I've become a reluctant .Net "developer" in the last year or so because of professional reasons. I've been a Mac user for the last few years, so that adds a few complications because there's not a lot of useful, reproducable help. Microsoft does offically support the Mac, but it is in the typical Windows style (IMHO) of run this installer, reboot, etc. This is not the way I would like to run "my" Macs. But i've found a way to make life much easier.

You might know that MacOS (nee Mac OS X, bastard child of NeXTOS) is a relatively capable UNIX, but it misses a lot of the things that make Linux (and BSD) easy to live with, a large repository of third party tools outside of the Mac OS (development) tools (largely things like Python and git). This is what Homebrew solves, it brings a very large repository of third party (mainly Free/Open source software) to the Mac using a model somewhat similar to APT or RPM on Linux.

One thing that only becomes clear after using Homebrew for a while that there's two ways to install packages using the brew command, the command alone brew install <package> and the cask variant brew install --cask <package> . The first variant is mostly used for installing the usual open source based packages, the cask version is in general used for closed source based "applications". I really like having randomly installed packages (epsecially those necessary for software developemnt) administered using a package repository, which bring us (finally) to .Net.

The first, obvious, package you might want to install is dotnet

brew install dotnet

The problem is that this installs the latest .Net runtime (whatever it is called) on your system but nothing else.

The second option is to install dotnet-sdk

brew install dotnet-sdk

Which installs the latest runtime including the development tools like MSBuild etc.

These are in general usefull unless you develop on larger projects that lock into specific .Net language versions.

Which bring me to the current "solution" that I am using. The github user isen-ng releases regular "casks" for specific .Net language versions in their repository. (note the remarks, they can be important).

Adding the repository to you Homebrew setup is simple:

brew tap isen-ng/dotnet-sdk-versions

Installing a specific version (see link above for details) is therefore relatively painless, just do the following to install the latest net6.0 version:

brew install --cask dotnet-sdk6-0-400

Finding your currently installed .NET versions (if you have any) is not very difficult (showing the results after running the previous command on a new computer):

[host] # dotnet --list-sdks
6.0.405 [/usr/local/share/dotnet/sdk]
[host] #

Starting from .Net 6 (net6.0) the ARM64 architecture is supported, so .Net code will run natively on any device with Apple Silicon chips.

I've been working with logging in Python for the last few weeks. For some reason I ended up having to log to a MySQL (MariaDB?) server and I hadn't done that before. Turns out that a lot of people want to log MySQL queries to the same logging server as Python, but not a lot of people want to log to a MySQL server. The Python logger is actually quite a nicely documented piece of software if your needs are basic, but want something more and you might end up between a suggestion and a hard place...

Next to logging to MySQL I also wanted to configure the loger using code, not an ini file or a YAML file. Enter DictConfig. The example in the documentation is massive, does much more than anyone needs and is too complicated for when you are starting out with logging. So here's a basic example:

logging_config = {
    'version': 1,
    'disable_existing_loggers': False,
    'formatters': {
        'standard': {
            'format': '%(asctime)s [%(levelname)s] %(name)s: %(message)s'
        },
    },
    'handlers': {
        'default_handler': {
            'level': 'DEBUG',
            'formatter': 'standard',
            'class': 'logging.StreamHandler',
            'stream': 'ext://sys.stdout',
        },
    },
    'loggers': {
        '': {
            'level': 'NOTSET',
            'handlers' : ['default_handler']
        },
    },
}

import logging.config
logging.config.dictConfig(logging_config)
logger = logging.getLogger(os.path.basename(__file__))
# Now you can use logger to log
logger.error('Panic')

This should be sufficient for a simple logger to stdout (the CLI, console, DOS box whatever you call it). See the documentation if you want to change something or make it more complicated.

When you want to log to a MySQL database, you need to write your own custom handler class, inheriting from logging.Handler. Or you could google for an existing MySQLHandler, like this one I found on Github.

I did bring that handler up to Python 3 specs, and followed whatever Pycharm wanted me to fix on this code.

