Some time ago and for about a year I used a Mac, which had natural scrolling by default. I decided to resist the urge to immediately configure it to work like Windows, and instead I made it a point to give natural scrolling a try for at least a while before making up my mind as to whether to keep it or lose it. While giving it a try, I was surprised to see that it was very easy for me to adjust to it, despite the fact that I have been using the unnatural Windows scrolling mode for nearly 30 years. (Ever since the mouse wheel became a thing.) I found that natural scrolling was indeed... natural. So, I kept using it, and I became addicted to it. Ever since then, I always have to configure natural scrolling on any Windows machine that I get my hands on before I can start using that machine.

Windows is so poor that it does not offer any user interface through which a novice user can change the mouse wheel scrolling mode. To do that you have to edit the registry, and the setting you are going to be modifying is a machine setting, so you will be affecting the mouse wheel mode for all users, not just for yourself. This is unbelievably lame, but hey, that's Windows, we are totally used to lame.

One of our customers tried installing our Windows Application on one of their computers and their antivirus software complained. They in turn complained to us, so we had to find a solution. I am documenting the solution here.

Consistently every year for many years now, the Dutch have been ranking #1 in the world in English-as-a-foreign-language proficiency, according to yearly reports by the Education First (EF) organization. (Wikipedia.) I can attest that at least in the Randstad area, almost everyone speaks English, and many do so very fluently.

Nonetheless, there are certain mistakes that the Dutch are somewhat prone to make in English, due to interference from peculiarities of the Dutch language. When this happens, it is called Dutchlish.

Here is a collection of examples of Dutchlish that I have collected over the course of several years of living in The Netherlands.

Abstract

A new method for Automated Software Testing is presented as an alternative to Unit Testing. The new method retains the benefit of Unit Testing, which is Defect Localization, but eliminates white-box testing and mocking, thus greatly lessening the effort of writing and maintaining tests.

This was written on 2021-11-26 but it is retro-dated so as to not appear among my recent posts, and thus avoid embarrassing certain unnamed entities. It is written in past tense even though a few paragraphs down the page it begins describing my current experience, because in the near future I intend this to become my past experience.

In 2015 I decided to leave Greece and its destroyed economy, and to go live and work elsewhere in Europe. I started an international job search, and within a couple of months I had a few offers to choose from. I picked the one from a company called Topdesk, in the nice little university town of Delft, in The Netherlands, mainly because of tax benefits available to expats in that country, but also, and in no small part, because The Netherlands has the reputation of being one of the most foreigner-friendly countries in Europe. The Netherlands achieves this reputation in a number of ways, one of which is the fact that the Dutch rank number one in the world (1) in English-as-a-foreign language proficiency, making it possible to live in The Netherlands without ever having to learn Dutch.

(Useful pre-reading: About these papers)

This assumes that you have previously established a wi-fi connection, so windows has created what it calls a "profile".

In short, the commands are:

netsh wlan connect ssid=<ssid> name=<name>

and

netsh wlan disconnect

To obtain ssid and name, use:

netsh wlan show profile

This should display all existing profile names, and by default, the <name> is the same as the <ssid>.

Things can get more complicated if you have multiple wi-fi adapters, or an ssid that differs from the profile name, but the above should cover the general case.