Literally translating to "The town where only I am missing", Boku dake ga Inai Machi presents (what else?) a manga artist with no life or future who finds out he can transfer his consciousness in the past, fixing things that went wrong. Of course, the worse thing that ever happened to him was living through a killer's series of murders of some of his school classmates. Another traumatic experience makes him, now 29 years old, transfer his consciousness in the past, during his childhood years, and determined to find and stop the killer.

Now, this might not seem particularly captivating, only the solution for saving the children is not to investigate clues or stake out locations or alert adults, but using the tools a mere child has: making friends, being around the lonely people the killer seems to target. This has an impact on the man's life, but also on that of the people around. In the end, it's a call to end self alienation by connecting and doing good things to people close to you. The title is a metaphor to the impact a person has on their environment. What if you never were? Would things change? The English title - Erased - is the one licensed for the US market and has little to do with the plot.

The anime is nicely drawn, if not spectacular, the Japanisms are pretty common, the story is sort of predictable, so the only true positive thing about the show is the mood and moral. I can't recommend it to everybody, but I personally enjoyed it. It has just 12 episodes and so it's like 4 hours in total. Here is a trailer:

[youtube:75MF3Sap1J0]

Update: the initial article was plaing wrong :) I fixed it now. The important change is that you need to npm link the dist folder, not the root folder of the plugin project.

So, the question arises when you want to change a module that is used (and tested) in another module. Let's say your normal flow is to change the version of the child package, then npm run packagr, then npm publish it, then npm install childModule@latest in the parent app. This quickly gets tiresome and leads to unrealistic version numbers.

A better solution is to use npm link. First, you go to your plugin/child module and you run npm run packagr. When it's done, go to the dist folder and run npm link. This will create a symlink in the global node_modules folder for your project's distribution package. Then, move to the parent module and run npm link <name-of-child>. The name of the child is the same as the name of the application. This creates a symlink in the parent module's node_modules to the global symlink created earlier.

Wait! A few gotchas, first:

• careful with the operations that might change the content of the folder linked in node_modules, as they will change the actual source code of the plugin
• after you finish with the work on the plugin, then delete the symlink, publish the child and reinstall @latest at the parent
• make sure that the version of the plugin package in the parent is permissive (something like >=initialVersion), otherwise you might have problems with the version number you set in the plugin package.json file

Hope this helps.

NPM is a popular package manager (think NuGet for JavaScript) and the information of the packages that it needs to install is stored in a file called package.json. You run npm install, packages are getting downloaded in a folder called node_modules and a package-lock.json file is generated. Since you can always delete node_modules and package-lock.json and rerun the package install, a common assumption is that they are redundant and they shouldn't be stored in source control. That is wrong in most cases.

The lock file not only stores the progress of the npm installation, but also the actual versions of the packages that it installs (for the entire dependency tree). As opposed to this, package.json contains only the packages directly needed by the project and the acceptable ranges of the versions. One can allow for any version of a package to be used, or maybe anything above a version, or an interval or something that is "the best version" around a specific version. Deleting the package-lock.json file effectively tells NPM that you trust package.json and the developers of each package for the versions of the dependencies loaded.

Here is a common scenario: you create a new application, you need some NPM packages so you npm install thePackage. This gets the latest version of thePackage and installs it, then marks the exact version into package-lock.json as well as the versions of the packages thePackage uses and what they use and so on. Finally, you commit the project, including package-lock.json. Three months later, a new developer comes and gets the project from source control. They use npm install and see that everything works perfectly, because the packages restored are the exact same versions as the ones restored for the original developer. But now they think "who committed package-lock.json? Don't they know it's redundant?" so they remove it from source control. Three months later another developer comes and runs npm install on the source from the code repository, only nothing works anymore. The versions that were downloaded are, depending on what is specified in package.json, the latest version of the dependency or maybe a version similar, but with a different minor version, and with the dependencies that the developers thought best for that particular version.

There is a situation when package-lock.json is entirely redundant and that is when package.json only specifies exact versions. NPM works so that you cannot replace the same version of a software in their repository, so the devs will never be able to change the package versions they used for a specific version. That is why it is safe to assume that the same version of a package will use the same package dependency tree (unless some of the packages are removed, but that's another question entirely).

