Year: 2015

Checklists and bureaucracy

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Here’s an article about using checklists in medicine by surgeon and author Atul Gawande. He also wrote a book on the subject called The Checklist Manifesto. The article mentions a landmark event in the development of airplanes. During an early demonstration of the machine that would become the B-17, a prototype crashed shortly after takeoff. … Read more

Adrian Frutiger

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Mr. Frutiger designed type. Among his designs were OCR-B. It’s used to print the numbers on bank checks. He also designed Univers and the eponymous Frutiger. If you have found your way in many airports worldwide, you owe it partially to the signs with Frutiger’s letterforms. He died September 10, 2015.

Good stuff from Microsoft

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Microsoft has rolled out some good developer-support stuff lately. This will help us get past their embrace – extend – suffocate strategy of the Ballmer years. They now allow individuals and small teams to use Visual Studio Community Edition free of charge. This is huge for their ecosystem: it puts them on a par, toolchain-wise, with … Read more

Starting a 501(c)(3) nonprofit in Massachusetts

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Here are the steps for starting a non-profit in Massachusetts. I’ll update this as I go forward doing this.  The basic deal is this: it’s a corporation, and needs all the paperwork for a corporation. Here’s an online quiz from the IRS about whether an organization is eligible for tax exemption. Once it’s set up … Read more

SAML single-signon — implementation experience

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I’ve recently had the pleasure of figuring out how to set up SAML-based single signon. This was for a SaaS offering (at Glance Networks, my employer).  Here are some of the things I learned along the way. I set up a so-called SAML Service Provider: a service that gets information about user identities from Identity … Read more

Glance Networks — a good company!

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I’m presently working at Glance Networks.   They’ve been around for well over a decade; they’ve never taken an investment from venture capital firms, and they provide screen sharing and co-browsing services. They make it possible for one person to help another person online with a minimum of fuss. This company stands out in the … Read more

Vaccination rates by school in Massachusetts

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Here’s an interesting data set.  This table contains vaccination rates for kindergartners by town and school in Massachusetts. It shows immunization rates for DTaP (Diptheria, Tetanus, and Pertussis), Polio, MMR (Measles, Mumps, Rubella), and Hepatitis B. It also lists immunity to chickenpox. It’s published here as an Excel file.  That makes it easier to numbercrunch, … Read more