The Wiert Corner – irregular stream of stuff

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

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If you need to know underlying information on Delphi versions

Posted by jpluimers on 2016/08/18

Since I’m not that fast at updating List-Delphi-Installed-Packages.ps1 [WayBack] (which I should rename into something containing the word Version in it), here are some useful links to stay up-to-date:

–jeroen

Posted in Delphi, Development, Software Development | 2 Comments »

.NET/C#: two ways of creating an empty array

Posted by jpluimers on 2016/08/18

Empty arrays are not used often as arrays usually are about the presence data, not about the absence.

Here are two ways based on the int data type in C# (the original [WayBack] examples [WayBack] are using string, but since string itself is also a kind of array…):

Specify a size of zero:

int[] a = new int[0];

Specify an empty initialisation:

int[] a = new int[] { };

Though many people think arrays are a thing of the past, I think it is one of the first generic types and have their place. For one, enumerating over arrays using foreach is a lot faster in many environments than enumerating over other data types. Another thing is that the fixed nature of arrays can be very beneficial in setting constraints.

That’s why I like the balanced view from Eric Lippert [WayBack] in Arrays considered somewhat harmful – Fabulous Adventures In Coding – Site Home – MSDN Blogs [WayBack]

–jeroen

via:

Posted in .NET, .NET 1.x, .NET 2.0, .NET 3.0, .NET 3.5, .NET 4.0, .NET 4.5, C#, C# 1.0, C# 2.0, C# 3.0, C# 4.0, C# 5.0, C# 6 (Roslyn), Development, Software Development | Leave a Comment »

Glitch in `brew update` – just run it again when you see `Error: update-report should not be called directly!`

Posted by jpluimers on 2016/08/17

If you see the error below when running brew update, then you bumped in a small brew glitch [WayBack]. The solution is usually to just run brew update again [WayBack] (thanks Ashley Willis [WayBack]) and it will likely run fine:

$ brew update
/usr/local/Library/brew.sh: line 32: /usr/local/Library/ENV/scm/git: No such file or directory
/usr/local/Library/brew.sh: line 32: /usr/local/Library/ENV/scm/git: No such file or directory
/usr/local/Library/brew.sh: line 32: /usr/local/Library/ENV/scm/git: No such file or directory
/usr/local/Library/brew.sh: line 32: /usr/local/Library/ENV/scm/git: No such file or directory
/usr/local/Library/brew.sh: line 32: /usr/local/Library/ENV/scm/git: No such file or directory
/usr/local/Library/brew.sh: line 32: /usr/local/Library/ENV/scm/git: No such file or directory
/usr/local/Library/brew.sh: line 32: /usr/local/Library/ENV/scm/git: No such file or directory
/usr/local/Library/brew.sh: line 32: /usr/local/Library/ENV/scm/git: No such file or directory
/usr/local/Library/brew.sh: line 32: /usr/local/Library/ENV/scm/git: No such file or directory
/usr/local/Library/brew.sh: line 32: /usr/local/Library/ENV/scm/git: No such file or directory
/usr/local/Library/brew.sh: line 32: /usr/local/Library/ENV/scm/git: No such file or directory
/usr/local/Library/brew.sh: line 32: /usr/local/Library/ENV/scm/git: No such file or directory
/usr/local/Library/brew.sh: line 32: /usr/local/Library/ENV/scm/git: No such file or directory
Error: update-report should not be called directly!

–jeroen

via:

Posted in Apple, Home brew / homebrew, Power User | Leave a Comment »

Some interesting encoding/Unicode/text articles on kunststube and links for test files of various encodings

Posted by jpluimers on 2016/08/17

After yesterdays post on Testing and static methods don’t go well together, I read around on Source (kunststube [WayBack]) a bit more and found these very nice articles on encoding,Unicode and text:

Related on those, some other nice readings:

–jeroen

Posted in Ansi, ASCII, CP437/OEM 437/PC-8, Development, EBCDIC, Encoding, ISO-8859, ISO8859, Shift JIS, Software Development, Unicode, UTF-16, UTF-8, UTF16, UTF8, Windows-1252 | Leave a Comment »

Builds ChaCha20 version of openssl on Mac OS X static without dylib for use with testssl.sh

Posted by jpluimers on 2016/08/17

A while ago, testssl.sh [WayBack] needed Darwin binaries (for OS X): Supply Darwin binaries + install documentation · Issue #127 · drwetter/testssl.sh [WayBack]

So I created the small Bourne shell (sh) script below to deliver them.

It allows me to update these gists:

The build script itself is in a gist as well: https://gist.github.com/f4de3937630b87753133.git [WayBack]

It helped me to contribute to these testssl.sh issues:

Not all of these binaries are in https://github.com/drwetter/testssl.sh/tree/master/bin [WayBack] as it makes the testssl.sh repository too bloated. Some (including non-OSX builds made by others) are here:

Eventually the script might get merged into https://github.com/drwetter/testssl.sh/blob/master/utils/make-openssl.sh [WayBack] as there is a Darwin switch in this commit: https://github.com/drwetter/testssl.sh/commit/6efc3e90f52e5926b0853d3b2fb221b631dcf452 [WayBack]

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Apple, Development, Mac, Mac OS X / OS X / MacOS, Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger, Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard, Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard, Mac OS X 10.7 Lion, MacBook, MacBook Retina, MacBook-Air, MacBook-Pro, MacMini, OpenSSL, OS X 10.10 Yosemite, OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion, OS X 10.9 Mavericks, Power User, Security, Software Development, xCode/Mac/iPad/iPhone/iOS/cocoa | Leave a Comment »

Testing and static methods don’t go well together

Posted by jpluimers on 2016/08/16

A few links as, in code I’ve inherited, I see way too many static methods hindering testing:

–jeroen

Posted in Agile, Development, Software Development, Unit Testing | 1 Comment »

“Personal Computing on the VIC 20” manual is on-line, but prepared for a slow download.

