My Life and Code

I have an older cousin who, when I was a teenager, gifted me her old turntable (which was outdated at the time, but has somehow made a comeback), complete with built-in 8-track player (a technology I am sure  is never coming back). Along with it were a handful of 8-track tapes, most of which I had no interest in, but one of them was Queen's The Game , which included a song I'd at least heard  of, "Another One Bites the Dust". So I listened to that one. It was my first exposure to Queen, and I remember really liking some of that album over the summer I listened to it. In particular, the songs "Need Your Loving Tonight" and "Crazy Little Thing Called Love" were favorites of mine. One of the songs got chopped off halfway through due to the 8-track format, ending on one track and resuming on the next. Very awkward. Despite liking some of this album, I didn't really become a fan of Queen until I saw Wayne's World . I'd heard "Bohemian R...

"A republic, if you can keep it." -- Benjamin Franklin  

In my senior year of high school, I started hanging out with this guy named Mike. For the life of me, I can't remember how it started, because Mike and I weren't in any of the same classes, and now that I think of it, I have to wonder if it was through a mutual friend, Chuck. But I'm only a few sentences into this and already rambling. Mike's older brother was in a band, and Mike and I auditioned to join. This sounds fancier than it was. I played bass, Mike played drums. It was through Mike's brother and his band that I met Bill, the topic of this blog post. Bill was the singer in the band. Just a few years older than Mike and I, Bill had an encyclopedic knowledge of music, specifically hard rock and heavy metal. His enthusiasm and love for it was contagious, and I always enjoyed talking music with him. He seemed to know everything about every hard rock or metal album from the 1970s to the current day. I always thought he should've written for a rock magazine. N...

httpResource  is still experimental in Angular, and I've begun playing around with it. Once I got a working implementation on a simple form, I wanted to update my tests. This was challenging. I did some searching and found a couple of posts about using HttpTestingController  and mocking a response, but I wanted to retain the service-level abstraction in my component unit tests, which know nothing about HTTP, only that services are used, and one of them now returns an HttpResourceRef in place of an Observable. Here's the mock implementation I wrote. I'm using Vitest now in this project instead of Jasmine, but the syntax should hopefully still make sense. class ExerciseServiceMock {   get = vi . fn (). mockImplementation (() => {       const paginatedResults = new PaginatedResults < ExerciseDTO >();       paginatedResults . totalCount = 0 ;       paginatedResults . results = new Array < ExerciseDTO >(...

One of my hobbies for a long time now has been the building of a digital library of movies and TV shows. I originally undertook this using media stored on a combination of USB drives and a DLNA server, but just over a year ago purchased a NAS and hosted an instance of Jellyfin . Jellyfin is amazing and I plan to write a separate entry about that later. Today, out of curiosity, I decided to see if it were possible to sort my media in order of how well it was rated (community rating/general consensus), and yes, Jellyfin provides this. And once I'd sorted my movies in order of community rating, I just had to know: What's the worst rated stuff I have here? What follows is that list, in descending order -- my "Bottom 10 Movies", so to speak. #10 - Can't Stop The Music Starring Steve Guttenberg and The Village People Is It Really That Bad?  Yes Okay, okay, I need to make something clear at the outset: I love bad movies. And this one is...woof. Bad. It's bad. It...