Summary: If you have any version of a dependency in package.json specified as anything else than a specific version (no tilde, no caret, no asterisks, no intervals), then you also need to store package-lock.json in your source control.

If you ever used The Pirate Bay, you know that a lot of the content there is porn. Even the most popular distribution users share movies or series among tons of porn links. In order to solve this problem, TPBClean.info appeared, as a simple pirate bay proxy that eliminated the porn links. Now that site is dead. I can't say that I am overly sad about it, since it worked very badly anyway. Yet, now, if you want to find movies shared by the likes of xxxlavalxxx or juggs99 (which probably started out as porn distributors anyway, with those nicks), you can't even see where they are in all that sea of xxx.

Well, there is a very simple solution, works in your browser, and all you need to do is install an extension that you probably ought to have had anyway. Now, this article assumes you use Chrome, but it probably works the same with Firefox. For Internet Explorer and Edge I have no idea and I also don't have the time to do the research, so if you feel inclined to help others and you know how to do it, please leave a comment and I will update the post.

This is the solution: install the CJS extension, which is a simple enough tool that allows you to run a script of your own design on any page. After you have installed it, browse to The Pirate Bay, click the extension button and add this script:

document.querySelectorAll('a[href="/browse/500"]')
.forEach(node=>{ 
    while(node && node.nodeName.toLowerCase()!='tr') { node=node.parentNode};
    if (node) node.style.display='none';
});

You might be tempted to try to load jQuery and rewrite the script, for better readability, but take into account that most ad blockers (which you probably use, if you use torrent sites) block jQuery on pirate bay domains.

What the script does is hide all the rows that have the Porn (id 500) category. If the site ever changes its ids, you might want to update the script, although that scenario is pretty unlikely.

Update: TPB Clean seems to be back online, but the article still applies.

We are changing the furniture and repainting the walls in the apartment, so naturally, the first order of business is to dig into closets, drawers, bags, boxes and various regions under existing furniture and throw away as much as possible. It is a strange feeling, one that makes me remember a past and dead self, one that was hopeful, smart, crazy, in love, using technology and doing stuff that I can't even begin to comprehend nowadays.

I dug into old CD albums, remembering with much nostalgia the movies that I was watching and intending to keep forever. The movies are still around, CD players are almost gone. I had to use my wife's laptop to read the CDs, as mine would only accept a few of them. Well, that's because it's broken, but still. Among the CDs I found old source code and material that I had gathered from friends, jobs, the Internet, hacking. I felt like an archaeologist digging through the remains of old civilizations, ones we hold dear and towards which we feel a strong sense of ownership, but with which we have nothing in common.

Here it is: the Palm VX PDA that was built in 1998 and still works now, with the same battery, if you can just find a way to connect it to a computer so you can upload new stuff to it. Here it is: the Nokia E60 phone that worked flawlessly for more than ten years. I bought a smartphone to replace both of them just five years ago. But also, here it is: an external modem I had forgotten I had; I still wonder where I used it, if ever, and how I got hold of it. Same for the audio/video/infrared wireless transmitters and receivers that allowed me to watch movies from the computer to the TV in the other room. Tens of meters of Ethernet and all kinds of connective cables, forgotten in an age of ubiquitous digital wireless connection just forgotten in the odd corners of the house. Remains of two desktop computers (that I could still make work if I had the inclination) linger like the fossilized bones of extinct creatures.

I feel a mix of gratefulness, nostalgia, loss and that I am fucking old, all at the same time. I wonder where I could find people that still value these things that I dug out from my past and that otherwise will soon become anonymous and amorphous junk. Geez, look at the 6 CDs of utility software, stuff I still remember fondly and stuff I have never used: antivirus, archiving, communication, VoIP, OCR, document processing, all software that is in heavy use today but you would be hard pressed to find people still recognizing these particular incarnations. Music that I still have in my playlist on CDs almost twenty years old. Games that I had worked on that I have forgotten ever doing. Random writing from when I was so young I feel embarrassed just to remember.

