The Wiert Corner – irregular stream of stuff

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

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Wolfgang Rupprecht on Dennis H. Klat, Carlos Hawking and Deeklatt – Google+

Posted by jpluimers on 2018/03/18

Wow: [WayBack]ย Wolfgang Rupprecht – Google+:

Dennis H. Klatt 1938 – 1988

I knew him at MIT. He was my undergraduate thesis advisor and was a kind and gentle person. When I knew him around 1980 he was about to build the prototype for the first Klatt Talker as it was called then. He had speech samples generated by running his mathematical model of the vocal tract on a large mainframe, but no way to generate speech in real time. I remember being quite happy years later when I heard he had convinced DEC to produce it. The local Boston radio stations would sometimes use it on air when they were goofing around. The initial voice (and the only voice early on) had a bug that made it sound like a Mexican accent to most people. It wasn’t intentional and was a bit of a surprise that a vocal tract modeled from first principles would sound that way. Going with that observation and figuring it was best to advertise bugs as features, the voice was often called “Carlos”. I didn’t realize that Hawking’s voice was also based on the Klatt models (and Klatt’s own voice at that!)

Poking around Google to see what else Google had on him dredged up one more interesting tidbit. There was a character in a TV cartoon called Deeklatt that used his voice. I wonder how many people realize that Deeklatt was a play on D. Klatt. Dennis, we should all be so lucky as to leave a legacy like yours.

–jeroen

Posted in History, LifeHacker, science | 1 Comment »

Opinion needed: DIY or branded scanner for scanning film negatives and slides?

Posted by jpluimers on 2018/03/16

I’ve a ton of slides, negatives and photos to scan and want to automate the process as much as possible. Think thousands.

Opinions are welcome on both the hardware to use and the process.

It looks like for slides and negatives the opinions vary betweenย building your own rig, fiddling with flatbed lighting or buying a tad more expensive one.

But that was 3 years ago. How’s the state of the art right now?

–jeroen

via:ย [WayBack]ย Guess I’ve got a lot to do over the holidays… I’m pretty sure #Googleโ€ฆ

Posted in LifeHacker, Power User | Leave a Comment »

0x8024400E error with WSUS SP2

Posted by jpluimers on 2018/03/16

From a note a very long time ago: [WayBack]ย 0x8024400E error with WSUS SP2

TL;DR:

  1. ensure you have at leastย KB2938066 installed.
  2. while upgrading WSUS, ensure you reboot the server after each update.

Related:ย [WayBack]ย windows – WSUS clients failing to get updates with error 80072EE2 – Server Fault

–jeroen

Posted in Power User, Windows, Windows Server 2008, Windows Server 2008 R2 | Leave a Comment »

Tumbleweed on Raspberry Pi 3 – Bug 1084419 โ€“ Glibc update to 2.27 causes segfault during name resolution

Posted by jpluimers on 2018/03/15

Need to watch these:

A few notes:

  • It is inside the glibc name resolution
  • IPv6 is OK, IPv4 fails.
  • ping/nslookup (which do not depend on glibc) are OK
  • there is an intermediate fix requiring direct osc downloads

A simple test case

Failing situation

$ curl --silent --show-error http://example.org > /dev/null
Segmentation fault (core dumped)

Succeeding situation

$ curl --silent --show-error http://example.org > /dev/null

Non related, but in hindsight my own stupid fault during a similar update: a post mortem

Most important bits of my external infrastructure - page 1

Most important bits of my external infrastructure – page 1

I thought I had forgot about the SuSEfirewall2 changes (On my research list: migrate from OpenSuSE SuSEfirewall2 to firewalld) so assumed that was the reason I broke one of my secondaries (which runs on a Raspberry Pi 2):

Mistakes like these are the reason to have secondaries in the first place https://infrastatus.wiert.me and do port-mortems.

Which is kind of odd, as the SuSEfirewall2ย didn’t throw any warnings like at this similar one:

This one still works because it is on the firewall in front of the Raspberry Pi 2:

(Screenshots of the above URLs are below).

In fact it was another mistake: I had forgotten to make the DHCP lease static, which resulted in a wrong IP address to be assigned upon reboot, instantly making the firewall rules invalid:

I could have fixed this remotely when I had thought about this.

–jeroen

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in *nix, Development, Hardware Development, Linux, openSuSE, Power User, Raspberry Pi, SuSE Linux, Tumbleweed | 3 Comments »

EmbarcaderoMonitoring – monitoring the Embarcadero internet related services

Posted by jpluimers on 2018/03/15

Over time, there are lots of complaints about Embarcadero related internet services (like forums, QC, Appanalytics, docwiki, blogs,ย web site, maintenance,ย …) so to track uptime, I’ve created a set ofย EmbarcaderoMonitoringย pages:

This is preliminary work based on my own lists of Embarcadero endpoints combined with some research like [WayBack] dnsdumpster embarcadero.com.pngย and [WayBack] IdentIPSpy

Underneath, they run on the uptimerobot.com infrastructure which has a limit of 50 free monitors.

