Euan's Blog

Windows

Building a ZIP file from a folder containing shortcuts on Windows

While shortcuts can be handy, you don't generally want to include them in a compressed ZIP archive and would rather have the actual files that they point to. I couldn't find an obvious way to do this built in to Windows, so I ended up creating a PowerShell script.

Swift

Exploring Swift On Windows

Swift is most commonly known for targeting Apple's platforms, though it also supports other platforms including Linux and Windows.

JavaScript

Speech To Text With JavaScript

I've recently been playing with some options to automatically convert speech into text. My original plan was to do it on the back-end in the ASP.NET core server, but testing turned up a few issues which led me to look for alternatives.

C#

Monitoring Windows Services With C#

Ever wanted to monitor the state of Windows Services in a .NET project? This is a problem I recently had to solve and after some experimentation I settled on using WMI to monitor changes.

C#

Logging with Source Generators in .NET

.NET 6 added a new feature called Source Generators, allowing compile time code generation. Microsoft's logging library makes use of these Source Generators to generate best-practice logging code.

Server Admin

Converting an SVN monorepo to separate Git repositories

One of the tasks I've been slowly chipping away at over the last year or more has been to slowly convert an SVN monorepo with 15-20 year's worth of history into per-project Git repositories.

Server Admin

Setting up PHP with FastCGI on Windows using Apache

While PHP-FPM isn't available on Windows, you can use mod_fcgid to run PHP as FastCGI under Apache instead.

Android

Searching Paged Data In Jetpack Compose

Searching through a lazy-loaded list of items in Jetpack Compose using the Paging library and Kotlin flows.

JavaScript

Implementing a cancellable asynchronous delay in JavaScript

Implementing an asynchronous delay in JavaScript with support for cancellation, which may be used for periodic tasks in asynchronous contexts.

Go

OpenVPN Server: Assigning Static IP Addresses Via A Script

Assigning static IP addresses to OpenVPN clients from a database table using a script which runs when a client first connects.

PHP

Using PHP's Typed Class Properties with PDO

PHP’s PDO supports fetching result sets as objects, which when used in conjunction with the PostgreSQL driver or the MySQLnd driver can make use of typed properties.

Android

Troubleshooting Firebase Cloud Messaging on Android

I've had some issues with an Android device not receiving push notifications from Firebase Cloud Messaging. Fortunately, there are a few troubleshooting steps you can take.

Development Practices

How I Write Documentation: AsciiDoctor Built With GitLab CI

How I write documentation using Asciidoctor and build it using GitLab to create both HTML web pages and PDFs for all my documentation on every commit.

Server Admin

Setting Up A Jenkins Server On NetBSD

Setting up Jenkins on NetBSD to provide Continuous Integration for the Nim project.

C#

Parsing Data Packets In .NET

An example of how I parse data using the new Span types in .NET.

Nim

Validating strings at compile time

In my previous post, I looked at one way of solving a problem when interfacing with a library that takes a string argument with a list of parameters, such as the pledge(2) system call in OpenBSD.

Nim

Generating strings at compile time in Nim

Simplifying APIs that take string parameters using Nim to provide a strongly typed wrapper that generates strings at compile time.

C#

C# JSON encoding with System.Text.Json - a small gotcha

Microsoft released a new namespace for working with JSON in .NET core 3, called System.Text.Json. I've recently spent some time trying it out with a view to moving from Json.NET.

Zig

Automated Testing for Zig projects with Circle CI

Using Circle CI to provide Continuous Integration for projects written in Zig.

Server Admin

Deploying Hugo on NearlyFreeSpeech.NET with Git

How I deploy my Hugo based web site to NearlyFreeSpeech.NET using Git to automate the build process.

Nim

Continuous Integration for Nim using Circle CI

Using CircleCI to provide Continuous Integration for Nim projects.

Nim

Faster Command Line Tools in Nim

After having read the blog post titled Faster Command Line Tools in D by Jon Degenhardt on the D Blog, I was interested to see how Nim would stack up performing the same task.

C#

Using Nim with C# .NET

Nim is a statically typed programming language that compiles to C. In this post, I will show how code written in Nim can be integrated within programs written for the .NET framework in C#.

PHP

Using Laravel's scheduled tasks with systemd timers

Laravel 5's scheduled tasks are very sueful for performing periodic work, but the documentation only explains how to use them with cron. In this post, we look at how to run them with systemd timers.