And this is just from a 50 square meter apartment that we moved into just ten years ago. I can't even imagine how people do this when they move out from their childhood home, where they and their kids have lived for generations. What do they find? Do they even recognize it? What happened to all the people that I once was?

Just a short info about HttpInterceptor, which is the Angular system of intercepting http requests, so you can do useful stuff like logging, error handling, authentication, etc. There are two npm packets for http, the old one is @angular/http and the new one is in @angular/common. While their interfaces are similar, HttpInterceptor only works for @angular/common/http.

Bonus thing: in the interceptor you are building, when you get the Observable<HttpEvent<any>> from next.handle, do not .subscribe to it, lest you will double all http requests (including adding items).

Occasionally I ask myself if I really am an "ist". You know: misogynist, racist, classist, sexist, bigot, and so on. Or maybe I am "one of the good guys", a progressive feminist antiracist. And the answer is yes. I am both.

I've just read a really long feminist article that - besides naming white bigoted men "the enemy" and showing them the smallest bit of empathy just because "if you mess with them, they mess with us women when they get home" - had the author wonder how come so many of the people who got outed by the latest wave of misconduct allegations were people who declared themselves progressive and even wrote or shared content towards that. And the answer is really simple and really uncomfortable for all purists out there: we are all a bit bigoted. More than that, sometimes were are really leaning towards a side and then we change back, like reeds in the wind. I think that's OK. That's how people are and have been since forever. The answer is not to pretend we are different, but to accept we have that side and to listen to it and converse with it in order to reach some sort of consensus.

The animal brain has one job and one alone. It has to heavily filter all the inputs from the real world and then create a manageable model of it in order to predict what's going to happen next. Shortcuts and pure yes and no answers are heaven to it. If you can look at one person and immediately infer things that will help you predict their behavior from simple things like sex or color of skin or the way they dress, the brain is ecstatic. Try telling it that no, that's not good, and instead of the limited statistical experience model that it uses it should instead rely on the morally curated amalgamation of acceptable experience of other people frustrates it. It's not a human thing, it's not a mammal thing; if you could express this idea to an ant, it would get angry with you. The brain wants - if not even needs - to be racist, sexist and other isms like that. What it wants is to take everything and put as much of it in small boxes so that it can use the limited capacity it has to navigate the things that are not labeled in one way or another.

So yes, physiologically we are too stupid to not be bigots. All bigots are stupid. We are all bigots. In order to not be, or at least not behave like one, you have to be motivated. Messing one's entire life in a matter of days with an onslaught of sympathetic and coordinated allegations would do that quite well. That doesn't mean it's the right thing to do, any more than it would be to "kill off" people who disagree with you. Therefore in matters such as these I cannot help feeling sympathetic towards people who are quite literally dicks. It doesn't mean I agree with what they did, it means I don't agree with what anybody did. And in such moments of sympathy I hear the parts of me that current society wants erased shouting for attention: "See, we were right! We are dicks, but these moralists are überdicks!" I listen to bits of me that want everything wrong with the world to be the fault of poor people, women, people from other nationalities, races or religions, certain jobs or certain types, having certain cars or behaving or dressing in a certain way. It would be so easy to navigate a world like that: just kill off the Jews and black people, put women in their place, write code only in C#, rename the island of Java to DotNet, be happy!

Yet it is obvious it doesn't work that way. Not even white males wouldn't want this to happen, most of them. How do I make the voices shut up? Clearly witch hunting offenders until their lives are more upended than if they stole or ran someone over with their car does not work. And the answer, from my own limited experience, seems to be contact. Whenever I am inclined to say all Chinese or Indians are stupid (which is numerically much worse than being antisemitic and so many people from my background are guilty of it) and I meet a brilliant Asian programmer or entrepreneur or simply an articulated and intelligent human being I am forced to revisit my assertion. Whenever I think women can't code and I meet young girls smarter and more energetic than I am I have to drop that, too. Whenever I want to believe black people smell or are violent or are genetically faulty and I see some Nubian Adonis talking high philosophy way over my head, I just have to stop. If these people would all go hypersensitive, get offended by everything I say or do and gang up on me for being limited in my view, I clearly won't be motivated or even have the opportunity to grow out of it. Of course gay people and Jews are responsible for all evils on Earth if they are the ones making my life hell. And it is also easy to remain bigoted if I surround myself with people just like me. I've read somewhere a statistic that showed racists usually live in areas where they lack contact with people of color.