It means I have to:

  • trim this down for relevancy
  • better document the endpoint
  • find correct endpoint targets for the black (disabled) and red (down) entries as a few of them might need tweaking
  • maybe split off an insecure and secure version (now most subdomains have both http and https monitored)

Any ideas on improving this are welcome: please post a comment here on on the resulting G+ thread.

Note it likely won’t show cases like when the website was hackedย or TLS certificate issues like inย SSLLabs security reports for some embarcadero subdomains. I need to think about a means for those, as it will certainly help monitoring my own infrastructure in a similar way.

–jeroen

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in *nix, Cloud, Development, DevOps, Infrastructure, Monitoring, Power User, Software Development, Uptimerobot | Leave a Comment »

Stop using anemic daily stand-up questions | Software on a String

Posted by jpluimers on 2018/03/15

TL;DR:

Reminding everybody of the actual purpose of the daily stand-up and of the goal(s) you have for the sprint may be all thatโ€™s needed to give the shortened versions some much needed context and focus.

Always read the Scrum guide, as it states the purpose of this meeting:

The Daily Scrum is a 15-minute time-boxed event for the Development Team to synchronize activities and create a plan for the next 24 hours.

Source: [WayBack]ย Stop using anemic daily stand-up questions | Software on a String

via: [WayBack]ย Marjan Venema – Google+

–jeroen

Posted in Agile, Development, Scrum, Software Development | Leave a Comment »

Delphi: do not mix interfaces and classes part X

Posted by jpluimers on 2018/03/15

A very interesting discussion on what the mixing of interfaces and classes can get you into: [WayBack] I’ve got an interface with generics which accepts classes:IMyGeneric = interface…..end;What I want to do is to allow this interface toโ€ฆ – John Kouraklis – Google+

TL;DR: do not mix interfaces and classes.

As often, Asbjรธrn Heid chimes in showing some insight on clever mixing of the two with sample code accepting an unconstrained type. Don’t do that unless you really know what’s going on behind the scenes.

–jeroen

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Delphi, Development, Software Development | 4 Comments »

GitHub – keith-turner/ecoji: Encodes (and decodes) data as emojis

Posted by jpluimers on 2018/03/14

[WayBack] GitHub – keith-turner/ecoji: Encodes (and decodes) data as emojis:

Ecojiย ๐Ÿฃ๐Ÿ”‰๐Ÿฆ๐Ÿ”ผ

Ecoji encodes data as 1024ย emojis, its base1024 with an emoji character set. As a bonus, includes code to decode emojis to original data.

Sick. Works splendid when all your systems are fully nice to Unicode.

None are. So there’s a German word for it:

Nein

Via:

 

–jeroen

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Development, Encoding, Fun, Go (golang), Software Development, Unicode | Leave a Comment »

Medisch dossier | Autoriteit Persoonsgegevens: wie heeft recht op inzage/wijziging/verwijdering van welke gegevens en waarom wel/niet?

Posted by jpluimers on 2018/03/14

[Archive.is] Medisch dossier | Autoriteit Persoonsgegevens, meer details in [Archive.is]ย praktijkgids_patientgegevens_in_de_cloud_def.pdf.

Doordat een combinatie van regelgeving van toepassing kan zijn – waaronder “Wet op de geneeskundige behandelingsovereenkomst” (WGBO), “Wet bescherming persoonsgegevens” (Wbp) of/en “Wet bijzondere opnemingen in psychiatrische ziekenhuizen” (Wet Bopz) – is het een lastig gebied, niet alleen voor jezelf, maar ook voor ouders/verzorgers/vertegenwoordigers.

Bovenstaande link heeft meer informatie over wie er recht heeftย op inzage/wijziging/verwijdering van welke gegevens en waarom wel/niet.

–jeroen

Posted in LifeHacker, Power User | Leave a Comment »

Aerotwist – ๐ŸŒŸ When everything’s important, nothing is! ๐ŸŒŸ

Posted by jpluimers on 2018/03/14

Interesting read of about 20 minutes on the time between the request of an URL and the actual visible rendering clues.

Do libraries and frameworks prioritize components on boot? If so, how, and if not what can we do? And, in exploring that question, I discovered that Server-Side Rendering isn’t a silver bullet!

Source: [WayBack]ย Aerotwist – ๐ŸŒŸ When everything’s important, nothing is! ๐ŸŒŸ

The state about a year ago was that progressive rendering had the best results as seen on the right.

I wonder if that has changed by now.

–jeroen

via:ย [WayBack] ๐ŸŒŸ When everything’s important, nothing is! ๐ŸŒŸ ย -via FlynxGood read for javascriptโ€ฆ – Roderick Gadellaa – Google+

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

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