It also runs on an unsupported version of Mediawiki 1.31** which by itself does not explain the outage, but does indicate that their idea of handling their internal lifetime management is different than what they advocate to clients in their software subscription model, see [Wayback/Archive] Delphi – Embarcadero store, [Wayback/Archive] Update Subscription – Embarcadero and [Wayback/Archive] Special Offers on RAD Studio, Delphi & C++Builder – Embarcadero:

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Posted in *nix, Bookmarklet, Delphi, Development, JavaScript/ECMAScript, Lightweight markup language, MediaWiki, Monitoring, Power User, Scripting, SocialMedia, Software Development, Twitter, Uptimerobot, Web Browsers | Leave a Comment »

Henry Markram speurt naar autisme in een mysterieus orgaan – NRC

Posted by jpluimers on 2022/03/08

Heel herkenbare “Intense World Theory” in het stuk van Niki Korteweg [Archive.is] Henry Markram speurt naar autisme in een mysterieus orgaan – NRC:

En ineens begrepen ze: er is geen sprake van een gebrek, van remmende hersencellen. Het is juist overgevoeligheid, overreagerende neuronen. Mensen met autisme worden overspoeld door de intense beleving.

Autisme is en blijft een ontwikkelingsstoornis. „Maar als we de verschillen kunnen waarderen en begrijpen dat wij ons moeten aanpassen, dan zal dat veel constructiever zijn”, denkt Markram. „Wij zeggen dat mensen met autisme geen empathie hebben. Terwijl wij zelf geen empathie hebben. Voor hen.”

Via:

–jeroen

Posted in About, Autistic Spectrum/Autism, Personal | Leave a Comment »

Need to keep an eye on Clockwise until it supports either personal (non G-Suite) Google accounts or Office-365

Posted by jpluimers on 2022/03/07

Too bad that when trying this out in 2021, you got the message

Please sign in with your work Google account.Clockwise does not currently support signing in with a personal Google account.

G-Suite only

G-Suite only

Note that if you have a G-Suite account, it needs these cookies to be accepted to signup via [Archive.is] https://www.getclockwise.com/signup:

Please enable cookies to sign in to Clockwise

Google sign in requires that third party cookies are enabled to work properly.
  1. Open cookie settings by going to this url: chrome://settings/content/cookies
  2. At the bottom, in the “Allow” section, click “Add”.
  3. In the dialog that opens, copy and paste: [*.]getclockwise.com
  4. Repeat step 2, this time in the dialog copy and paste: [*.]google.com
Without this setting, Clockwise may be unable to log you in or keep your session active.
The domains on which cookies are required.

The domains on which cookies are required.

More info:

Via:

–jeroen

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Posted in Google, GoogleCalendar, Power User | Leave a Comment »

Productivity is about focus, which is hard, so setting up your life can help a lot

Posted by jpluimers on 2022/03/07

Thanks Twitter!:

I use a single 4K monitor for this, and either different full-screen workspaces or remote desktop/screen/logon sessions per job.

My phone is always on vibrate, and sometimes in a different room.

I read e-mail usually once every few days, and try to do social media and chat outside my concentration sessions.

I try to concentrate on once thing at a time without getting distracted.

–jeroen

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Posted in LifeHacker, Power User | Leave a Comment »

PCIe bifurcation to split an x16 or x8 slot into multiple x4 channels: allows PCIe adapters with multiple NVMe cars

Posted by jpluimers on 2022/03/07

It looks like some X9 and X10 Supermicro boards already support PCIe bifurcation (splitting of PCIe slots into multiple channels), which might be worth a try to upgrade some of my older rigs to use NVMe instead of SATA storage as it will allow me to use adapters that support multiple NVMe devices into a single PCIe slot.

The X9 motherboards uses an LGA 2011-R socket, and the X10 motherboards an LGA 2011-R3 sockets.

Both use chipsets not being that different: the X9 uses the C600 series (which are similar to the X79 consumer series), and the X10 uses the C610 series (which are similar to the X99 consumer series).

This is what I found out about the bifurcation support for my boards:

References:

–jeroen

Posted in Hardware, Mainboards, Power User, SuperMicro, X10SRH-CF, X9SRi-3F, X9SRi-F | Leave a Comment »