Basically, what I want to say is that I see no reason why someone would want to be paranoid. Either there is something wrong with them or people are really out to get them. And it is so easy to label someone "the enemy" and just pound on them, so easy to blame anyone else for your troubles, so easy to enter the flight or fight mode that is encoded in our very beings. I see this with my dog: he avoids big dogs since a big dog attacked him. If he continues this trend, he will certainly avoid getting attacked again by a big dog, while trying to get acquainted with them might result in injury or even death. It's so easy to decide to avoid them, however nice they smell and how nice they play. For him it is a very limiting, but rational choice.

Hide your inner bigot, cage him in the darkest depths of your soul, and it will grow stronger, malignant, uncontrolled. This is what civilization, especially the forced kind, does to people. It makes them think they are something else, while inside they are cancerous and vile, just waiting to explode in the worst way. Instead, I propose something else: take your bigot for a walk, talk to it, introduce it to people. Maybe people will start avoiding you like the plague, but that's their own bigotry at work. And soon, you will probably be the progressive one. It's hard to be a racist if you have a black friend and difficult to be a misogynist when you meet wonderful humans that happen to be female. You will make the bad joke, you will expose your limits and the world around you will challenge you on them. But in the end, your limits will expand, people who matter will understand and appreciate your growth, and frigid feminazi Jew lesbos can go to hell.

You know that joke, about the guy who wants to become progressive, so he is searching for a gay friend? Why not try it the other way around? Find a bigot near you and make friends.

In both these positions, White to move and mate in two moves. Can you spot them?

[SetUp "1"]
[FEN "2B5/K7/6p1/3QpNbb/4Pkp1/3P4/3PqP2/5RN1 w - - 0 1"]
1. Nd4 Qxf2 (1. .. Qf3 2. Ne6#) (1. .. Qe1 2. Ne6#) (1. .. Qe3 2. dxe3#)
(1. .. Bh6 2. Ne6#) (1. .. Qxe4 2. Qxe4#) (1. .. g3 2. Nh3#) 2. Ne2# *

[SetUp "1"]
[FEN "7b/3PKn2/1R2N1P1/1pr1k3/1N3p1Q/1pP1r2n/4pR2/BB6 w - - 0 1"]
1. Nd4 Nxf2 (1. .. Rcxc3 2. Ndc6#) (1. .. Rc8 2. Re6#) (1. .. f3 2. Re6#)
(1. .. Bf6+ 2. Qxf6#) (1. .. Nd8 2. Qxh8#) (1. .. Nfg5 2. Qxh8#) (1. ..
e1=Q 2. Re6#) (1. .. Rc6 2. Ndxc6#) 2. Re6# *


Here it is in video format:

[youtube:ueht7DBP5dc]

Until recently, all I knew of Jack London is that he wrote White Fang, which I read when I was a child and to my shame sometimes mix up with Romain Gary's White Dog, and To Build a Fire, which is a short story I really liked, but which I mostly use as an example of how cold some places on Earth are. At a friend's recommendation I started reading Martin Eden and I really loved it.

Slowly building the characters and with careful attention to details of action and thought and feeling, London is both heavily autobiographical and feverishly critical of society as a whole. An extreme version of his own history, Martin Eden's character is a street ruffian who had to fend for himself since he was eleven years old. A chance meeting with a beautiful young girl from high society makes him want to be more so he dedicates his life to reading, learning and becoming more like the ideal he believes people in high society embody. Handsome, strong, very smart and blessed with good health and powerful will, he does just that, in short time managing to cross the cultural gap and then continuing to grow and learn until he even becomes a critic of the people he saw as gods just a few years ago.

