The Wiert Corner – irregular stream of stuff

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

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Linux – How to Securely Copy Files Using SCP examples

Posted by jpluimers on 2020/03/16

I love short and to the point examples. The list of permutations for scp is at [WayBack] Linux – How to Securely Copy Files Using SCP examples.

–jeroen

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Posted in *nix, *nix-tools, Development, Internet protocol suite, Power User, SSH, TCP | Leave a Comment »

worksheet function – How to add or subtract to, or increment, column letters in Excel? – Super User

Posted by jpluimers on 2020/03/13

[WayBack] worksheet function – How to add or subtract to, or increment, column letters in Excel? – Super User:

Here’s the best I’ve found so far: =SUBSTITUTE(ADDRESS(1,( COLUMN() + 1 ),4),1,"")The part in the middle marked in bold is the only part that changes. In this example, it’s taking the current column and adding 1, so returning B if it’s in column A and AA if it’s in column Z.

It is related to the question and answer [WayBack] Formula to return just the Column Letter in excel – Super User:

FYI on your original formula you don’t actually need to call the CELL formula to get row and column you can use:

=ADDRESS(ROW(),COLUMN())

Then as an extension of that you can use MID & SEARCH to find the $ and trim down the output so you are just left with the letter:

=MID(ADDRESS(ROW(),COLUMN()),SEARCH("$",ADDRESS(ROW(),COLUMN()))+1,SEARCH("$",ADDRESS(ROW(),COLUMN()),SEARCH("$",ADDRESS(ROW(),COLUMN()))+1)-2)

edit You can even simplify this further:

=MID(ADDRESS(ROW(),COLUMN()),2,SEARCH("$",ADDRESS(ROW(),COLUMN()),2)-2)

And it is part of a much more elaborate answer

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Posted in Development, Excel, Office, Power User, Software Development | Leave a Comment »

MacOS: Checking a disk for bad blocks

Posted by jpluimers on 2020/03/13

Hardware fails, but most disk tools on MacOS only check logical disk structures, not bad blocks.

Luckily, fsck_hfs can, though Apple is a bit secretive on it: [WayBack] Page Not Found – Apple Developer: ManPages/man8/fsck_hfs.8.html is empty, but there is [WayBack] man page fsck_hfs section 8 and the gist below.

Disk volumes on MacOS use a successor of HFS called HFS Plus – Wikipedia, but the tooling never changed names.

I got at the below parameters through [

This is the disk check command:

# sudo fsck_hfs -dylS /dev/disk3s1
** /dev/rdisk3s1 (NO WRITE)
    Using cacheBlockSize=32K cacheTotalBlock=65536 cacheSize=2097152K.
Scanning entire disk for bad blocks
   Executing fsck_hfs (version hfs-407.50.6).
** Performing live verification.
** Checking Journaled HFS Plus volume.
   The volume name is SanDisk400GB
** Checking extents overflow file.
** Checking catalog file.
** Checking extended attributes file.
** Checking volume bitmap.
** Checking volume information.
** The volume SanDisk400GB appears to be OK.
    CheckHFS returned 0, fsmodified = 0

The italic part is the bad block scanning. The normal part the hfs scanning, which will continue even after finding bad blocks.

If bad blocks are found, output looks more like on the right. If it looks like that, basically you know a disk is toast.

It can be slow, as I did not specify a cache, so it defaults to 32 Kibibyte. You can increase that by adding for instance -c 512m  for 512 Mebibyte cache, just read the short help or man page below.

This tremendously helps checking volumes containing many files, for instance [WayBack] Checking Very Large Time Machine Volumes – Mac OS X Hints

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Posted in Apple, Mac, Mac OS X / OS X / MacOS, Power User | 1 Comment »

Some links on bind rndc

Posted by jpluimers on 2020/03/13

No, this is not a random number generator, according to the documentation, bind rndc is the name server control utility. Again very undescriptive; luckily the full name found elsewhere is Remote Name Daemon Control.

