Plurrrr

Night Moves: a great read

In the early afternoon I read the last chapters of Night Moves, Alex Delaware series book 33 by Jonathan Kellerman on my Kindle Paperwhite. And the book didn't disappoint; I enjoyed it a lot.

• book
• crime fiction

The Wedding Guest

In the afternoon I started in The Wedding Guest, An Alex Delaware Novel by Jonathan Kellerman. It's book 34 in the series.

• book
• crime fiction

Ordered seed packages arrived today

The second of May I ordered four seed packages online. And today a package from the Zaden Gigant (seed giant) arrived. I ordered the following seeds:

• Cape sundew, Drosera capensis, 10 seeds.
• Venus flytrap, Dionaea muscipula, mix, 10 seeds.
• Aechmea nudicaulis, 10 seeds.
• Bulbophyllum siamenensis, 20 seeds.

As I can't find the latter as a known orchid species; I guess it's a misspelling of Bulbophyllum siamense; The Thailand Bulbophyllum.

I have experience growing the first two carnivorous plants from seed. Especially the Cape sundew is very easy to grow from seed.

I grew Aechmea nudicaulis from pups in Mexico, and got them even flowering. I like this species a lot and want to give raising them from seed a try.

As for the latter, while I have some experience with growing orchids I never grew them from seed, so this is probably going to be a bit of a challenge.

Besides the four packages I ordered I also got 40 seeds of blue waxweed, Cuphea viscosissima, for free.

• orchid
• plant

Brother HL-L2350DW

In the early afternoon the Brother HL-2350DW I ordered yesterday arrived. I placed my order with 123inkt.nl and everything went OK. Unpacking the printer and setting it up was very easy. Especially since I had already read the User's Guide.

For now I connect the printer via USB. OS X "El Capitan" running on my Mac Mini recognised the printer immediately.

• home office

PostgreSQL don't do this list

While I haven't used PostgreSQL yet, I have plans to look into this database in the near future. Today I came upon this great Don't Do This list. I added a link to this list to my local wiki for future reference.

• postgres

How to show a Wi-Fi password on macOS or OS X

To set up WiFi with the Brother laser printer I needed the password. In order to get a Wi-Fi password on OS X or macOS do the following:

1. Press ⌘ space to open Spotlight Search or click on the magnifying glass on the left side of the menu bar.
2. Enter "Keychain access" and press return.
3. In the search input field at the right top of the Keychain Access window enter your Wi-Fi network name.
4. Double click the row with "AirPort network password".
5. Tick "Show password" to get the password.

• macos

Use nmap to find machines and open ports

In the evening I used nmap to find all machines on my local network, with success. I used:

nmap -sn 192.168.11.0/24

I also used the following command to find all open ports on my Mac Mini:

sudo nmap -p 1-65535 -sV \
     -sS -T4 ip-address

This scan took 1804.45 seconds.

The following open ports where found:

• 88/tcp Heimdal Kerberos
• 5900/tcp Apple remote desktop vnc
• 63946/tcp unknown
• 63947/tcp unknown

According to the admin subnet TCP/UDP port finder both are related to Xsan Filesystem Access (Apple). See also TCP and UDP ports used by Apple software products.

For more useful nmap commands check out the nmap cheat sheet

• security
• networking

Reasons Why You Should Keep Learning C/C++

1. It enables you to learn crucial programming ideas and understand other systems
2. C/C++ is fast and efficient
3. There are many successful C/C++ projects
4. It influences and helps you learn other advanced programming languages
5. Many code samples are done in C/C++

Source: Reasons Why You Should Keep Learning C/C++.

Those are not really strong reasons as at least 4 out of the above 5 hold for a lot of programming languages, like for example Python.

• c
• cpp

Stop Datepicker click event propagation

In the afternoon I stopped event bubbling from an input field named date under control of a jQuery Datepicker to a nearby input element, a checkbox, as follows:

$("input[name='date']")
    .click(function(event) {
        event.stopPropagation();
});

Before the above code each click in the input field resulted in the nearby checkbox being toggled.

• jquery
• javascript

SF & F book recommendations

Also in the afternoon I recommended several books to my friend Simon, via email:

"Remembrance of Earth's Past" a science fiction trilogy by the Chinese writer Liu Cixin, which consists of the following books:

• The Three-Body Problem
• The Dark Forest
• Death's End

It took me a little while to get into the first book. I liked the second book the most.

I wrote in my email that if Simon had already read this series he would like Isaac Asimov's Foundation series as well. And vice versa, if he already had read this series, the Foundation series is a must-read:

• Prelude to Foundation
• Forward the Foundation
• Foundation
• Foundation and Empire
• Second Foundation
• Foundation's Edge
• Foundation and Earth

I also recommended The Night Angel trilogy, a fantasy series written by Brent Weeks:

• The Way of Shadows
• Shadow's Edge
• Beyond the Shadows

Also of this trilogy I liked the second book the most.

Another author I like a lot is John Sandford. I have read most of his mystery novels but he has also written an SF with Ctein: Saturn Run.

And finally, I recommended The Swarm by Frank Schätzing.

• book
• science fiction
• fantasy

List all files in a git commit

In the afternoon I needed to list all files in a single git commit. I used the following porcelain command (meant to be user-facing):

git show --pretty="" \
    --name-only eeddcc94

What also works is the following plumbing command (meant to be programmatic):

git diff-tree --no-commit-id \
    --name-only -r eeddcc94

• git

Create an SSH Tunnel for MySQL Remote Access

To create a SSH tunnel that listens on port 3307 on localhost and connects to port 3306 (MySQL) on example.com use:

ssh -fNL 3307:127.0.0.1:3306 \
    user@example.com

If successful you can login to MySQL running on the remote host by executing on localhost:

mysql -h 127.0.0.1 -P 3307 \
    -u USER -p DATABASE

This also works with applications like MySQL Workbench.

• ssh
• mysql
• security