The Wiert Corner – irregular stream of stuff

Jeroen W. Pluimers on .NET, C#, Delphi, databases, and personal interests

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Archive for February 4th, 2021

Twitter @Nick_Craver: “I’ve talked with so, so many new devs over the years and far too many are afraid to try because they’re afraid to fail. So do me a favor, share your failures […]”

Posted by jpluimers on 2021/02/04

Every now and then it is good to read back this [WayBack] thread by @Nick_Craver: “

I’ve talked with so, so many new devs over the years and far too many are afraid to try because they’re afraid to fafavor, share your failures.

So do me a favor, share your failures. Not just the successes. It’s not just about learning from them. Sometimes it’s just about people knowing they happen.

Reminder: you see the successes people are proud of and want to shout from the rooftops for all to see. Far, far fewer people share all the failures leading up to those successes. Yet those missteps are almost always far more numerous.

Hi, I’m a dev. I’ve caused more production outages that I can count. I’ve deleted a production database by accident. I’ve missed hundreds of bugs in code reviews. I try my best. I try to not repeat mistakes. It still happens sometimes. I still think my impact has been a net good.

[…]”

The thing about mistakes is that they do happen, and we need to learn from them. Almost always, it is useless to blame, but do your best to prevent them from happening again by doing blameless post-mortem.

We do however need to become better engineers, so this thread is relevant as well, because the impact of some is not been a net good:

[Cached] WayBack: thread by @www_ora_tion_ca: “This is wildly disingenuous, I speak as a flight instructor and major IT incident investigator. Modern software authors have the professional discipline of a cute puppy in comparison to aviation practitioners. […]”. quoting [WayBack] Alex Stamos on Twitter: “I agree with Chris. This is the kind of thinking that leads to “Why can’t we just have building codes for software? It worked to protect against earthquakes and fire!” Earthquakes and fire aren’t conscious adversaries. Try writing a standards document on how to win at chess.”

My biggest faults:

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Agile, Code Quality, Development, Software Development | Leave a Comment »

delphi – Faster DirectoryExists function? – Stack Overflow

Posted by jpluimers on 2021/02/04

From a while back: [WayBack] delphi – Faster DirectoryExists function? – Stack Overflow:

Q

I use

DirectoryExists (const PathName : String);

to check if a directory is reachable from a computer or not. But if the directory does not exist and the path name is a network path, i.e.

\\computer1\Data

the method takes a very long time to return.

There must be a faster way to determine that a network folder is not reachable. Or can I configure some timeout parameter that DirectoryExists uses internally (I looked at the source code but it just delegates to GetFileAttributes which is defined in kernel32)?

Any ideas?

A

There is no faster way:

any function accessing anything on a remote share will timeout when that share is not available.

If the cause of your timeouts is automatic disconnecting of shares, then these link may help you:

If the application can continue without the completion of the check, then you can put the check in a separate thread, and upon completion of the check, you can update your status in the UI.

Be aware that when you try a multi-threading way, that you have to disprove your code is free of race-conditions and memory leaks. Time-outs in combination with exceptions usually make that a hard task.

Related:

–jeroen

Posted in Delphi, Development, Software Development | Leave a Comment »

Chris Foster: Windows Development in a KVM Virtual Machine

Posted by jpluimers on 2021/02/04

For my link archive: [WayBack] Chris Foster: Windows Development in a KVM Virtual Machine covering among others much (mostly based [WayBack] libvirt: The virtualization API) stuff:

Similar posts:

–jeroen

Posted in Development, KVM Kernel-based Virtual Machine, Power User, Proxmox, Software Development, Virtualization, Windows | Leave a Comment »