There is so much more to the book, though. The transformation carries the reader through every strata of society, dissecting behavior, culture and belief, making bold philosophical claims while making one feel and understand from the point of view of this amazing character and others. At the time of the writing, the book was not well received, mostly because of the ending, which I won't spoil here, but how premonitory it was to describe similar events to the actual fate of the book itself! Now it is considered one of the best Jack London books and the one he is more known for.

I've read the Andrew Sinclair introduction after I've finished the book, which is what I really recommend to everyone, since it spoils the entire story. From the intro we learn that the book is heavily based on the author's own life and also of the differences between Eden and London's stories. Sinclair also criticizes some parts of the book, where the writing was not as good or was discordant with the rest of the work, but I personally liked every bit of it. Used to a classical story structure, I always expected some things to happen which did not or happened differently, an early sign that so much of this is based on real life. But also, I feel that having Martin Eden be endowed with so many positive attributes made the book a bit less accessible that it should have been, for the character is a beast of will and life force, of health and capacity of work. London was not as fortunate himself and many a reader will probably feel as I did, that the book hints that only an extraordinary person can break away from their position in life and maybe it isn't worth it anyway. Intended as a critique of individualism and personal ambition, it falls a little flat when we encounter the person London probably dreamed to be.

Bottom line: a powerful book on the nature of life values, as they are taught, believed, chosen and created, about how illusion can spur one to magnificent deeds and hard achievement sour the taste of life itself. It talks of the inner and outer drives of people, making them both majestic and ridiculous. It felt realistic and somehow uplifting and terribly depressing at the same time. I highly recommend it.

I am in the process of converting an old web site to Angular 5 CLI. Little technical value other than I need to understand the underlying concepts, but I needed to take some Javascript code and execute it in Typescript, the de facto language for Angular. And you hear that Typescript is a super set of ECMAScript, but it's not as easy to integrate existing code.

So, first of all, we are talking pure Javascript code, not set up as a module or anything more advanced. Let's say something like function say(message) { return 'I say '+message.content+' ('+messsage.author+')'; }. It's a simple function declaration receiving a message object with the fields content and author and returns a string. How to use it in Typescript, which is a strong typed language?

First of all, you need to load the script itself. The file can be added to angular.cli.json, in the scripts section, like this:

"scripts": [
        "../node_modules/jquery/dist/jquery.min.js",
        "assets/js/someJqueryThing.js",...

Next, in the Typescript file you want to execute the code, import the script:

import('someJqueryThing')

(note that it is not some import something from something else syntax, just the name of the script, so that it is bundled in for that page. But at this moment Typescript tells you there is no say method, and that's because you have not declared it for Typescript.

There are two options. One is to add a file called someJqueryThing.d.ts in the same folder with the .js in which you declare the signature of the say function, the other is to declare it in the .ts file you are running the Javascript from. The syntax, for this case, is

declare function say(obj:any):string;

You could declare an interface and specify what kind of object say receives

interface Message {
  content:string,
  author:string
}
declare function say(message:Message):string;

, or you can even declare var say:any;

I did something and suddenly my API was not run in IIS Express anymore, but in Kestrel. I reviewed code changes, configuration changes, all to now avail. I don't want Kestrel, I want IIS Express!!! Why did Visual Studio suddenly decided to switch the development server?

Solution: it is your Visual Studio. The button you use to start debugging has a little dropdown that allows you to choose which server to use. I had probably pressed the wrong one at some point.

You will quickly understand why I felt the need to say I was unbiased, but let me first demonstrate how much unbiased I was: I went into this raw fruits store, with an errand from the wife, and wanted to get something from me. Usually I like the caju and macadamia nuts, but I didn't want to have the conversation about why did I spent so much on something I eat out of boredom, so I looked around to get something else. And here they were, packaged and sold just like any other dried fruits or nuts: bitter apricot kernels. So I bought a 200 g bag.

Back in the office, I opened the bag up and I started eating. They were bitter as hell, but I didn't mind it much. I was eating some of them, then switching to candied ginger (which I'd absolutely love if it weren't so sweet), then back again. After a while, though, I'd had enough. About half of the bag in, I couldn't really find a reason to keep eating them. My colleagues had all refused to eat (and spit) more than half of one. But I was curious what they were actually for. People who love bitter tastes, maybe?

