I’m a huge fan of Go’s table-driven tests. They’re really well-suited for behavioural testing, which we discussed before, and they make writing tests quite easy. As with the previous post in this series, this was written to prepare for a learning session on tests at work; the content here is a collection of suggestions and observations based on how our team was writing tests. Maybe you’ll find it useful too; maybe you won’t.

I volunteered to do a learning lab session on testing at work; there were some common patterns and things I noticed we were doing when writing tests which I thought we could be doing better.

I’m back in Singapore and away from my desktop, which has meant not being able to play any of my more demanding or Windows-only games on the computer I actually have here (a MacBook Pro). I gave GeForce Now a shot, but given that they didn’t have any servers in the region, the latency made things quite unplayable. It also didn’t look very good, most likely for the same reason.

I’ve been wanting to revamp this whole site for quite a while now, and it’s finally happened. The first commit for this iteration was made on September 24, 2018 and after an initial few days’ worth of work it basically stagnated until today.

I’ve been keeping a daily journal for quite a while now - 8 or so years? I started using OhLife, which was email-based, then when that shut down I moved to plain-old-Markdown files stored in a TrueCrypt (and now VeraCrypt) container… thing.

Bash on Ubuntu on Windows, or the Windows Subsystem for Linux (or WSL), is a little over one year old now, and still a mouthful to say. When it was announced, I tweeted:

My Microsoft Band 2 seems to have finally died on me. On the bright side, it lasted over a year.

While trying to fall asleep, I ended up thinking about the key combinations used to create splits in tmux.

Removed support for older OSes, fixed a crash bug, and dropped usage tracking.

Relatively recently, I started using the actual command-line tool for NuGet; previously, I’d been using the Package Explorer GUI to create packages for ForecastPCL. The benefit of the command-line tool is that it automagically creates packages the “proper” way - I don’t understand how things are supposed to be structured internally, with the subfolders whose names specify the platforms you’re targeting, but I don’t need to worry about that.

Not every place in the world uses the full stop (or period) as a decimal mark. Quite a few use the comma instead.

In a previous post I wrote about installing Jekyll 1.4.2 on Windows - at the time, the guide linked from the Jekyll site itself was way out of date. Happily, they’ve since updated to link to a much better guide.

This is a quasi-follow-up to my previous post, where we looked at installing the new Jekyll 3 beta on Windows. I had to install the Nokogiri gem to get this site working again once that was done, and came across an issue.

I got an ErgoDox off of Massdrop a few months ago, switching up from the Microsoft Sculpt Ergonomic Keyboard. It’s an ergonomic, truly split keyboard (the two halves are joined by a cable so you can position them almost anywhere you want), with a feature that stood out to me: it’s reprogrammable, being driven by a Teensy microcontroller.

Less is great. Having to manually compile it isn’t.

Just over a week after getting it, my Wacom Bamboo Stylus feel (which is quite a name) ended up going through the wash cycle. I’d clipped it inside one of my cargo pockets, and forgotten to take it out.

While updating Is it on Spotify? to use the new(ish) Spotify Web API, I ran into an issue when testing things out locally.

Another UI redesign, and long-overdue improvements to tiles.

It’s been almost two years since Fourcast launched. I thought it’d be fun to look at how much it’s changed since then, and talk about how it’ll change soon.

Bug fixes and more useful error messages.

Windows Phone 8.1’s been out in near-final state through the Preview for Developers program for about three weeks now. Though there’re a lot of new features and changes, I’m not going to go over all of them in detail; by now there are loads of other articles and posts available which would do a much better job. These are just my thoughts on things I came across.

For one reason or another (read: I have no idea why, but…), the few webcasts I’ve watched recently seem to work better when viewed faster than real-time. I’d download the MP4 version, open it up in VLC, and use the playback speed controls to speed things up anywhere from 1.1 to, on one occasion, 1.3 times the normal rate.

Well, that is one misleading title. Maybe the subtitle will make up for it?

