Posted by jpluimers on 2015/01/21
Stefan Heymann did a great presentation Character Sets and Unicode in Firebird at fbcon11. About 90% of it is not about Firebird, but about Unicode: a highly recommended presentation.
There is also a PDF version of the same presentation for easier reading/searching.
If you like Firebird, there is a whole bunch of Firebird related presentations from various authors shared by MindTheBird.
–jeroen
Posted in Ansi, Database Development, Development, Encoding, Firebird, ISO-8859, ISO8859, Software Development, Unicode, UTF-8, UTF8 | Leave a Comment »
Posted by jpluimers on 2015/01/21
While in the USA I usually go by Home Depot to get some inspiration.
This time my Eye fell on a lot of Smart Home Products compatible with the Wink Hub: people in the USA have a lot more choice in that area than in The Netherlands.
So I did some more browsing and found this: Shop Amazon – 20% or More Off Select Wink Home Automation Bundles until January 31st 2015.
Some of that is even better than the ones listed at Wink – Featured Products – The Home Depot.
Too bad this 110V stuff doesn’t work in 220V land (:
–jeroen
via: Wink | Buy and View Smart Home Products.
Posted in LifeHacker, Power User | Leave a Comment »
Posted by jpluimers on 2015/01/20
This used to be a great Delphi-only feature that I missed in Visual Studio, but I found the downloadable free extension Favorite Documents extension.
It is a by Sergey Vlasov, who has a whole bunch of free and paid Visual Studio add-ins, extensions and tools.
–jeroen
Posted in Delphi, Delphi 2007, Delphi 2009, Delphi 2010, Delphi XE, Delphi XE2, Delphi XE3, Delphi XE4, Delphi XE5, Delphi XE6, Delphi XE7, Development, Software Development, Visual Studio 11, Visual Studio 2010, Visual Studio and tools | Leave a Comment »
Posted by jpluimers on 2015/01/19
Interesting stuff: Zenoss Open Source Network Monitoring and Systems Management.
Stuff like monitoring NNTP, monitoring HTTP, monitoring DNS, etc.
–jeroen
Posted in *nix, Linux, Monitoring, Power User, SuSE Linux | Leave a Comment »
Posted by jpluimers on 2015/01/18
Interesting talks about Apple Macintosh (now Mac) LC475, 800K floppies, System 7.6/7.7, SCSI, AppleTalk, Serial, Ethernet, hardware upgrades, etc.
New computer time. Well not exactly “new”. I needed to read/write some old….
Posted in Apple, History, Mac, Power User | Leave a Comment »
Posted by jpluimers on 2015/01/17
Woot! Post 2400 (:
For my own reference.
My old stats: https://wordpress.com/my-stats?blog=7443331
My new stats: https://wordpress.com/stats/7443331
Hopefully the old stats stay for a while as they are far more useful.
–jeroen
Posted in Power User, SocialMedia, WordPress | 2 Comments »
Posted by jpluimers on 2015/01/16
Even if you think you are familiar with something, it pays to keep your knowledge current.
I’ve been always struggling with the crontab syntax. It’s flexible, but for most cases overly complex, for instance I still thought I needed “0 0 * * 0” to run something weekly, which I needed.
So I am pretty sure there were no @monthly or @weekly in crontab last century.
Not so any more, and if I’d had the crontab documentation more often, I had known about the crontab shortcuts @reboot, @yearly, @annually, @monthly, @weekly, @daily, @midnight and @hourly many years ago: Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in *nix, Linux, openSuSE, Power User, SuSE Linux | Leave a Comment »
Posted by jpluimers on 2015/01/15
Hopefully it is not a coincidence that Steve Streeting left the SourceTree team four years after the first SourceTree release and shortly after the first release of SourceTree 1.6. version, but the SourceTree 1.6.x versions suck: it often hangs and is (often extremely) slow. This apart from numerous NullReferenceExceptions. I find this odd, as 1.5.x is far more stable in that respect, hence my hope it is not about Steve Streeting.
Even though many people complained about 1.6.x. being bad (read the comments on the release page), and quite a few ask for a way to downgrade, a downgrade option isn’t provided there.
A SourceTree downgrade itself is not that difficult. Ensuring the embedded versions of Git and Mercurial/Hg are up to date is more difficult. Getting that right is especially important on Windows: hgflow works much better with the embedded Mercurial/Hg. More importantly: both Git and Mercurial/Hg recently had a very nasty security issue.
So here are steps on how to downgrade, then upgrade the embedded versions of Git and Mercurial.
Posted in Development, DVCS - Distributed Version Control, git, Mercurial/Hg, Power User, Software Development, Source Code Management, SourceTree, Windows | 7 Comments »
Posted by jpluimers on 2015/01/14
One of the features that bites me over and over again is the ZEROBASEDSTRINGS that got introduced in Delphi XE3 and is by default ON in mobile compilers and OFF in Desktop compilers.
Back then, Mark Edington showed a small example of the effects:
| procedure ZeroBasedTest; | |
| const | |
| S: string = '012'; | |
| begin | |
| {$ZEROBASEDSTRINGS OFF} | |
| Writeln(S[1]); // shows "0" | |
| Writeln(S.Chars[1]); // shows "1" | |
| {$ZEROBASEDSTRINGS ON} | |
| Writeln(S[1]); // shows "1" | |
| Writeln(S.Chars[1]); // shows "1" | |
| end; |
and then explained:
The XE3 RTL source code has been refactored to be string index base agnostic. In most cases this is done by utilizing string helper functions which are always zero based.
When it is necessary to traverse a string, the Char[] property is often used to access the individual characters without concern for the current state of the compiler with respect to zero based strings.In addition, the “Low” and “High” standard functions can now be passed a string variable to provide further flexibility as needed.
When zero based strings are enabled, Low(string) will return 0, otherwise it will return 1. Likewise, High() returns a bounds adjusted length variation.
The problem is the non-existent forward compatibility of the other compilers (Delphi XE2 and lower).
So if you have library code that needs to work in Delphi versions, you cannot use the High and Low to make the code ZEROBASEDSTRINGS neutral.
Many Delphi developers regularly skip many Delphi versions, so these are still popular:
The result is that library code is full of conditionan IF/IFDEF blocks like these:
| {$ifdef GX_VER240_up} | |
| for Index := Low(input) to High(input) do // for ZEROBASEDSTRINGS | |
| {$else} | |
| for Index := 1 to Length(input) do | |
| {$endif GX_VER240_up} |
–jeroen
via: Mark Edington’s Delphi Blog : XE3 RTL Changes: A closer look at TStringHelper.
Posted in Ansi, Delphi, Delphi 2007, Delphi 7, Delphi XE, Delphi XE2, Delphi XE3, Delphi XE4, Delphi XE5, Development, Encoding, Software Development, Unicode | 8 Comments »
Posted by jpluimers on 2015/01/13
I never use wireless keyboards because of the bad signal quality. Now there is one more reason not to use them…
By Andrian Knoth, thanks to a link by Kristian Köhntopp:
“KeySweeper is a stealthy Arduino-based device, camouflaged as a functioning USB wall charger, that wirelessly and passively sniffs, decrypts, logs and reports back (over GSM) all keystrokes from any Microsoft wireless keyboard in the vicinity.”
–jeroen
via “KeySweeper is a stealthy Arduino-based device, camouflaged as a functioning….
Posted in LifeHacker, Power User | Leave a Comment »
The Wiert Corner - irregular stream of stuff 