The Wiert Corner – irregular stream of stuff

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

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“The Pocket Guide to Debugging” zine and Debugging Puzzels by b0rk (Julia Evans)

Posted by jpluimers on 2025/09/10

I forgot scheduling this post, but it is still very relevant: about the debugging related materials by b0rk (Julia Evans) as they are not limited to just “The Pocket Guide to Debugging”.

It is excellent material to learn at home, work or be used during education.

Before the Elmo* takeover, she mainly used Twitter to post beta material and later the final versions. Easiest queries to find back the Tweets are:

Here are some of links found via the above lists of tweets:

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Posted in Debugging, Development, Software Development | Leave a Comment »

Excel: sorting an array on 3 different columns using functions

Posted by jpluimers on 2025/09/09

Given Excel is the most popular functional language (see the video under my post “Everybody should have an obsession with Lisp-like language at least once in their life” @KevlinHenney), this post is on sorting with Excel functions.

I had an array in Excel starting at row 2 (to exclude the headings) where I had to sort on 3 different columns: C, A, B (or numerically 3, 1, 2) so [Wayback/Archive] sorting – How to multi level sort an array in excel, using formulas? I am aware about the way, using SORT button on DATA tab – Stack Overflow (thanks [Wayback/Archive] Armaan Gohil and [Wayback/Archive] Jos Woolley) didn’t fully apply but did put me on the right track as I wasn’t aware that the SORT function allows to specify multiple columns using an embedded array argument.

The functions that worked:

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Posted in Development, Excel, Functional Programming, Office, Power User, Reddit, SocialMedia, Software Development | Tagged: | Leave a Comment »

vx-underground (@vxunderground) / Twitter

Posted by jpluimers on 2025/09/09

I thought I had been living under a stone for decades when I bumped into vx-underground (@vxunderground) / Twitter

The largest collection of malware source code, samples, and papers on the internet.

Password: infected

That appeared to be untrue as vx-underground, ran by a team of volunteers, started in 2019 ([Archive] web.archive.org/web//vx-underground.org) right when a few crisis in my life came together at the same time.

So here are the links for my archive as they are great content for both Red Teams and Blue Teams on many things cyber security related:

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Posted in Blue team, Pen Testing, Power User, Red team, Security | Leave a Comment »

Resetting the iDrive on a BMW E61 and E61 LCI

Posted by jpluimers on 2025/09/08

I drive an E61 and a friend an E61 LCI, so:

Oh, the channel also has this very useful video: [Wayback/Archive] BMW E60/E61 tips: how to manually shift the gear selector to Neutral (completely dead💀 car) – YouTube

--jeroen

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

Reminder to self: find back if non-archived early GMAIL (alias for GOLD MAIL on VAX/VMS) can be found back

Posted by jpluimers on 2025/09/08

Blog posts I should check:

In the meantime:

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Posted in History, Power User, Retrocomputing | Tagged: , , , , | Leave a Comment »

World Health Organisation – “Quick reference guide: responsible reporting on suicide”

Posted by jpluimers on 2025/09/05

With World Suicide Prevention Day coming up in less than a week, this is a reminder on how to report on this. Not just important to the media at large, but everyone on social media too.

When you are in The Netherlands:

  • Is your life in immediate danger? Call 112 immediately.
  • If your life is not in immediate danger but you could still use help, call 113 (standard rate) or 0800-0113 (free of charge) or start an online chat.

When you are outside The Netherlands, find help via these links:

Please read the 1 page large font and visually clear [Wayback/Archive] responsible-reporting-on-suicide.pdf.

The [Wayback/Archive] World Suicide Prevention Day 2024 started with the 2024-2026 triennial theme “Changing the Narrative on Suicide”, so please please please read the above PDF.

If you cannot view PDF on your computer, you can read it through the picture below, or an on-line PDF viewer in your web-browser through these links:

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Posted in About, Awareness, LifeHacker, Media, Personal, Power User, SocialMedia | Leave a Comment »

msftconnecttest/msftncsi: Trouble connecting to Web sites and services because of certificate errors? Check if you’re being held captive – The Old New Thing

Posted by jpluimers on 2025/09/05

Note that http://neverssl.com is the way to figure out if you are in a captive portal, see below.

In Windows 10, the name of the endpoint changed from msftncsi to msftconnecttest, presumably to make the purpose of the access more obvious in security and audit logs. Nobody will understand that NCSI stands for Network Connectivity Status Indicator.

[Wayback/Archive] Trouble connecting to Web sites and services because of certificate errors? Check if you’re being held captive – The Old New Thing

It refers to a few other interesting sites, for instance about modifying if/how NCSI detects internet connectivity:

As mentioned at the top: my blog post on http://neverssl.com: NeverSSL – helping you get online on WiFi networks requiring authentication

Other related blog posts:

–jeroen

Posted in Captive Portal, Internet, Power User, Windows, Windows 10, Windows 7, Windows 8, Windows 8.1 | Leave a Comment »

Ringvaartaquaduct | NavShip

Posted by jpluimers on 2025/09/04

Source: Ringvaartaquaduct | NavShip

Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a Comment »

LAN/WAN network building: test and know how to locate your cabling

Posted by jpluimers on 2025/09/04

I have seen too many sites where cabling was laid en never tested before actual use, which meant locating the cabling and faults was a nightmare.

Be sure to have good (which can be very simple, but more complex when Power over Ethernet is involved) testing hardware and use it during installation. You will thank yourself later.

A few videos that can be helpful:

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Posted in Development, Ethernet, fiber, Hardware, Hardware Development, Internet, Network-and-equipment, PoE - Power over Ethernet, Power User | Tagged: , , , , , | Leave a Comment »

Thread by Cameron R. Wolfe on Twitter about why GPT-3 is better than larger language models

Posted by jpluimers on 2025/09/04

For my link archive the [Wayback/Archive] Thread by @cwolferesearch on Thread Reader App starting with [Wayback/Archive] Cameron R. Wolfe on Twitter: “After GPT-3 was proposed, a lot of research was done to find an even better language model. Initial attempts focused on just training larger models. Contrary to popular belief, however, there is more to creating a good language model than size… 🧵[1/8]” / Twitter

3 years later, I’m anxious to know what the current state of the art on GPT is, as between GPT-2 and GPT-3 there was about a 3 year period.

–jeroen

Posted in AI and ML; Artificial Intelligence & Machine Learning, Cloud Development, Development, GPT-3, Software Development | Leave a Comment »