The Wiert Corner – irregular stream of stuff

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

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Parable of the Polygons – a playable post on the shape of society

Posted by jpluimers on 2017/06/15

A diverse community pays off but also needs investment from everyone. Small steps…

A playable post on how harmless choices can make a harmful world.

Source: Parable of the Polygons – a playable post on the shape of society

–jeroen

Posted in Development, Fun, History, Software Development | Leave a Comment »

What the DEC?!? Records of Minicomputer Giant Digital Equipment Corporation Open for Research at CHM | Computer History Museum

Posted by jpluimers on 2017/06/14

The records represent the largest and most complete set of DEC records in existence, dating from 1947 through 2002, with the bulk from the company’s years of operation from 1957 through 1998, when they were bought by Compaq Computer. The collection is a comprehensive technical history of every major computing innovation at DEC, as well as its nontraditional business culture, which still serves as an industry model—nearly every contemporary company strives for a “culture of innovation.” The processing of the collection presents an extraordinary opportunity to study DEC’s product lines and business practices in depth as was never before possible. Very few companies as influential as DEC have as long a history, and the breadth and depth of this collection makes it unique in its comprehensiveness.

Source: [WayBack] What the DEC?!? Records of Minicomputer Giant Digital Equipment Corporation Open for Research at CHM | Computer History Museum

via: [WayBack] Alan Cox – Google+

I could spend months in this archive (:

The PDP-11 and VAX-11/750 were the machines I first learned about DECNET, EARN and BITNET.

–jeroen

Posted in History | Leave a Comment »

Mikrotik firewall URLs

Posted by jpluimers on 2017/06/14

Some links that inspired me for various Mikrotik firewall rules:

–jeroen

Posted in Development, Internet, MikroTik, Power User, RouterOS, routers, Scripting, Software Development | Leave a Comment »

Firebird; testing for NULL and equality in practice: IS [NOT] DISTINCT FROM

Posted by jpluimers on 2017/06/14

Boy, I totally missed that this was introduced back then in Firebird 2.0:

 In Firebird 2 and higher, you test for null-encompassing equality with DISTINCT. This has already been discussed, but here’s a quick recap. Two expressions are considered:
  • DISTINCT if they have different values or if one of them is NULL and the other isn’t;
  • NOT DISTINCT if they have the same value or if both of them are NULL.

[NOT] DISTINCT always returns true or false, never NULL or something else. Examples:

if (A is distinct from B) then...
if (Buyer1 is not distinct from Buyer2) then...

Splendid!

Source: Testing for NULL and equality in practice

–jeroen

Posted in Database Development, Development, Firebird | Leave a Comment »

Bug fixes from both sides for “Windows 10 Creators update and Delphi debugging don’t go well”

Posted by jpluimers on 2017/06/13

It looks like Microsoft and Embarcadero solved their ends for [WayBack] Windows 10 Creators update and Delphi debugging don’t go well… :

The issue was caused by the Windows LoadLibrary trying to optimise loading which backfired for libraries (PE files like DLL/EXE…) that have multiple import tables in them as generated by the Delphi and C++ Builder linker (and maybe other linkers as well).

Microsoft finetuned their optimisation whereas a future update to Delphi and C++ Builder will generate more optimised import tables.

–jeroen

via [WayBack] Blog post “The Issue with Delphi Runtime Packages and Windows 10 Creators Update”… – Marco Cantù – Google+

 

Posted in Delphi, Development, Power User, Software Development, Windows, Windows 10 | Leave a Comment »

URLs for Mikrotik scripts to block IP addresses after repetitive login failures

Posted by jpluimers on 2017/06/13

For my research list:

–jeroen

Posted in Development, Internet, MikroTik, Power User, RouterOS, routers, Scripting, Software Development | Leave a Comment »

Keep consistent formatting – via: The Oracle at Delphi: Code is the language, formatting is the dialect.

