Wow, blogging with any kind of regularity is hard I kind of hard I guess. Who knew?

Anyway this was just a quick note for a problem I had recently.

I found that my Visual Studio 2022 debugger would hang, freeze or become unresponsive intermittently. Prior to the last update the process would freeze completely, however even after updating it would freeze though the IDE itself would remain responsive.

This freeze seemed to trigger more frequently when using time-travel debugging.

As usual when weird things happen the antivirus was to blame.

Excluding the process named VsDebugConsole.exe seemed to resolve at least all the debugger hangs after adding the exclusion. No doubt some more will occur but at least VS22 is usable again.

To get to exclusions on Windows 10 (old-skool) go to Windows Security -> Virus & threat protection -> Virus & threat protection settings -> Manage settings -> Exclusions -> Add or remove exclusions.

Like most side projects that devour hours of time and end up being entirely useless, this one started with a simple question:

Can recessions be predicted by increased interest in news stories about recessions?

The background behind this question -- and you'll have to forgive my complete ignorance of basically the entire field of economics -- is that recessions are a feature of capitalist economies. From what little I've read (and understood); during a boom, businesses scale up their operations to produce more and more "stuff". At a certain point the amount of "stuff" exceeds the demand for "stuff" and businesses and sectors are left holding a load of plant/equipment/employees they no longer need.

One of the challenges for generating accurate character sizes in a PDF document I encountered while building PdfPig was working out the bounding box for a cubic Bezier curve.

A cubic Bezier curve is defined by 4 points; the start, end and 2 control points.

We can number the points for use in the formulae in this post:

• Start: P0
• Control 1: P1
• Control 2: P2
• End: P3

This gives the formula for the Bezier curve: