• .NET - Programming - Web

    Scraping dynamic page content

    Scraping dynamic content from websites has become an important task in data collection and analysis. With the advancements in web technologies, websites are now using dynamic content that cannot be easily scraped with traditional web scraping techniques. In this blog post, we will explore how to scrape dynamic content from…

  • .NET - Programming - Testing

    Unit-testing file I/O

    Two good news: file I/O is unit-testable, and it is surprisingly easy to do. Let’s see how it works! A software no-one asked for First, we need a piece of software that deals with files and that has to be unit-tested. The TestableIO project does the following: given a directory,…

  • Programming - Software

    Fixing Git pull errors in SourceTree

    If you encounter the following error when pulling a repository in SourceTree: VirtualAlloc pointer is null, Win32 error 487 it is due to to the Cygwin system failing to allocate a 5 MB large chunk of memory for its heap at the fixed address 0x68570000, while only a hole 2.5…

  • Audio

    Castle on the hill of crappy audio quality

    As the yearly dynamic range day is close (March 31st), let’s have a look at one of the biggest audio massacres of the year, Ed Sheeran’s “Castle on the hill”. First time I heard the song, I thought my headphones just got broken, it’s really that bad. So let’s measure…

  • .NET - Programming - Testing

    Necessary evil: testing private methods

    Some might say that testing private methods should be avoided because it means not testing the contract, that is the interface implemented by the class, but the internal implementation of the class itself. Still, not all classes were designed with testability in mind, so real life compromises sometimes demand such…

  • Web

    I am right and you are wrong

    Have you ever convinced anyone that disagreed with you about a deeply held belief? Better yet, have you changed your mind lately on an important topic after discussing with someone else that did not share your point of view? Let’s face it, if the topic of the discussion is not…

  • .NET - Programming - Software

    Windows Forms smells funny, but…

    In the “2016 .NET Community Report” just released by Telerik, the answers to the question “What technology would you choose if building for Windows Desktop?” were as follows: So roughly half of new desktop developments would be based on Windows Forms, a technology declared dead multiple times. The Telerik report…

  • Multi-thread

    Parallel loops in the AltaLux kernel

    The AltaLux plugin for IrfanView is now open-source (here is the GitHub link) and it is worth analyzing the different methods used for parallelizing the computational kernel. The filter factory, contained in the CAltaLuxFilterFactory files, can create one of four possible instance types (actually there’s a fifth one that you…