The Wiert Corner – irregular stream of stuff

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

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Since none of the pictures returned for searching 46W6740 is correct, here is…

Posted by jpluimers on 2015/10/16

Since none of the pictures returned for searching 46W6740 is correct, here is one that is. – Jeroen Wiert Pluimers – Google+

46W6740 Ultranav keyboard (not full size, no trackpad, only trackpoint, no Windows keys). Click to get a larger picture.

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Keyboards and Keyboard Shortcuts, Power User, ThinkPad, UltraNav keyboards | Leave a Comment »

NOC Zone and NOC Apps – A Service and Free Mobile App for Website Monitoring

Posted by jpluimers on 2015/10/16

Interesting: this works through an on-line service that monitors up to 2 servers for free (including protocols like HTTP, SMTP and PING).

You can get reports at either through:

I’m using this to monitor my boxes at home.

A demo video is below.

–jeroen

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in *nix, Communications Development, Development, HTTP, Internet protocol suite, Power User, SMTP, TCP | Leave a Comment »

osx – Toggle AppleShowAllFiles with a simple bash script? – Stack Overflow

Posted by jpluimers on 2015/10/15

LOL:

The if syntax of your script was a bit…well, iffy.

Indeed it is:

#!/bin/bash
#toggle AppleShowAllFiles

current_value=$(defaults read com.apple.finder AppleShowAllFiles)
if [ $current_value = "TRUE" ]
then
  defaults write com.apple.finder AppleShowAllFiles FALSE
else
  defaults write com.apple.finder AppleShowAllFiles TRUE
fi

killall Finder

Even the alternative if statement is:

if [[ $(defaults read com.apple.finder AppleShowAllFiles) == TRUE ]]

–jeroen

via osx – Toggle AppleShowAllFiles with a simple bash script? – Stack Overflow.

Posted in Apple, bash, 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, OS X 10.10 Yosemite, OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion, OS X 10.9 Mavericks, Power User, Scripting, Software Development | Leave a Comment »

Best Online XML Viewer, Formatter, Editor, Analyser, Beautify-Beautifier, Minify, Tree structure, Notepad, Marker

Posted by jpluimers on 2015/10/14

Thanks Joshep Prajapati for pointing me to this great page which can do a lot of XML related things:

Best Online XML Viewer, Formatter, Editor, Analyser, Beautify-Beautifier, Minify, Tree structure, Notepad, Marker.

–jeroen

via: Generate XSD from XML – XSD.EXE versus on-line tools – take 2 « The Wiert Corner.

Posted in Development, Software Development, XML, XML/XSD, XSD | 3 Comments »

ASCII and Unicode. Love and hate?

Posted by jpluimers on 2015/10/13

So I won’t forget:

Even though this does not work on most USA T-Shirt sites, it works on this Dutch one: T-Shirt Ontwerpen – t-shirt zelf ontwerpen | Spreadshirt.

–jeroen

PS:

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in ASCII, Development, Encoding, Software Development, Unicode | Leave a Comment »

Books. Lots of books. In PDF.

Posted by jpluimers on 2015/10/12

Interesting: site:www.e-reading.link/bookreader.php – Google Search.

Likely highly illegal, but it has a lot of things in PDF that I already have on paper of stuff that is hard to get otherwise.

–jeroen 

Posted in LifeHacker, PDF, Power User | Leave a Comment »

Restore music and video from iPod: the iPod_Control\Music folder

Posted by jpluimers on 2015/10/09

When you’re not a frequent iTunes user, and recycle computer systems, then every once in a while you will get you in to a situation where you have Music on your iPod, but not on your PC any more.

Whereas iTunes is great at putting music on an iPod, it cannot get it back.

There are numerous paid tools to get the music from your iPod, but doing it manually is not that hard. Below are a few links to get you started, but they all come down to this:

  1. Your iPod has a hidden folder called iPod_Control in the root
  2. Inside the iPod_Control folder is a folder called Music
  3. Inside the Music folder, there are folders named with letters and numbers like F00
  4. Each numbered folder has media (music, video or even photos!) files with a strangely encoded name like B00N.mp3 or 3DUN.m4v with supported media extensions including mp3 m4a m4p jpg gif tif m4v mov.
  5. The media files contain meta data with song, artist, album, etc.

