Rambling Comments - Len Holgate's blog

Back in 2004 I started a series of blog posts, called “Practical Testing”, about testing real-world, multi-threaded code.

Today marks the start of the 30th year of JetByte Limited.

Another year, 2026.

A few days ago one of my build machines started to have unexpected test failures during regular integration builds of one of my client’s codebases.

I have been using a home-grown continuous integration system based on a hacked version of CruiseControl.Net since 2007.

We’re pleased to have resumed work with our nameless, large, American postal company, who, back in 2019 took our mail-sorting server software into an extended pilot programme.

I’ve been playing around with the low-level access to the Windows networking stack that is provided by \Device\Afd.

Welcome to 2025. 2024 was a good year for us, we continued to work with the secretive Online Gaming Company adding to and improving the cloud gaming server that we wrote for them.

I’ve been cleaning up a continuous integration build system for my cloud gaming client’s server system.

Last time I looked at way of using \Device\Afd to perform individual socket polling for readiness.

Recently, I’be been exploring socket readiness notifications on Windows using the \Device\Afd interface.

I’ve just had to deal with a situation where Windows 11 Explorer crashes and restarts every time I browse to a particular directory.

For a while now I’ve been playing around with the low-level access to the Windows networking stack that is provided by \Device\Afd.

There’s a bug in the TCP OOB (out of band) data handling code in all versions of The Server Framework from 6.6 through to 7.4.

Recently I spent quite a long time debugging a heap corruption bug.

There’s a lot of noise about how “Joe Biden’s government wants you to move away from using C++”.

I just broken my .htaccess file for about an hour and this resulting in /blog/ 301 redirecting to / which wasn’t intended… Fixed now.

I’ve been using the MiniDumpWriteDump() API from DbgHelp.dll for 20 years or so.

Back in 2004 I wrote this, I wonder why I used to make some people unhappy… I’m starting to believe that, at 37, I must now be old and cranky because to be quite honest with you; if you’re not writing code in such a way that you define concepts and abstra…

The only difference between a client and a server is the way in which the connection is established.

Now that I have a reasonably easy to use event-driven socket class I can start to use it.

I’ve been investigating the ‘sparsely documented’ \Device\Afd interface that lies below the Winsock2 layer.

Back in 2009 I started playing around with embedded assembly language on simple hardware with the intention of building a robot spider.

2023 was a good year.

We’ve now reached the end of the recent embedded development project for our Industrial Control Client.

I had an internet outage this morning.

The second of our “reanimation” projects has reached a significant milestone.

When your machine has multiple NUMA nodes it’s often useful to restrict a process to using just one for performance reasons.

We recently had an old client contact us with an unusual request.

I’ve always found testing multi-threaded code in C++ a humbling experience.

I’ve had a sick PC for several weeks now.

Previously published This article was previously published on len-learns-rust.com.

Previously published This article was previously published on len-learns-rust.com.

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.

Previously published This article was previously published on len-learns-rust.com.

Previously published This article was previously published on len-learns-rust.com.

Previously published This article was previously published on len-learns-rust.com.

The manual process around updating broken links is due to be replaced by a simple link checker that I’ve been writing in Rust.

Previously published This article was previously published on len-learns-rust.com.

Previously published This article was previously published on len-learns-rust.com.

This blog has been around a long time and the internet tends to rot.

On the 3rd of May 2003 I posted the first entry on this blog.

I’ve been investigating the ‘sparsely documented’ \Device\Afd interface that lies below the Winsock2 layer.

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?).

I’m debugging performance issues with a C++ server that has been stalling and then failing to recover.

Back in August 2012 I shared my scripts for building OpenSSL on Windows.

I’ve been writing a series of blog posts, called “Practical Testing”, about testing real-world, multi-threaded code.

Nineteen years ago I began a series of blog posts, called “Practical Testing”, about testing real-world, multi-threaded code.

I’m in the process of investigating GoogleTest and the experience has been interesting.

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.