Posted by jpluimers on 2016/08/16

From a while ago:

David Ratnasabapathy: The VIC-20 programmer’s manual was the best intro to programming I’ve ever read. I’d love to find a copy online, the new generation could use it.

+Isaac Kuo that book is wealth. I loved marginal explanations that expanded on the main text, it’s a tactic I use in my own class notes.

The manual was called Personal Computing on the VIC 20 and it is online! This is amazing! Ah, memories.

http://www.classiccmp.org/cini/pdf/Commodore/VIC-20%20Programmer’s%20Reference%20Guide.pdf

+Tomasz Machalski there’s a motherload here:

http://www.classiccmp.org/cini/pdf/Commodore/

Including VIC-20 User’s Manual.pdf

http://www.classiccmp.org/cini/pdf/Commodore/VIC-20%20User’s%20Manual.pdf

and VIC-20 Programmer’s Reference Guide.pdf

http://www.classiccmp.org/cini/pdf/Commodore/VIC-20%20Programmer’s%20Reference%20Guide.pdf

Jeroen Wiert Pluimers:+David Ratnasabapathy thanks a lot!

Downloaders: that site is slow. Not as slow as the New Horizons uplink, nor as slow as 1980s modems, but be prepared for some serious wait time.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modem#The_Smartmodem_and_the_rise_of_BBSs

Note that the wayback machine has them cached:

–jeroen

via It’s our third birthday! What better present than the VIC-20 [1] (“A Real… [WayBack]

Posted in 6502, Commodore, Development, History, Software Development, VIC-20 | 1 Comment »

If your Solitaire Collection on Windows 10 has display issues: ditch your old ATI/AMD Radeon graphics adapter

Posted by jpluimers on 2016/08/15

Solitaire Collection display issues on older ATI/AMD Radeon graphics cards

Solitaire Collection display issues on older ATI/AMD Radeon graphics cards

If you’ve installed Windows 10 and the Solitaire Collection looks like the picture on the right, then there is a good chance your machine has an older ATI/AMD Radeon graphics adapter (or mobile one).

At least these categories are affected:

Despite Microsoft knowing this (heck it fails on some Windows 8 systems as well), it keeps luring people into upgrading their working systems with Windows 10 resulting in non-working systems.

Not a smart move…

–jeroen

via: solitaire collection display problems radeon – Google Search

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

Fix the OS X Finder not displaying the contents of specific folders | MacIssues

Posted by jpluimers on 2016/08/15

The culprit is usually the mds [WayBack] process (metadata server).

Simple command-line solution:

sudo killall mds

A more convoluted way with the Activity Monitor is in the link below.

–jeroen

via: Fix the OS X Finder not displaying the contents of specific folders | MacIssues [WayBack]

Posted in Apple, Mac, Mac OS X / OS X / MacOS, Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger, Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard, MacBook, MacBook Retina, MacBook-Air, MacBook-Pro, MacMini, OS X 10.10 Yosemite, OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion, Power User | Leave a Comment »

The End of Gmane? – via: Random Thoughts

Posted by jpluimers on 2016/08/12

Lars Magne Ingebrigtsen at the end of July posted:

In 2002, I grew annoyed with not finding the obscure technical information I was looking for, so I started Gmane, the mailing list archive. All technical discussion took place on mailing lists those days, and archiving those were, at best, spotty and with horrible web interfaces.

The past few weeks, the Gmane machines (and more importantly, the company I work for, who are graciously hosting the servers) have been the target of a number of distributed denial of service attacks.

…

But I ask myself: Is this fun any more?

…

And now the DDoS stuff, which I have no idea why is happening, but I can only assume that somebody is angry about something.

…

I’m thinking about ending Gmane, at least as a web site. Perhaps continue running the SMTP-to-NNTP bridge? Perhaps not? I don’t want to make 20-30K mailing lists start having bouncing addresses, but I could just funnel all incoming mail to /dev/null, I guess…

…

I feel like I’m letting down a generation here. And despite what I rambled about in that paragraph up there, I’ve had many fun interactions with people because of Gmane. And lots and lots and lots of appreciative feedback over the years.

Later that day he posted a comment explaining a few more details.

Cutting things short: NNTP and MX work (for now), he is talking with parties for them to continue gmane, but for now the web-site is offline.

So I looked at which posts I had been using gmane links to correct them into linking to the Web Archive (a.k.a. WayBack machine) as much as possible. There were quite a few (even more than a simple Google search revealed) as shown in the list below.

Lesson learned
Counting how many of the gmane links were not at the WayBack machine I learned that for every blog post, I should links before posting them. Problem: I’ve scheduled about 400 posts and published some 3200, so that’s going to be a lot of edits.

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in gmane, SocialMedia | 1 Comment »

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