The steps to copy them back

  1. Do not erase your iPod when opening it in iTunes!
  2. Ensure you can mount your iPod as a disk (the “enable disk use” option in iTunes)
  3. Mount your iPod as a disk in Mac or PC
  4. Ensure you can view the hidden files
  5. Copy the Music folder including all subfolders to your Mac or PC
  6. Unhide the Music folder and all Music and Music/F* folders inside it using this chflags trick from Unhiding Unix Directories | Apple Support Communities:
    1. chflags nohidden Music
    2. chflags nohidden Music/F*
  7. Add these to your iTunes library and have iTunes re-generate the correct filenames from the meta-data

Some links explaining this in more detail:

–jeroen

Posted in Apple, iPod, iTunes, 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, OS X 10.10 Yosemite, OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion, OS X 10.9 Mavericks, Power User, Windows, Windows 7, Windows 8, Windows 8.1, Windows 9 | 2 Comments »

Delphi books you should have or have read

Posted by jpluimers on 2015/10/08

Here is a list of books that I think any serious Delphi developer should have or have read:

  • Julian Bucknall: The Tomes Of Delphi Algorithms And Data Structures (paperback, kindle)
    • Still a classic, focussing on the why and how of algorithms. Lots of it apply even outside the Delphi field.
  • Nick Hodges: Coding in Delphi (paperback, kindle/PDF)
    • Want to learn about the newest Delphi language features? Then this book is for you. If not and still using a Delphi XE* version, then you should consider a new job.
  • Danny Thorpe: Delphi Component Design (paperback; no eBook)
    • Despite its age, it is still current: it shows you how and why many designs in the RTL are they way they are. More importantly it shows how to use these designs in your code. Even the most advanced Delphi programmers can learn a thing or two here. Many of the new RTL/VCL/FMX developers can learn far more from it.
  • Daniele Teti: Delphi Cookbook (paperback, eBook)
    • Even though it is relatively young, it is a classic example of a good how-to book with many inspiring examples on how to get a variety of things done in both regular and mobile applications.
  • Cary Jensen: Delphi in Depth: ClientDataSets 2nd Edition (paperback, PDF)
    • Although ClientDataSet is rapidly becoming obsolete in newer Delphi versions, old Delphi code benefits from ClientDataSets a lot: definitely recommended if you have to maintain an existing codebase.
  • Marco Cantù: Essential Pascal (paperback, PDF not available any more since Marco started working for Embarcadero)
  • Chris Rolliston: Delphi XE2 Foundations (paperback, kindle parts 1/2/3)
    • It covers language and non-visual things well so it is pretty version agnostic.
  • Ray Lischner: Delphi in a Nutshell (paperback, kindle)
    • It still covers the best Object Pascal language description on paper (sans modern language features like generics and anonymous methods.

There are many other Delphi books out, but most are either version specific, bound to a narrow area of topics, outdated or not well written.

–jeroen 

Posted in Uncategorized | 1 Comment »

On Epsilon, MachineEpsilon, and relative differences – via: I was wondering, that what is the closest value to the Zero floating point can have – G+

Posted by jpluimers on 2015/10/07

A long time ago, there was an interesting discussion here: I was wondering, that what is the closest value to the Zero floating point can have.

Recently I needed to do some calculations on series where getting close to zero could become a problem.

  • Math seems to have an Epsilon of 1E-12.
  • Sytem.Types has Epsilon of 1E-30 and Epsilon2 of 1E-40.
  • XE4+ FMX has IsEssentiallyZero and IsNotEssentiallyZero for Single values.

In practice it depends a lot on what you are doing. Sometimes absolute Epsilons are best, but at other times relative difference is much more applicable.

Then there is also a Machine Epsilon: a way to derive an Epsilon from a data type that works in all languages and platforms.

–jeroen

Posted in .NET, Algorithms, C, C#, C++, Delphi, Development, Floating point handling, Software Development | 1 Comment »

Get the path to the most recent msbuild.exe from the registry.

