My Life and Code

During the COVID-19 pandemic, I’ve been using  SKYBOX VR  on Oculus Quest to watch movies in a virtual cinema that I didn’t get to see when they were theatrically released. The illusion of sitting in a movie theater is a convincing one, minus any reaction from the (non-existent) audience. It doesn’t change my perception of the films I’ve been watching — I’m just doing this for fun: to whet my appetite for going to the movies, and for a little VR escapism. Warning: Spoilers ahead.   In my last Movie Night at the Virtual Cinema , I watched 2001: A Space Odyssey , widely considered a Sci-Fi classic. This time around, I'm at the opposite end of that spectrum with Star Trek V: The Final Frontier , widely considered the worst of the Star Trek films, at least among those starring the original cast. I've watched this one many times, but never had the chance to catch it in the theater, and if you've seen this movie you're probably wondering why I chose this one. I'll be hon...

I'm currently in the process of upgrading an Angular application which does not  use the Angular CLI from webpack 2 to webpack 4. The incremental upgrade from webpack 2 to 3 was easy, but once I made the jump from 3 to 4, I encountered a lot of problems. I went through them one by one, but the one that had me stumped was the following: Unhandled Promise rejection: Unexpected value 'MakePositivePipe' declared by the module 'SharedModule'. Please add a @Pipe/@Directive/@Component annotation. ; Zone: <root> ; Task: null ; Value: Error: Unexpected value 'MakePositivePipe' declared by the module 'SharedModule'. Please add a @Pipe/@Directive/@Component annotation. The code was transpiling/compiling fine, but this error was occurring when I'd navigate to a page containing this pipe. This code has worked fine under webpack 2 and 3. I made sure that the pipe was being set up as a declaration , which it was. What finally  corrected the issue for me w...

During the COVID-19 pandemic, I’ve been using SKYBOX VR on Oculus Quest to watch movies in a virtual cinema that I didn’t get to see when they were theatrically released. The illusion of sitting in a movie theater is a convincing one, minus any reaction from the (non-existent) audience. It doesn’t change my perception of the films I’ve been watching — I’m just doing this for fun: to whet my appetite for going to the movies, and for a little VR escapism. Warning: Spoilers ahead. I hadn’t been born yet when 2001: A Space Odyssey  was originally released, but I’ve seen it several times, the first time probably when I was about 10 years old on TV one night. Truth be told, I found it boring  (and I wasn’t alone: the film got mixed reviews when originally released), but I gained an appreciation for it in later years.  The film begins during prehistory, with humanity’s ancestors being influenced by a strange alien monolith, before flashing forward to 1999 where a similar object...