Category: nice to know

Recently, I encountered the issue of codepages again. The problem was that the name of a Turkish city (İstanbul) was not represented correctly. Again a codepage issue. The character İ was not part of the application. How did these codepages come around? In the early days of Windows 95, we had ASCII. This had 127…

A few days ago, I got the suggestion to protect a transaction with a PIN number. But how does that mechanism work? It looks as if this mechanism is used to describe several situations. One situation (the simplest) looks a bit like a password. On the client side, a user enters a PIN code. This…

In some cases, you get unexpected weird results being returned from your database like: Testù�Summary. This may be expected as one inserted TestùęSummary. Apparently symbols like ę were not recognised and were subsequently translated into �. A likely reason is that the so-called codepage is wrong. Characters like ę are not included in the common…

I recently came across vbscript. I was a bit curious to see how this works. As a first step, I created a small batch file (“tom.bat”) that invokes a vbscript. This script reads as: cscript C:\Users\TOM.VAN-MAANEN\tom.vbs “KINLW7D6LPVM1” exit %ERRORLEVEL% This script shows how such vbscripts can be invoked. One may start a script from the…

I got interested in security certificates. What are these? How does it work? It is possible to use it on your own website? Those were my questions. The principle is somewhat confusing, but is works. The idea is that a security certificate exists of two elements. One element is a so-called private key. This private…

It is possible to store XML records in an Oracle table. This is one (of the many) way to retrieve XML information from an Oracle environment. It is actually quite simple. An Oracle table may contain columns that allows us to store XML records. An example is: CREATE TABLE “OE”.”TPERSON_DATA” ( “PERSON_ID” NUMBER(3,0), “PERSON_DATA” “XMLTYPE”…

I recently encountered a nice model on product types that I would like to share. A product type can be understood as an concept of a product, much like the descriptions you might see in a catalogue. Examples like a Peugeot 206 Gentry which is a concept of a car. It is not equivalent to…

Several possibilities exist to read XML files. One such possibility is to have it read via XSLT. This procedure is composed of three elements: The XML file that is to be read; A XSLT file that provides us with instructions on how to handle the XML file. An engine that translates the XML file via…

I know that lots and lots of possibilities exist whereby an XML file can be read. One set of possibilities is to use a Javascript. One then stores a script on the webserver that is processed by the web-browser. Upon processing, the XML file in read and can be stored in another format. A quick…

It is possible to use telnet to send an email. This is even quite straightforward. The idea is to start a telnet session with: telnet mail.wxs.nl 25 (or something alike that contains an email server to which one has connection. One could then enter to indicate the sender and receiver of an email: helo mail.wxs.nl…