Remember, C# does not have an exponent operator

I want to share an anecdote of confusing programming language features as a caution to my fellow programmers. Reviewing our application logs, I noticed that the API requests were interspersed with pauses of irregular durations. The interval between each successful request is supposed to be fixed; and the interval between each failed request, exponentially growing …

Avoiding time drift in virtual machines

If you use a virtual machine, you might notice that its system time starts to lag after it has been powered on for a while. To solve this problem, it is useful to run an NTP (Network Time Prococol) client within the VM to have its time synchronised regularly. On Windows, automatic time synchronisation is …