The Wiert Corner – irregular stream of stuff

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

  • My badges

    Mastodon

  • Twitter Updates

  • My Flickr Stream

    20140508-Delphi-2007--Project-Options--Cannot-Edit-Application-Title-HelpFile-Icon-Theming20140430-Fiddler-Filter-Actions-Button-Run-Filterset-now20140424-VMware-Fusion-6.0.3.-no-reclaimable
    More Photos

  • Pages

  • All categories

  • Enter your email address to subscribe to this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email.

    Join 1,828 other subscribers

macos – How can I list all user accounts in the terminal? – Ask Different

Posted by jpluimers on 2018/03/19

With system account starting with underscore:

dscl . list /Users

Without underscore, so only regular accounts:

dscl . list /Users | grep -v ^_.*

Source: [WayBack] macos – How can I list all user accounts in the terminal? – Ask Different

–jeroen

Posted in Apple, iMac, Mac, Mac OS X / OS X / MacOS, MacBook, MacBook Retina, MacBook-Air, MacBook-Pro, MacMini, macOS 10.12 Sierra, OS X 10.10 Yosemite, OS X 10.11 El Capitan, OS X 10.9 Mavericks, Power User | Leave a Comment »

A beginner’s guide to beefing up your privacy and security online

Posted by jpluimers on 2018/03/19

Want to protect your security and privacy? Here are some places to start:

via: [WayBack] I think I’ll keep this article somewhere where I can easily share it with the famz the coming days :) – Roderick Gadellaa – Google+

–jeroen

 

 

Posted in Power User, Security | Leave a Comment »

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

Posted by jpluimers on 2018/03/18

Wow: [WayBack] 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 between 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: [WayBack] Guess I’ve got a lot to do over the holidays… I’m pretty sure #Google…

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] 0x8024400E error with WSUS SP2

TL;DR:

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

Related: [WayBack] 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 – 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 SuSEfirewall2 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, web site, maintenance, …) so to track uptime, I’ve created a set of EmbarcaderoMonitoring pages:

This is preliminary work based on my own lists of Embarcadero endpoints combined with some research like [WayBack] dnsdumpster embarcadero.com.png 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 hacked or TLS certificate issues like in 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 that’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] Stop using anemic daily stand-up questions | Software on a String

via: [WayBack] 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 to… – John Kouraklis – Google+

TL;DR: do not mix interfaces and classes.

As often, Asbjørn 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:

Ecoji 🏣🔉🦐🔼

Ecoji encodes data as 1024 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 »

« Previous Entries
Next Entries »