Posted by jpluimers on 2017/06/13

When this developer finally went to commit his/her changes, they had also reformatted most of the codebase into his/her preferred coding style/format. This was even for files for which no other changes had been made!Imagine the next developer coming along and pulling down the latest changes from the source control system and trying to merge them into their own local changes.

Because of all these code-format-only changes, it became nearly impossible to merge any changes without going through every conflicted file and painstakingly reconcile the changes.

I’ve seen this happen on a few projects where there have been sequential single developers some of which reformatted the whole code base within a few days of taking over.

It made it impossible to perform a “blame” or proper history tracking of feature changes.

That increased the cost of maintenance a lot.

I’ve been on several teams that enforced a pre-checkin standardised formatting of the code. Only rarely that causes problems, usually it’s a blessing to as it makes for a consistent formatting of the code-base where it is much easier to cut the crap and focus on what the real problem is.

–jeroen

Source: The Oracle at Delphi: Code is the language, formatting is the dialect.

Posted in .NET, C#, Delphi, Development, Software Development | 2 Comments »

QC overview

Posted by jpluimers on 2017/06/12

I wish I made WayBack copies when I drafted the below QC post last year sans [WayBack] links.

Edit 20171221: since QC is back up, I’ve archived the queries. I still have to archive the reports.

Some QC entries I forgot to archive:

Luckily I did archive most of the QC entries I posted about after november 2013.

About 11-thousand of 135-thousand entries are archived by now, in part of a script I tried to make early 2016 (but crashed after a few thousand entries):

https://web.archive.org/web//http://qc.embarcadero.com/wc/qcmain.aspx

About 5 thousand entries are here, but I’m not sure which ones are duplicate:

https://web.archive.org/web//http://qc.codegear.com/wc/

About 20 thousand entries are here, but I’m also not sure which ones are duplicate:

https://web.archive.org/web//http://qc.borland.com/wc/

–jeroen

Posted in Delphi, Development, QC, Software Development | Leave a Comment »

Reverse ssh tunnel between two linux boxes to allow RDP traffic over port 3389

Posted by jpluimers on 2017/06/12

You know the drill: site that limits incoming traffic and has painful VPN. Luckily this time outgoing ssh traffic on port 22 was allowed (because they do SFTP which is SSH File Transfer).

Since I’ve outside Linux boxes and could run a Linux VM there (all Tumbleweed based), this allowed me to do a reverse SSH tunnel. Those are always a bit confusing, but this set of drawings really helps: What’s ssh port forwarding and what’s the difference between ssh local and remote port forwarding – Unix & Linux Stack Exchange [WayBack].

Which brings me to a statement like this:

ssh -o "ExitOnForwardFailure yes" -R :3389:192.168.199.114:3389 -p 33322 93.184.216.34

That didn’t work: a remote machine could not RDP to port 3389, but a local telnet localhost 3389 would. The reason is that by default sshd binds a remote port to the local address only and not the wildcard addres.

So you have to open up the remote config a bit: at least /etc/sshd_config and most likely also your firewall.

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in *nix, Communications Development, Development, Internet protocol suite, Linux, openSuSE, Power User, SSH, SuSE Linux, TCP, Tumbleweed | Leave a Comment »

munki/createOSXinstallPkg: Tools for packaging OS X installers – upgrade Mac OS X from InstallESD.dmg

Posted by jpluimers on 2017/06/12

You can use this package to install OS X on an empty partition, but perhaps more interestingly, you can also use it to upgrade existing OS X installations to a newer version of the OS X. There are many tools and workflows that support the installation of Apple packages; you can use these together with an OS X installation package to upgrade machines to the latest version of OS X.This is especially interesting when used with tools like Munki — you can automate the upgrade of a group of machines while still preserving user data, or offer an upgrade as a “Self-Service”-type option where a user can initiate an OS X upgrade themselves without needing to have administrative rights.

I will probably need this one day.

Source: munki/createOSXinstallPkg: Tools for packaging OS X installers

–jeroen

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

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