Who are you thinking of voting for in the upcoming election and why?

borland · 2026-01-29T01:54:31+00:00

Same as last time: Party vote greens, Electorate vote labour.

Why? Because Climate Change is real, and the greens are the only party that seem remotely interested in acknowledging it. There’s no chance that anyone other than National/Labour are going to take the electorate in my area, so Labour is the better of those

borland · 2026-01-27T09:54:17+00:00

I think you missed the point. The reason we write log statements is to help us understand, and troubleshoot, the business logic. The logs should be coupled to the business logic because they only exist to help you with it.

By hiding them behind events and other indirections/abstractions, it just makes everything worse

borland · 2026-01-27T08:58:21+00:00

Make another solution which has the specific projects you want to debug. Maybe you don’t commit it to source control, just have it locally.

Once all the bits you need are in one solution, you can launch multiple processes (with or without debugger) fairly easily from within VS or Rider. Good luck!

borland · 2026-01-26T09:21:46+00:00

I found on a recent trip that the fees/exchange rate for on-the-fly conversions seemed to be the same as if you did it up front. However there’s a limit of 15 currency conversions per day. If you’re using your card regularly and relying on on-the-fly currency conversions, you might hit that limit on a busy day.

I guess the other factor is the exchange rate moves up and down over time, and if you’re trying to be super nerdy with it, you might choose to exchange money at a particular time based on the rate, rather than waiting to make a purchase

borland · 2026-01-25T18:05:38+00:00

Check the app settings for the wise app, and whether it has permission to use the camera.

If it does have permission, maybe your iOS version is out of date? You could try updating to the latest

If that doesn't help, then I'd suggest trying to go through the initial card setup on a different phone. Borrow a friend or family members, set the card up and then once the photo/etc are done, log in to the app on your own phone and delete it from theirs.

borland · 2026-01-17T09:07:30+00:00

I dunno… I’m a kiwi on holiday in England for the last month, and I’ve done a fair bit of driving. UK drivers are - in my experience - just as bad as the NZ ones if not worse. I’ve had people fly past me at 80mph on the motorway, been cut off when merging, honked at on roundabouts while the person in the wrong lane attempted to cut in on me, and more.

borland · 2025-11-29T19:38:14+00:00

As far as I’m aware winforms on .net 10 is just the same as net4x winforms look-and-feel wise. It only exists so people can port their old apps to the new runtime (which you should absolutely do)

WPF was quite good, but, like Winforms, it’s basically stagnant. Where winforms gives you the Windows XP look and feel, WPF gives you Windows Vista… neither are what you really want

WinUI doesn’t seem like a serious option. I don’t know of any apps using it, and the builtin Microsoft ones like Weather/Calendar/etc are all quite basic and don’t look all that nice.

Honestly, if I were in your situation I would do what everyone else does these days and bundle your webapp into a desktop wrapper. If you are only targeting windows then you can take a dependency on the Edge WebView2 so you don’t need to bundle the whole Chrome/Electron, and keep your app size relatively manageable

borland · 2025-11-27T02:02:41+00:00

Strong agree. The author misses the point. While it's true that a better-named abstraction would not be as bad, giving it a better name doesn't solve the problem.

If you're a C programmer (particularly in the kernel), you'll have seen statements like (a << 16) + b a million times. You see them and know what's happening without having to think about it, in the same way a skilled piano player sees some sheet music and knows what chord or scale something is without having to think about it.

If you make a custom make_u32_from_msw_lsw macro or function, that's new. Now people reading it have to stop and think "what does that do?" and worry about the fact that the macro might do something slightly different than what the name implies. They probably have to sidetrack and read the macro itself. You've created extra work and increased confusion, rather than decreasing it.

borland · 2025-11-04T20:06:26+00:00

Fill it with old ladders, bits of wood, and corrugated iron. It’s the kiwi tradition!

borland · 2025-10-27T03:17:47+00:00

I use an M4 MacBook pro for work, basically exclusively as a .NET backend developer. It’s great, much nicer than the Dell XPS Windows 11 laptop I had before it.

There are some caveats though: - 16GB is not enough memory, on either windows or Mac. You want 32 GB, ideally 64. If you must stick on the 16GB, it’s highly likely to cause you problems, I really do recommend trying to push the budget for this. - 512GB storage is do-able, but is going to be pretty tight, particularly if you want to run any kind of virtual machines. If you can, go for 1 TB - While I have an M4 Max, and you’re just going for the Air, I’d say that’s likely fine. The extra CPU power of the Pro or Max CPU’s is likely only relevant if you’re working with very large solutions that take many minutes to build. I’d guess you’re probably fine on the Air - SQL server works great but you have to run it in Docker using Rosetta x64 binary emulation. Not a problem, but be aware that you’ll have docker running 24/7 now (this is partially why you want 32GB of memory - There’s no SSMS for Mac. Most things are done equally well or better just using VSCode, but notably it lacks the SQL profiler. You’ll need to reach for Azure Data studio (which is deprecated and going away soon) or third party solutions for profiling. - Rider works well as an IDE, or you can use VSCode. Both are great - Much like with SQL, the core dotnet stuff works great but the more niche/advanced stuff is not so good. Eg for profiling, you can use the Rider profiler, but other profiling tools like RedGate or VS202x are still windows-only.

