Social Networks for the life of the world
I’ve been messing around with the browser API navigator.mediaDevices.getDisplayMedia(). The question I hoped to answer: can I capture the content in some computer display surface and push it through the same sorts of process that I use with .getUserMedia()? I tested on Google Chrome 84. Answer: yes. It has some quirks. It doesn’t need, and … Read more
The US Federal Emergency Management Agency’s (FEMA’s) national flood insurance program has a non-governmental competitor. Here’s a Times piece about a Brooklyn-based non-governmental outfit called First Street Foundation. They’ve put together an online address lookup scheme called Flood Factor that returns a risk of flood at a property. They claim that FEMA’s rating system, based … Read more
I was really getting tired of the Wookiee look. So, I called the barber who usually takes care of that for me. She said they don’t allow walk-in customers because of the pandemic, and proceeded to read me a long URL over the phone to make an appointment. Generally I’m a geek and a Mr. … Read more
About time! the new Chromium-based Edge browser will show up on Windows 10 machines in this month’s update. For the cancelled Internet Explorer and Legacy Edge project people, I would have more sympathy if their work products hadn’t baffled software developers for a quarter-century. IE and old Edge were in the uncanny valley of compatibility. … Read more
There are some quick and easy things you can do to make Windows 10 easier to use. X Window System display server Download and install the free and open-source vcsxrv package from SourceForge. Then, configure your ssh to forward X11 packets. Then, when you ssh to a Linux or FreeBSD box, you’ll be able to … Read more
The Massachusetts Department of Public Health started publishing, on April 14, 2020, epidemiological data for each of the Commonwealth’s 351 cities and towns. The results come out once a week each Wednesday. They publish them in .pdf and .docx format. And, they don’t keep previous weeks’ data on their web site. Here is a .csv … Read more
Wow. Authorities finally figured what doctors have been saying for years. EHRs suck time and attention. The primary-care doctor who sees me works for a gigantic health-care conglomerate. He uses his own money to hire young people to sit and type mandatory gibberish into EPIC while he examines patients like me. Everybody knows the purpose … Read more
The US Centers for Disease Control publishes a Field Epidemiology Manual with lots of great material on how to handle epidemics. There’s a great chapter on communications during an epidemic here. (Infosec incident response planners would be wise to read this material; lots of it applies to communicating about data breaches. Back to the topic … Read more
We send data to a web service via POST, PUT, or PATCH. All these web requests carry a payload: one or more items of data. How do we code these web services to accept data?