So went on the Internet and KABOOOM! mind blown. Just for scale, try to look for yourself at the dimensions of the can of worms I'd just opened: apricot kernels.

Turns out that the "active ingredient" in the apricot kernels is amygdalin, a substance that turns to cyanide in the gut. Yes, you've heard that right: I had just bitten the tooth, dying for the motherland before I could spill the beans. Google had already failed miserably, by serving first a page that explained how Big Pharma and governments conspired to keep this wonder drug from the public. The second page was Wikipedia, then every single conspiracy nut site, sprinkled with the occasional very dry scientific study that bottom lined at "we don't really know".

But I am getting ahead of myself. At this point I was already severely biased and I first need to describe my earnest experience to you. Short story: accelerated heartbeat, fever, terrible headache and nausea that lasted for half a day. Also, didn't die, which was good.

Back to my rant. So, some guy looked at the chemical structure of amygdalin and thought it looked like a B complex vitamin, so he named it vitamin B17. It was quickly marketed as a cure for cancer, despite numerous trials to show that it wasn't. And no, it's not a vitamin for humans either. It is not made in the human body, but it's not needed, either. The bag was not labeled anything dangerous, because it came from the outside of the European Union, which has a law regarding this. Here is some advice for both the EU and the US. Turkey was OK, though, so it only said "great for cancer, eat 5 to 8 seeds daily, not all at once".

So how fucked was I after eating about one hundred of them? A European Food Safety Authority article said that eating three kernels exceeds the safe level for adults. A toddler could do that from just eating one. An article from Cancer Council Australia detailed the child fatalities due to ingesting apricot seeds. Another article was telling me of an adult who got poisoning, but he was both stupid and extreme (he was taking a concentrated extract) and didn't die anyway. A thousand other sites were telling me how amazing my health will be after I had just eaten ten times the daily dosage they suggested.

Drowned in the sea of controversy regarding apricot kernels I've decided to look for the chemical and medicinal treatment for cyanide poisoning. Step 1: decontamination. It was kind of too late to go to the toilet and do the anorexia thing. Step 2: take some amyl nitrite (and then some intravenous things). Wait, that's a party drug. I could maybe get one in a sex shop. There was no home remedy and most of all, even if the amyl nitrite seems to work, no one seems to know exactly why other than the vasodilating effect it obviously has. Another possible antidote is (ironically) hydroxocobalamin, also called vitamin B12a. In the end some vitamin C and a headache pill did wonders, just in case you eat a bunch of apricot kernels and feel awful. Obviously, if it were a serious condition I would have died at the keyboard, trying to wade through the marketing posts and the uselessly dry official reports. Also, not enough easily available party drugs, I dare say.

So, days later the bout of shaky hands, fever and the horrible headache that only blood oxygen deprivation can bring, I decided to write this post. I doubt people will find it with Google, but maybe just my immediate friends will know not to eat this crap.

A pilot for the much awaited Stargate Origins series was released. My prognosis: it will be a disgusting flop, yet remember that Stargate SG-1 was kind of terrible in the beginning and it went very far in the end. Since SG-1 and Atlantis went really over the top, the only solution was a prequel, but considering the Stargate universe, I bet it will be very difficult to reconcile any prequel with the events in the existing series.

First of all, there is the distribution format: it's a web series. Instead of a pilot episode lasting 45 to 60 minutes, they released three episodes, 10 minutes each. The "webisode" format doesn't give me a lot of hope. However, this might be a marketing ploy, to check how many people are actually still interested in the franchise. If they see they have a big fan base, they can always improve the show or start a serious one.

But now comes the real bummer: the quality of the show, from the productions values to script and acting, is abysmal.

They went with the gender swap crap: female protagonist, female director, etc. Yet instead of a character we can sympathize with or want to be her, we get an abusive, annoying and very stupid person who, if they were male, would have been pathetic and offensive. As female, it grates the nerves. See the scene where, tied up, surrounded by Nazis with guns who have her father hostage, she spits, bites and says "you're a dead man" and "next time I'll really make you bleed" to a Nazi officer. It does feel like the role was written for an adolescent, maybe prepubescent boy, then it was changed just a little for a 19 year old woman.

