Posts on MXI

Still alive

Mon, 07 Jul 2025 20:45:00 +0400

Wow, it’s been 5 years since the last post.

I’ve got somewhat unusual topic to cover and I don’t have another place to put it, so I thought I’d try to reanimate this blog. That will be another post. Here is a bit of rambling about the blog revival.

A case of adapting a CLI test command from *NIX to Windows

Wed, 01 Apr 2020 21:45:11 +0300

There is a package I wanted to publish to npmjs.com. That package provides a CLI tool among other features, and contains tests for that tool. Unfortunately, tests were made with only *NIX in mind, so it wasn’t possible to pass all tests and publish the package from Windows.

The main culprit is inside the following function:

function runWithInputAndExpect (input, args, expectedOutput, done) {
var command = 'echo "' + input.replace(/"/g, '\\"') + '" | node bin/cli.js ' + args;
exec(command, function callback (error, stdout, stderr) {
expect(error).to.be.a('null');
expect(stderr).to.equal('');
expect(stdout).to.equal(expectedOutput + '\n');
done(error);
});
}

What makes the difference between *NIX and Windows (as far as we concerned here) is how echo command works. First of all, it keeps the quotes! But after we try to remove them - we will soon discover that the rabbit hole might be quite deep.

And down the rabbit hole we go:

SDRSharp plugin for touch devices, some thoughts on license

Wed, 06 Nov 2019 17:00:00 +0300

This project was sitting on my hard drive for several years until now. Last time I made an attempt to clean it up and prepare for publishing to GitHub in 2017.

Making sure it compiles against all required targets and contains all the required notes - is easy for such a small project. But there was something I just didn’t know how to deal with… More on this below.

Back in time, I was playing with RTL-SDR dongles, and the device I was connecting them to was a Microsoft Surface 2 Pro - “laptop-but-more-like-a-tablet”. I love Microsoft Surface devices, especially that old one, for it’s compact size. It is really cool to be able to move around freely, listening what’s coming from a dongle, no awkward balancing acts with a classic laptop…

Portable use has some UX specifics. Namely, having to use keyboard and mouse is really limiting, and touch screen operation on a tablet device is much more preferred.

While SDR# had quite clean UI, it was clearly made without such considerations. The core functionality - frequency navigation - was nearly impossible to perform on the go. It is really hard to hit top or bottom of the right digit on the frequency display.

At the same time, I had some examples of test and measurement equipment in access. These are historically made with very good tactile operation in mind. So I figured I can bring some of that experience to an SDR# plugin.

Next folder, previous folder navigation in Explorer with QTTabBar

Sat, 22 Dec 2018 12:15:11 +0300

QTTabBar surprised us with the update recently, after almost three years of silence. (The changelog also points to an importance of having a full copy of your code somewhere outside of your PC. Version control systems to the rescue.)

To celebrate this fact, I decided to publish a little custom feature I’m using with QTTabBar — a script and UI buttons to navigate between folders within one common parent folder.

There are cases when you need to visit a set of folders, and going up and down in the folder structure is getting tedious. That’s where magic “Next folder”, “Previous folder” buttons come in handy.

Navigation pane, a.k.a. tree view can, in principle, be used for that, but it isn’t always convenient to use. I can only use it for top level navigation, unless Microsoft will come up with some way to reduce clutter in the tree - not showing subfolders that aren’t ascendants or descendants of current folder for example.

My QTTabBar panel looks like this:

Two triangles looking in opposite directions are the buttons this post is dedicated to.

Below is the code and description for the buttons.

PowerShell, square brackets and apostrophes

Mon, 08 Jan 2018 02:15:11 +0300

This is a follow-up post to the one about square brackets and Unicode in PowerShell.

I discovered recently that there is another PITA character that interferes with my workaround — it’s a single quote, or apostrophe.

It’s fine to start PowerShell inside a folder with an apostrophe in its name, but we have to escape it when using inside Powershell commands or passing into PowerShell from anywhere else.

Below are my experiments to find the best way to open PowerShell in any folder… if ever possible.

JavaScript spoiler with a twist (collapsing up or down)

Thu, 07 Sep 2017 21:28:11 +0300

I thought that I will eventually need to use spoilers in this blog to hide long and optional blocks of text. And at the same time I’m often unhappy with collapsible block implementations across the Internet.

So I decided to design my own spoiler with one useful feature: it can be collapsed not only from the top edge but also from the bottom edge — you will not lose the line you were reading and you don’t have to scroll all the way to the beginning of the spoiler.

Examples:

click to show

This spoiler can be expanded up and down. And your mouse is left right over the button you just pressed whenever it is possible (on top and bottom of a page there may be not enough stuff to keep it so, obviously).

click to show

This spoiler can be expanded in one direction only. Collapsing behavior is still the same. The difference is just a few lines in CSS.

click to show

Keep reading to see how it is done.

PowerShell, Explorer, square brackets and Unicode paths

Sun, 19 Mar 2017 00:55:11 +0300

Let’s make a folder C:\[test] and try to open PowerShell there from Explorer (using Ribbon or context menu).

Oops!

Let’s see what we can do with this.

HTML aspect ratio box using Custom Element

Sun, 04 Dec 2016 23:45:23 +0300

There is a standard trick to make HTML block with given proportions:

<div id="containingBlock">
<div id="wrapper" style="position:relative; width:100%; height:0px; padding-bottom:56.25%;">
<div id="content" style="position:absolute; left:0; top:0; width:100%; height:100%">
...
</div>
</div>
</div>

Since padding is computed according to containing element width, it’s possible to use it along with width to get required proportions (16:9 in this example, 56.25% = 100% * 9 / 16). And content block is positioned absolutely to use the space taken by padding.