Posted by jpluimers on 2015/10/06

Get the path to the most recent msbuild.exe from the registry:


@echo off
:: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/328017/path-to-msbuild
:: http://www.csharp411.com/where-to-find-msbuild-exe/
:: http://timrayburn.net/blog/visual-studio-2013-and-msbuild/
:: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/visualstudio/archive/2013/07/24/msbuild-is-now-part-of-visual-studio.aspx
setlocal
:vswhereModernTry
:: https://github.com/Microsoft/vswhere/wiki/Find-MSBuild
:: Normal output example of `vswhere -legacy -latest -property installationPath` has no trailing back-slash:
:: `C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio 14.0\`
for /f "usebackq tokens=*" %%i in (`vswhere -latest -products * -requires Microsoft.Component.MSBuild -property installationPath`) do (
set InstallDir=%%i
)
:: without ENABLEEXTENSIONS, %InstallDir% is only available outside the above loop.
for %%v in (15.0, 14.0) do (
if exist "%InstallDir%\MSBuild\%%v\Bin\MSBuild.exe" (
set msBuildExe="%InstallDir%\MSBuild\%%v\Bin\MSBuild.exe"
goto :finish
)
)
:manualTry
:: order of the versions is important: get the most recent one
for %%v in (14.0, 12.0, 4.0, 3.5, 2.0) do (
for /f "usebackq tokens=2* delims= " %%c in (`reg query "HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\MSBuild\ToolsVersions\%%v" /v MSBuildToolsPath`) do (
set msBuildExe="%%dMSBuild.exe"
goto :finish
)
)
:vswhereLegacyTry
:: -legacy is not compatible with -products or -requires
:: note there is no Visual Studio 13.0 (just like there is no Office 13.0) likely because USA superstition.
:: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Visual_Studio#History
:: msbuild was introduced in Visual Studio 8.0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MSBuild#History
:: Legacy output example of `vswhere -legacy -latest -property installationPath` has trailing back-slash:
:: `C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio 14.0\`
for /f "usebackq tokens=*" %%i in (`vswhere -legacy -latest -property installationPath`) do (
set InstallDir=%%i
)
:: without ENABLEEXTENSIONS, %InstallDir% is only available outside the above loop.
for %%v in (14.0, 12.0, 11.0, 10.0, 9.0, 8.0) do (
if exist "%InstallDir%MSBuild\%%v\Bin\MSBuild.exe" (
set msBuildExe="%InstallDir%MSBuild\%%v\Bin\MSBuild.exe"
goto :finish
)
)
:: nothing found
:finish
endlocal & if not [%msBuildExe%]==[] if exist %msBuildExe% ( echo %msBuildExe% )

view raw

get-msbuildExe-path.bat

hosted with ❤ by GitHub


for /f "usebackq tokens=*" %%c in (`"%~dp0get-msbuildExe-path.bat"`) do (
call %%c %*
)

view raw

run-msbuild.bat

hosted with ❤ by GitHub

With help from:

Note

This needs adoption for Visual Studio 2017 (15.0) and up; see the comments at the above gist:

lextm commented on Mar 9, 2017 • 

Note that 15.0 (in VS2017) no longer registers itself at this registry key location, so this trick won’t simply work. vswhere is now recommended to locate MSBuild 15,

https://github.com/Microsoft/vswhere

n9 commented on May 17, 2017

Be sure to call vswhere -products * to get standalone installation of BuildTools. (See Microsoft/vswhere#61.)

–jeroen

Posted in .NET, .NET 2.0, .NET 3.0, .NET 3.5, .NET 4.0, .NET 4.5, C#, C# 2.0, C# 3.0, C# 4.0, C# 5.0, C# 6 (Roslyn), Delphi, Delphi 10 Seattle, Delphi 2007, Delphi 2009, Delphi 2010, Delphi XE, Delphi XE2, Delphi XE3, Delphi XE4, Delphi XE5, Delphi XE6, Delphi XE7, Delphi XE8, Development, Software Development | Leave a Comment »

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