Some links for my archive as often there are no man-pages installed on systems with bind:

–jeroen

Posted in *nix, bind-named, Linux, Power User | Leave a Comment »

Show the mmc and USB disks on a Raspberry Pi

Posted by jpluimers on 2020/03/13

Small trick:

find /dev | grep "sd\|mmc" && ls -al /dev/disk/by-id/

–jeroen

Posted in *nix, *nix-tools, Power User | Leave a Comment »

github – What is the current way to remove a git submodule? – Stack Overflow

Posted by jpluimers on 2020/03/12

There is git submodule add, but no git submodule remove. That one is called git submodule deinit, but still a lot of links on the internet do not mention it, so I’m glad there is a good answer to [WayBack] github – What is the current way to remove a git submodule? – Stack Overflow:

You have the git submodule deinit

git submodule deinit <asubmodule>    
git rm <asubmodule>
# Note: asubmodule (no trailing slash)
# or, if you want to leave it in your working tree
git rm --cached <asubmodule>
rm -rf .git/modules/<asubmodule>

deinit

Un-register the given submodules, i.e. remove the whole submodule.$name
section from .git/config together with their work tree.

Further calls to git submodule update, git submodule foreach and git submodule sync will skip any unregistered submodules until they are initialized again, so use this command if you don’t want to have a local checkout of the submodule in your work tree anymore.

If you really want to remove a submodule from the repository and commit that use git rminstead.

If --force is specified, the submodule’s work tree will be removed even if it contains local modifications.

–jeroen

Posted in Development, DVCS - Distributed Version Control, git, Source Code Management | Leave a Comment »

Current state: still fighting with rectum cancer, but chances for better quality of life

Posted by jpluimers on 2020/03/12

The below thread describes my current state; this is how the rest of the family is doing:

  • Eega is almost recovered from surgery of a set of huge and smaller cysts; her cancer seems not to have returned
  • Brother has his third big cold in 3 months time; hopefully it is not COVID-19; not much response from his caretakers. He is still very confused about the family situation and should get more care than the 6 hours a week he gets now (out of the entitled 15+) but requests for more care since 2017 have had no success
  • Mom’s Alzheimer’s is progressing fast: she thinks I’m her brother and insists I should take care of the burden of her problems

This is a follow-up on Far less active on blog on social media: some personal things that need to be done. about a year ago, where I did not know what year would be ahead.

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Posted in About, Personal | 2 Comments »

Corona virus crisis humour research

Posted by jpluimers on 2020/03/12

https://twitter.com/GMMKuipers/status/1237745540265390084

Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a Comment »

0.30000000000000004.com

Posted by jpluimers on 2020/03/12

Cool! It’s about Floting Point Math. Which means that in most programming languages 0.1 + 0.2 does not equal 0.3: [WayBack] 0.30000000000000004.com

–jeroen

Posted in Development, Software Development | Leave a Comment »

Installing SourceTree 3.x for Windows on an air-gapped machine

Posted by jpluimers on 2020/03/11

Since the “account.json” SourceTree search did not help me much, below are the steps for installing SourceTree for Windows 3.x on an air-gapped machine.

Prerequisites:

Steps:

  1. Run Process Explorer on the target system
  2. Run the SourceTreeSetup installer on the target system
  3. When registering, click on the “BitBucket” button on the target system
  4. In Process Explorer, find out the web browser process that the setup kicks off and grab the command-line, which looks like this when running Chrome as default browser:
    "%LocalAppData%\Google\Chrome\Application\chrome.exe" -- "https://bitbucket.org/site/oauth2/authorize?response_type=code&client_id=123456789012345678&state=authenticated&redirect_uri=http://localhost:34106/"
  5. Copy the URL bit https://bitbucket.org/site/oauth2/authorize?response_type=code&client_id=123456789012345678&state=authenticated&redirect_uri=http://localhost:34106/ over and paste it on a machine that has internet access
  6. Logon, and follow the steps until the URL look like this: http://localhost:34106/?state=authenticated&code=876543210987654321
  7. Copy that URL over to a web-browser on the target system and execute it
  8. Finish the installation steps on the target system

Now a new file should be in %LocalAppData%\Atlassian\SourceTree\accounts.json suitable for SourceTree 3.x. In the future you might be lucky enough to copy that to a target system before installing.

I was not so lucky, because my accounts.json was SourceTree 2.x based, which the SourceTree 3.x setup modifies, but is still not happy with.

Note these number differ on each request:

  • 123456789012345678 is a base64 encoded request ID
  • 876543210987654321 is a base64 encoded response ID
  • 34106 is a random TCP port where the installer is listening on to get the authentication information

Fiddler

Initially, I had Fiddler steps in the above, but found out I did not need those. One thing that complicated this is that Fiddler had been removed from Chocolatey for a while, so I was not sure it would stay as a product:

SourceTree

Now has an MSI installer:

Has old steps for 2.x versions to get around the above hoopla:

–jeroen

Posted in Development, DVCS - Distributed Version Control, Software Development, Source Code Management, SourceTree | Leave a Comment »

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