After learning about Custom Elements I decided to see if I can abstract the trick and turn it into something clean and reusable. So it could be used just like this:

<ratio-box ratio="16:9">
...
</ratio-box>

Custom Elements is quite recent feature in HTML, with version 0 available only in Chrome and version 1 just coming into play. It also requires JavaScript to work. So it is not practical to use yet, but still an interesting experiment.

See the code and demo below. In addition, there is also a slightly improved HTML+CSS version.

Parallel processing in PowerShell

Fri, 16 Sep 2016 21:05:05 +0300

Running arbitrary number of tasks in parallel with PowerShell, while showing overall progress.

The main disadvantage of the code I provided in previous post is that it is performed sequentially. We can speed it up by means of parallel processing, since main limiting factor is not an I/O but minifying algorithms performance.

There are a lot of ways to use parallelism in PowerShell and it wasn’t clear for me which one suits well for my task. I.e. to convert my script, which is processing a lot of small files on a local machine.

It also should:

provide updates in real time;
keep output table formatting as close to original as possible.

Ellipsis function for PowerShell

Sat, 03 Sep 2016 00:07:11 +0300

One more unintended thing arose from another post.

I was looking for a way to fit a lot of lengthy paths into console screen by removing less important parts. “Ellipsis” is a standard name for such a thing. You’re dealing with it every time you’re looking at “…” in place of something too long to fit into borders.

Here is my implementation for PowerShell.

Blog minification in a fancy way with PowerShell

Wed, 17 Aug 2016 00:31:11 +0300

There is no built-in support for minification in Hugo engine, which isn’t a bad thing on its own. But I had to figure out a way to minify my files while keeping building and maintenance extremely simple.

At first point I added minify for text files. It’s a single binary (written in Go), and with a single call it can run recursively over Hugo’s public folder, minifying output files in-place, just as I needed.

But minifying images is a more tricky task. I decided to use jpegtran and optipng, but they can’t be run recursively. Some scripting is required to use them. While the task of finding all the images in a folder and applying minifiers on them is trivial and can be solved with PowerShell one-liner, it was not satisfying enough, so I end up with the thing described below in this post.

Additional motivation is to have a tool that can be adopted easily to any other processing task and will give me a fancy progress report.

Quick note about objects in PowerShell

Fri, 12 Aug 2016 03:14:15 +0300

I decided to move this note out from another post.

It’s a kind of summary on a question “Why [PSCustomObject]@{} syntax is the preferred way to create objects in PS”. After looking into StackOverflow (one, two) and some other resources (three), I decided to test and write it down for myself.

Nothing really new here. I only hope it will work as a good summary.

Update: Select-Object examples. Additional links.

Ways to measure execution time in PowerShell

Fri, 05 Aug 2016 21:28:11 +0300

Ok, back to business. No electronics at least for a few posts though.

It will be clear later why I became interested in this topic. But it is, on its’ own, worth for a post, so here it is.

Measure-Command

The canonical way to measure how long something runs in PowerShell is to use Measure-Command cmdlet.

> Measure-Command { "do stuff" }
Days : 0
Hours : 0
Minutes : 0
Seconds : 0
Milliseconds : 0
Ticks : 7436
TotalDays : 8,60648148148148E-09
TotalHours : 2,06555555555556E-07
TotalMinutes : 1,23933333333333E-05
TotalSeconds : 0,0007436
TotalMilliseconds : 0,7436

One notable downside of this is that you see no output from a command. Time span is returned instead.

What else can we do?

Circling the square

Thu, 02 Jun 2016 20:48:23 +0300

I have some more Paint.NET shapes added to collection. Superellipses to be precise. Check the project page.

Superellipse or Lamé curve is the shape produced by generalized equation of ellipse, where we change the power factor. It approaches to rectangular shape on large values.

Also check the video below for a little bit of history of this shape in design.

Released some shapes for Paint.NET and converter

Sat, 02 Apr 2016 14:34:14 +0300

Some glitch-art, for starters. Guess what it was supposed to be: Recently I was doing some simple photo-editing and found that it will be much easier if there were some crop masks. 3x3 grid and things like that. After looking into Paint.NET forum I discovered that Paint.NET has support for custom shapes. This feature meet my needs almost perfectly. I think I’ve overdid it a bit, and after some research and coding I end up with a bunch of stuff which you can see on a project page.

Decision between various blog engines

Sat, 20 Feb 2016 14:54:00 +0300

Ok, now this site is officially live. Time to write something. I’ll start from some details about site itself.

Initial idea was (long time ago) to use PmWiki as the site engine. I’ve used it before and I really like it. The main drawback that was bothering me - the complexity of maintaining blog-like site on a wiki engine. It is possible, but there are better ways to do it.

Then I discovered static site generators. There is not much conceptual difference between them and file-based wiki engines like PmWiki - bunch of text files translated into html pages with some rules, but on publishing time, rather than each time on site access. And it’s perfectly fine this kind of site. There even should be a way to use PmWiki as static site generator, if I remember correctly.

Looking for static site frameworks, I quickly discovered that there is a plenty of them. And there is a good choice of programming languages they are implemented in. As it was with PmWiki some time ago, I need to compare them and decide on optimal choice.

Hello world

Mon, 02 Nov 2015 22:18:46 +0300

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