Posts from 2023
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Migrating to Hugo
I have just completed migrating the blog from Movable Type to Hugo. Hopefully everything still works and is in the right place, but do let me know if you find any issues. The comments have been migrated to Disqus. I’ve been wanting to … -
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SetServiceStatus framework bug
One of my clients has been reporting an intermittent issue with the deployment of new releases of their game server. This runs as a Windows service on many, many, cloud machines and, just sometimes, the service seems to have issues during … -
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LockExplorer is no more
I’ve finally done what I should have done several years ago and shut down the LockExplorer site. I haven’t had the time required to keep the tool up to date and fewer people were interested than I originally expected. I may make … -
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Practical Testing: 39 - 19 years' unit testing the same code
Back in 2004 I started a series of blog posts called “Practical Testing”, about unit testing a non-trivial piece of C++ code. The idea was to show how adding unit tests to existing, real-world, code could be useful and could … -
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Adventures with \Device\Afd
I’ve been playing around with Rust recently and whilst investigating asynchronous programming in Rust I was looking at Tokio, an async runtime. From there I started looking at Mio, the cross-platform, low-level, I/O code that Tokio … -
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VS2022 Version 17.6.0 Preview 3.0 - Standard Library Modules warnings (std.ixx)
So, this morning I’m back from my Easter break and working on some code for a client and the first thing I do is kick off my CI build and things start failing. It seems that my “cunning plan” to have my CI build use the … -
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GoogleTest - the first test
I’m in the process of investigating GoogleTest and the experience has been interesting. I’ve been unit testing code and doing Test Driven Development for a long time now; almost 20 years and I’m still learning. I’ve … -
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Practical Testing: 40 - Code updates and new functionality
Nineteen years ago I began a series of blog posts, called “Practical Testing”, about testing real-world, multi-threaded code. As with most code that works well, and is used by lots of people, we’re still changing it and … -
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Practical Testing: 41 - GoogleTest
I’ve been writing a series of blog posts, called “Practical Testing”, about testing real-world, multi-threaded code. Up until now I’ve used my own, home grown, unit testing framework. When I started out with this … -
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Building OpenSSL 3.x for x86 and x64 on Windows for side by side deployment
Back in August 2012 I shared my scripts for building OpenSSL on Windows. These have changed a little since the ones I had for the 1.0.x and 0.9.x releases of OpenSSL. The main idea is the same, the scripts build the OpenSSL code as both … -
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The cost of encapsulation
I’m debugging performance issues with a C++ server that has been stalling and then failing to recover. I’ve reached a point where we can generate the problem using a network interruption that causes multiple connections to … -
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Quick and dirty analysis of memory allocations in Visual Studio code
Yesterday I was bemoaning encapsulation and how it was hiding what was going on inside my objects (and quite right too, what good would it be otherwise?). The issue is that the object I was interested in, and each of the objects that formed … -
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Adventures with \Device\Afd - test driven understanding
I’ve been investigating the ‘sparsely documented’ \Device\Afd interface that lies below the Winsock2 layer. Today I use a test driven method for understanding and documenting the API. TDU - Test Driven Understanding When … -
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20 years of blogging...
On the 3rd of May 2003 I posted the first entry on this blog. I then proceeded to “back fill” the blog with various things that had either been posted before in other places or had been laying around waiting for me to have … -
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Wayback
This blog has been around a long time and the internet tends to rot. This means that quite a lot of the links on old posts are broken. I’m slowly fixing these broken links to use “The Wayback Machine” but it’s … -
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Testing, discipline and detail
The manual process around updating broken links is due to be replaced by a simple link checker that I’ve been writing in Rust. It’s not quite ready yet but it’s nearly there… I was updating a few broken links today … -
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Debugging network protocols with journaling
One of my long-term clients has hundreds of cloud machines running instances of their server, each server maintains thousands of reliable UDP connections using a custom protocol that we’ve developed over the years. When things go … -
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Sick PC
I’ve had a sick PC for several weeks now. It has cost me a surprising amount of time and thought. It started with my main work machine randomly hanging. This is Windows 11 with a Ryzen 9 5900X, and it has previously run faultlessly … -
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Multi-threaded testing
I’ve always found testing multi-threaded code in C++ a humbling experience. It’s just so easy to make stupid mistakes and for those mistakes to lurk in code until the circumstances are just right for them to show themselves. … -
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Setting the preferred NUMA node for a Windows Service (and making it work after a reboot)
When your machine has multiple NUMA nodes it’s often useful to restrict a process to using just one for performance reasons. It’s sometimes hard to fully utilize multiple NUMA nodes and, if you get it wrong, it can cost in …