Which brings me to the next point: the Nazis. The Nazis again, portrayed as they always are: ugly, mean, pompous, fanatical, always mentioning their Führer, stupid, narrow minded, etc. How can you do any good writing with cardboard characters? The answer: you can't. Start a show like this and you miss out the opportunity to see the Americans, British and Nazi Germans cooperate against the teachings of their respective cultures in order to defeat the Goa'uld threat. I have high hopes for the camerawoman, who in all this disaster seems to have escaped with good characterization and a decent actress.

Last, but not least, the production values would have been bad in a student project. Almost no post processing, the special effects are horrid, the soundtrack is slapstick from other series and there are some moments (an alien landscape seen through a window which is an obvious pastel drawing, for example) that make you wonder which 10 year old genius made that for a school project.

So you have a cheap production that a few fans in a basement would have done better, marred by bad setup, unusable characters and stupid writing. All of these can change: money can be spent, writers and directors changed or motivated, step taken to improve something that fans have been waiting for for a long time. However, what cannot be changed are the actors. The lead actress is bad, as are the two "young good guys". There is no getting around that. The others are not much better. Even Connor Trinneer, who you might remember as Trip, the engineer in the Star Trek: Enterprise series (and was also in a few episodes of SG Atlantis) and in this plays "the father", acted dazed and confused, as if asking "how did I get here? what am I doing?" in every scene. He was probably regretting taking the role. And he is 48 years old, he could have played the dad without the cheap white hair and mustache.

Bottom line: Trying to YoungIndianaJonesize Stargate was always a tough sell. Doing it with such lack of respect for the franchise and to the cinematic art is mind boggling. Didn't they want to succeed with this? I am baffled. Here is the trailer.

Annihilation, by Jeff Vandermeer, is a very short book that seems to be inspired by the Strugatsky brothers' Roadside Picnic. The same timeless quality, thoughtful introspective characters and a weird area that seems to defy the laws of physics and biology. But nothing is truly revealed, or learned, other than the somewhat senseless thoughts that the main character has. The other three women quickly succumb to the influence of "Area X", so we are left with a weird chick moving around in an unexplainable place with unfathomable rules. If Dallas' Pamela would have woken up from a dream at the end of the book, it would have meant just about the same as the actual ending.

I only read the book because of the upcoming movie. I am fairly certain that it will be better than the book, which manages to bore in half the pages of a decent story. It isn't that I disliked it, it's that I did not actually like anything in it. Everybody is acting crazy and without context and in the few pages that bring some context, it's the boring relationship between the lead and her husband and I couldn't care about any of them.

I am sorry, but when you write a book about a scientific expedition, it's customary you write about characters that behave like scientists, not like directionless drunkards with self-traumatic histories. I don't understand how this book won any science fiction award. It is well written, but it's barely average. I am not going to read any of the other books in the trilogy.

Update for .NET Core 3.0:

Seems for .NET Core 3.0 the solution is much simpler:

• install the Microsoft.AspNetCore.Authentication.Negotiate NuGet package
• add authentication in ConfigureServices like this:

  services
      .AddAuthentication(NegotiateDefaults.AuthenticationScheme)
      .AddNegotiate();

• use the authentication in Configure (above app.UseAuthorization();)

  app.UseAuthentication();

No need to UseIISIntegration, UseHttpSys or anything.

Original post:

If you get the System.InvalidOperationException "No authenticationScheme was specified, and there was no DefaultChallengeScheme found." it means that ... err... you don't have a default authentication scheme. Solution:

• Install NuGet package Microsoft.AspNetCore.Authentication in your project
• add

  services.AddAuthentication(Microsoft.AspNetCore.Server.IISIntegration.IISDefaults.AuthenticationScheme);

  to the ConfigureServices method.

Update: Note that this is for IIS integration. If you want to use self hosted or Kestrel in debug, you should use HttpSysDefaults.AuthenticationScheme. Funny though, it's the same string value for both constants: "Windows".

Oh, and if you enter the credentials badly when prompted and you can't reenter them, try to restart Chrome (as in this answer)