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.   I’d only seen this film once before, on DVD, maybe a year or so after it was released. I remember being surprised when it came out that they were rebooting the Hulk only 5 years after the previous Hulk movie (Ang Lee’s 2003 The Hulk ), though that film had been poorly received, and now I wonder if, had the film been received better, if it would have been considered part of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, or if they still  would have done the reboot. Regardless, on the single previous viewin...

I've been using Moq for ages, but today while writing a unit test ran into a runtime exception I'd never had before: Expression references a method that does not belong to the mocked object: mock => mock.GetExpiredCredentials(It.IsAny<DateTime>(), It.IsAny<DateTime>(), It.IsAny<Boolean>()).Returns<IEnumerable`1>(.fakeResults, new[] {  }) I couldn't understand why. The method in question was  on the interface, and if it wasn't, the code shouldn't have even compiled , yet it did. Even more confusing was that, when I Googled the error message, all the results seemed to point toward extension methods , and this method was not  an extension method. It turns out, what I had done was to misplace my parentheses (facepalm)! Here's what my original take looked like: _credentialServiceMock      .Setup(mock =>            mock.GetExpiredCredentials(              ...

  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.   This movie was from before my time and marks the first time I watched a film using SKYBOX VR that I'd never seen before. The film is a fictionalized account of the  Judges' Trial , which was a trial which took place in Germany post-World War II in which German judges were tried for their part in the atrocities of the Nazi party. Released in 1961, it stars several big-name Hollywood stars of the era, and is part of the United States National Film Registry. I have to admit that I...

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...

I'm currently in the process of trying to upgrade the version of webpack in an old Angular project, which doesn't use the Angular CLI. I made the necessary modifications to upgrade from version 3 to version 4, but was getting the following error with less-loader : (node:672) UnhandledPromiseRejectionWarning: TypeError [ERR_INVALID_ARG_TYPE]: The "path" argument must be of type string. Received type undefined     at validateString (internal/validators.js:112:11)     at Object.normalize (path.js:266:5)     at new LessError (C:\DevGit\MyOrg.Portal\MyOrg.Portal.Mvc\Resources\ng\node_modules\less-loader\dist\LessError.js:15:169)     at C:\DevGit\MyOrg.Portal\MyOrg.Portal.Mvc\Resources\ng\node_modules\less-loader\dist\index.js:62:14 This had me tweaking the webpack config endlessly, until finding out that this is apparently an issue in less-loader v6. When I downgraded to v5.0.0, the problem went away...leaving me with the next problem to troubleshoot. ...