This "Coding and Techy Stuff" category is here because peripatetically I make a living as a software engineer. This is where I put anything related to coding and technology, and sometimes just unrelated information such as you might find posted on ycombinator's always-intellectually-curious Hacker News.
Alas, Windows 10 introduced an absurdly complicated way to start a VPN connection where it used to take only a couple clicks. Turns out you can make a shortcut that will allow you to single-click your way into a VPN connection like the good old days. Winaero.com does a great job of describing how to […]
In the end, it looks like I should have searched through the code for all SQL commands like "SELECT" and "UPDATE" and "INSERT" and determined which tables I needed. Might have saved a few days. But you know how you get tunnel vision when you're down the rabbit hole. So, […]
Iridium is a privacy-oriented browser based on Chromium, so it has all the advantages of Chrome without flooding Google with a continual stream of telemetry as you surf the web. From looking at it and playing with it recently, I find it to be pretty much what it advertises, and am happy using it to […]
Well this is just delightful. There are enough tips and tricks on this single website to keep a web designer happy for a long time. Thoroughly enjoying trying to get impress.js working in a site that I'm working on. Delicious crumb here: https://1stwebdesigner.com/css-effects/ […]
Normally when installing FreedomBox inside VirtualBox, you can use Bridged Mode and get on with things, but you can't use bridged mode when installing a VirtualBox image running on a VM with a dedicated IP address. This is because bridged mode requires DHCP which you don't have in this scenario. You […]
Blockchain is not "just another database." Or even "a decentralized database." It is more, because it enables two people to trust each other without relying on a third party. It took me a while to realize how important and revolutionary that is, so... here is my brief intro to […]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ms_1TZL-Z48 https://venturebeat.com/2017/12/23/why-you-want-blockchain-based-ai-even-if-you-dont-know-it-yet/ https://oceanprotocol.com/
Overall, the two systems are roughly equal, both are well supported and both are well documented for the needs of anyone with basic PBX needs. For most purposes, either way you go, you're going to be fine. However, most likely, if you're asking "Asterisk or FreeSWITCH" you have little […]
Every now and then we encounter a Stack Overflow answer that cuts through hours of searching and aborted attempts at fixes with a few lines of elegance. Here's one I just deployed, figured I would point others to it as well in case Google brings you here... The easiest method I have found so far is […]
In the previous post, we installed two virtual machines, one for Windows and one for Mac. Here, we install Xamarin and Visual Studio on each environment, and jump right into a code tutorial or two. It's pretty straightforward to install Xamarin, but the installer does take a long time. In each dev […]
I am a long time C# developer and have worked with Visual Studio extensively for server and client side development, but have not developed any Apps yet. I have a few friends who are interested in App development, so I'm starting a thread here on this blog to cover some of the material that we'll be […]
I currently know almost nothing about Angular, but it does look interesting enough for when I have time to look closer. I had to integrate an authentication sequence with AngularJS recently and found that it can create some barriers to a simple approach until you spend time learning about how it […]
Another example of how you can spend hours trying to understand an idea and get nowhere, but search for "intuitive+youridea" and rapidly find a gem like this example of the difference between functional and imperative programming. Within seconds of reading this I understood more than an […]
It's fascinating how few articles on a given subject can be written in an intuitive manner. Just spent an hour aggressively searching the Internet for anything similar to this article giving an intuitive introduction to Lisp and found very little. Spent another hour with similar results for the […]
Since it's actually an OS issue more than a DB issue, this solution works for more than just MySQL which is mentioned in the article linked below. This fix is the only one that worked for me using SQL SERVER after trying everything else. So I figured I'd put this out there for others to find: […]
Insightful article about going beneath the surface layer to understand people. Google attracts enough talent that it can afford to look beyond the obvious factors in hiring. For example: "leadership — in particular emergent leadership as opposed to traditional leadership. Traditional leadership […]
https://techxplore.com/news/2017-03-sony-patent-application-method-wirelessly.html Wirelessly charging your phone using your friend's phone? You have to hand it to Sony for bright ideas. James Milne, True Xiong and Charles McCoy are named as the inventors on a Sony patent application published […]
Very cool that this worked, so I figured I'd share online in case it happens to you. The screen went bad on my iPhone 5, so I couldn't tell the iPhone to trust iTunes in order to make a backup. It kept prompting me to enter a passcode which I couldn't enter. Hold your power and home buttons down for […]
"In theory, the Internet of Things promises to make your life easier and your work more efficient, ... saving you time, money, and energy... except when the companies that make these connected objects act in a way that runs counter to the consumer's best interests -- as the technology company […]
This is obscure, so I'm posting it here to save someone the few hours I just spent. I recently clicked "Tools/Options/Debugging/Require source files to exactly match the original version." A little later, without realizing it was related to this config change, I discovered my debugging […]