Update (2020-04-19): Is it on Spotify? is still online, though it no longer works. All of the links to it here have been left intact regardless. While at a café with some friends, I heard bits and pieces of a song over the stereo - this song. It sounded pretty nice, so after finding out what it was (in a roundabout manner1) I starred it on Spotify.

It seems there's no shortage of these. (I guess this doesn't help in that respect either.)

I’ve accumulated quite a number of wallpapers over the last few years; close to two thousand images totalling almost 3.5 GB and counting, in fact. They came from a whole hodgepodge of places online, in various sizes and aspect ratios, and I have them in my SkyOneDrive folder so they get synced across my desktop and laptop.

Architectural improvements, and a new way of getting weather data. Switched from using Weather Underground’s XML API to their JSON one. This doesn’t affect functionality, though it does bring a very small reduction in data usage. Another side effect: the “Root element is missing” issue should no longer occur. Rewrote the way the app stores, handles, and retrieves settings. Fixed an issue involving Live Tiles for locations with “/” in their names.

I spent last December working on the narration and caption features for PowerPointLabs without actually working on the plug-in itself; everything was done in a separate project. Eventually, it came time to merge everything in.

This week was interesting.

You can use the name or index number to specify a menu bar or toolbar in the list of available menu bars and toolbars in the container application.

One day, some time ago, a friend commented on how lengthy my PowerShell prompt line was. I hadn’t noticed it until that point, but he was completely right.

Though it wasn’t an actual objective, each of our last few trips has resulted in coming home with a new plush animal.

19:56, December 22nd 2013, London.

I dropped by the UWCSEA Dover Campus earlier to visit the alumni office. Passing by the English block, it became clear there were some… changes.

…but there’s only one bird here.

A cleaner while still familiar main UI.

Tweaks and fixes for the Live Tiles.

Settings UI tweaks, architectural improvements, and bug fixes.

Minor changes relating to dates and time.

Fixes for a crash bug, and improved crash reporting mechanisms.

If you’ve upgraded from Fourcast v0.6 to v0.7 and Fourcast is set to load your Home Location on launch; OR Fourcast is set to load the previously viewed location on launch The app will crash on launch. To fix this (without having to wait for v0.8), uninstall and reinstall the app – really sorry!

Higher resolution tiles, backend architectural improvements, bug fixes, and optimisations.

Because I couldn’t find this ANYWHERE, and only figured it out after stumbling across a post on how mercurial_keyring is bugged on Windows (and only stores one password).

What’s the Dew Point? Where exactly is the Weather Station located? Wonder no more.

Chronologically, Made 4-bit Webther. Helped with the School of Computing Freshmen Orientation Camp. Made and released Fourcast. Discovered and watched both The Legend of Korra and Avatar: The Last Airbender. (Both of which are incredibly awesome.) Took a module at school. Went on a quick family vacation. That was fun.

Get your current location as a tile, jump straight into Pick a Place, and know when your forecast has loaded without having to stare at the screen.

Tile tweaking, UI improvements, and several bug fixes relating to commas.

Shiny, new tiles have landed.

First release of Fourcast on the Windows Phone Marketplace.

Update (2020-04-19): 4-bit Webther is no longer available; the Yahoo! Weather API is no more. The links to it here have been removed, but the remainder of the post’s text has been left untouched, as self-indulgent as it is.

Update (2020-04-19): 4-bit Webther is no longer available; the Yahoo! Weather API is no more. The links to it here have been removed, but the remainder of the post’s text has been left untouched.

Update: As of September 27, 2018, ISAAC is no longer available on this domain. The links to to it have been removed from the post below, though the remainder of the content has been left unchanged.

Update: As of September 27, 2018, ISAAC is no longer available on this domain. The links to to it have been removed from the post below, though the remainder of the content has been left unchanged.

Update: As of September 27, 2018, ISAAC is no longer available on this domain. The links to to it have been removed from the post below, though the remainder of the content has been left unchanged.