The one "big" thing I did, was to change the constructor of the handler class to the following:

def __init__(self, host: str, port: int, db_user: str, db_password: str, db_name: str):
    pass

I'll leave the implementation of this function up to you, but the signature is really important when you want to use this custom handler in combination with DictConfig.

logging_config = {
    'version': 1,
    'disable_existing_loggers': False,
    'handlers': {
        'default_handler': {
            'class': 'my_custom_handler.MyCustomHandler',
            'level': 'DEBUG',
            'formatter': 'standard',
            'host': "localhost",
            'port': 3306,
            'db_user': "user",
            'db_password': "password",
            'db_name': "Log",
        }
    },
    'loggers': {
        '': {
            'level': 'NOTSET',
            'handlers' : ['default_handler']
        },
    },
}

import logging.config
logging.config.dictConfig(logging_config)
logger = logging.getLogger(os.path.basename(__file__))
# Now you can use logger to log
logger.error('Panic')

The custom handler in this example has the class name MyCustomhandler and can be found in the my_custom_handler module. As you can see the parameters for a custom handler in DictConfig reflect the parameters of the constructor of the custom handler. Note also that a database handler doesn't really need a formatter when your datastructure looks like the format of log messages.

In 2019, I spent a lot of holiday time on recording various events with C3VOC, so I had very few days left to go on a cycling holiday. At the end of September we tried to ride as close to the Dutch-German border as possible using (mostly) the "knooppunten"-network. We started in Bad Nieuweschans and got as far as Sittard in just over a week. We had a surprising amount of nice weather, but one day was very, very wet and cold.

For some reason I never added the summer holiday 2018 photograps to Flickr, nor did I write a quick post here. So, here it is. Enjoy our route from Zaltbommel to Berlin via Cologne, Paderborn, Magdeburg and Brandenburg.

Last Saturday I spent the afternoon at the beach, mostly watching loads of people paragliding along the dunes. The Flickr album has the photos. The album has had two more batches of photographs added to it, so if you've watched them ealier, check again for more colourful photographs.

Hi there! It's been a while ;-)

For various reasons I haven't been writing here as much as the (last/first) few years. But this week I felt the need to write a blog post and I noticed that the build environment for this site had been completely destroyed. Fortunately I had the sources in git, but the rest was broken beyond all recoginition.

So after quite a few hours, this site is back with a new theme, built with the latest Nikola and has SSL support!

The blog post that I talked about will probably appear here in the coming week or so.

For the last few years I had (for some unknown reason) three entries for VLC in my "Open with" menu in the Finder. There was no way to remove them from VLC itself and I couldn't find a way to do it myself. Until today. The following steps are also valid for other application that have stale "Open With" entries in the Fidner on a Mac running MacOS (nee Mac OS X)

The first step is to close the offending application, just to make sure nothing is still open that could block our attempts). Then open a CLI terminal (Terminal, iTerm, etc) and go to "~/Library/Application Support/". You will find loads of qpplication related directories (maps, folders) here. Remove all the directories that have something to do with your application ("rm -rf VLC" etc).

The last step is to recreate the "Open With" menu and restart the Finder. This might take a few seconds ("/System/Library/Frameworks/CoreServices.framework/Frameworks/LaunchServices.framework/Support/lsregister -kill -r -domain local -domain system -domain user" and "killall Finder")

I've started a new "project". I had a need to convert some UML diagrams to Python code and foudn that there was no support for the OpenModel XML fileformat, so I created it. See Github for more information. It is a prototype for now, but with a little help (from you?) it could be made much more useful, even support for other UML XML fileformats?

The last few months have been quiet here, I know. I've been very busy organizing SHA2017 and then mainly the AV part. The archived results can be found at media.ccc.de.

So I had to create a 1024*1024 background image consisting of 2 different 64x64 tiles. The script had to choose randomly between both tiles, with a preference for one over the other. Below is the resulting code. Enjoy!

Het is het eind van het jaar en op het nippertje de foto's van de laatste week zeilen online gezet op een publieke plaats. Alle zeilfoto's van afgelopen zomer zijn nu te vinden in het Ûlepanne album op Flickr