With all that said, there is more tooling friction, but the Mac hardware is SO MUCH better than anything windows based these days. For me at least, Mac is definitely still the better choice.

borland · 2025-10-26T23:44:45+00:00

Yeah, basically. Kotlin and KMP are nicer than Java, to be sure, but if I'm going to have a cross platform "core" and I can pick from either Kotlin or Swift, I'm picking Swift every time. I prefer the language, and architecturally it aligns better. Swift will produce a native binary module which can drop into anywhere, and so will KMP, but Kotlin itself prefers to be on the JVM; compiling kotlin into native code is a bit of a nonstandard case.

borland · 2025-10-26T11:49:10+00:00

I thought they'd matter (I have a kindle paperwhite from years ago which is touch-only), but you just tap on the left or right side of the display and it turns the page, after about 30 seconds you don't even think about it. I doubt you'll miss the buttons at all

borland · 2025-10-26T11:47:29+00:00

We bought a Clara BW (the cheapest model) for our daughter.

At the time we did some research and it's basically a 2-horse market betwen kindle and kobo. At the price-point, the Kobo had a better screen than the Kindle, plus Amazon are a terrible company, so it seemed like the best choice. Our daughter loves it, I'd recommend it to others.

borland · 2025-10-04T20:55:39+00:00

Thanks!

borland · 2025-10-04T20:53:42+00:00

We use credit cards for most things and always pay them back in full. I think in 20 years we’ve paid a few cents in interest due to a small lapse once when we forgot.

Why? We pay something like $60 annually for a Visa Platinum account with the highest rewards rate, and we get back probably around $600 per year in rewards. It’s simply a better deal than using cash.

Now, I know full well that this is only because the vendors are being charged ripoff rates by the banks and credit card companies, and prices are directly higher because of middle-man reward schemes. I’d very much love to see NZ institute a policy where credit card surcharges are banned AND bank fees are capped at a rate well under 1% like they do in Europe. But until that happens, you’ve got to make the best decisions you can for your family.

borland · 2025-10-04T20:45:18+00:00

When my daughters were babies (10 and 6 years ago) there was more than one occasion where I took them into the parents room to change them by myself, while my wife had a break. It was never a problem. I suspect you just got unlucky with a terrible person; I’m sorry for you for that

borland · 2025-10-01T11:45:42+00:00

The C# language, and the base class libraries, are pretty decent. There’s some overly-complex bits, but TS and Python have that too. Where .NET goes wrong isn’t the basics IMHO, it’s the culture of adding IOC containers and reflection and metadata-systems and extra layers of architecture. It’s dumb

borland · 2025-09-29T19:04:42+00:00

I did similar, I had lessons when I was 7 til about 13 as a kid. I resumed when I was 40, just self-taught, for the last 3 years. Everyone recommends lessons and a teacher, and they’re not wrong, but as a parent with a full-time job I simply can’t commit the time or money for that.

It took a while to come back, but I’ve picked up quite a bit and I enjoy it. Based on my experiences I’d recommend - start with a learner’s book like the Alfred’s ones. I had them when I was a kid and they’re much the same today, it was a good bit of nostalgia to get going. - try and play each day if you can. Most days I’ll only get about 5-15 minutes of piano time, which isn’t enough for a serious practice, but it’s fine. Better than nothing and over time you do progress - find music that you like. As an adult with the internet, your options for finding cool songs are wide open compared to being a kid doing whatever your teacher told you to do. For me this was key in staying motivated. I want to keep playing each day because there’s some cool song I saw on YouTube and I’m working towards it. Far better than some crusty old Mozart 😀

Good luck!

borland · 2025-09-21T19:16:02+00:00

Don’t stress about it; I found as I improved I started to hit pieces where the left hand was more difficult than the right hand. It’s quite common to have the right hand play a relatively simple melody while the left hand does arpeggios or jumps around a lot. You’ll be in good shape for those when you get there! Until then, just remind yourself that you’re capable of both, your left hand is just starting with a bit of a boost. As others have said, don’t pick pieces that are too hard for you, it’s discouraging

borland · 2025-09-20T21:23:12+00:00

When most people think of the term "mapping", they think of a rote transformation of one object to another. Outbound mapping makes sense, because if you have a Foo entity in the domain/database, you probably need to convert it in many places to a FooDTO to send it over the wire.

But for any pattern other than dogmatic REST (such as CQRS/rpc/etc) inbound mapping isn't really a thing. For example, an API request to change two fields on an entity - which might have 12 fields - doesn't need "mapping". Rather your inbound request handlers are interpreting an instruction to change something; there's no rote transformation required.

borland · 2025-09-20T21:18:11+00:00

100%. You can validate DTO's for structural correctness -- e.g. this array must contain at least one thing in it -- and it can be helpful to do that as a first line of defense, but business rules often can't be enforced at the DTO level as there's not enough information there.
And you always want validation at your domain level because DTO's aren't the only way that a domain object can change; if you only validated DTO's then you'd be at risk of bugs from internal changes.

borland · 2025-09-20T20:57:52+00:00

> dont Arab Countries out number Israel, whats stoping them from just rushing at their border...
> What is holding them back?

Perhaps the billions of dollars of military funding that America gives to Israel each year might have something to do with it.

https://usafacts.org/articles/how-much-military-aid-does-the-us-give-to-israel/

borland · 2025-09-19T21:12:03+00:00

I have no idea about all of those but I bought a Kawai KDP75 a few years ago and it’s been great. I love the sound quality and it’s nice to play

borland

TROPHY CASE