Milton Friedman wrote an article called “The Social Responsibility of Business is to Increase Its Profits” fifty years ago. It is here. Here are some articles marking that anniversary, for reference. Some of them challenge the status quo Friedman established back then. Andrew Ross Sorkin, New York Times Tom Poldre, B Lab UK Article about the Business Roundtable’s challenge to… Read more →
Category: Reference
Half a century of this is enough: Friedman’s piece saying business must be irresponsible
Fifty years ago come this Sunday, on September 13, 1970, Milton Friedman (a professor of economics at The University of Chicago) published a piece in the New York Times called “The Social Responsibility of Business is to Increase Its Profits.” Invoking the socialist bogeyman, he argues that businesses should focus only on increasing their profits. Fifty years on, this has… Read more →
Explore pandemic data with SQL
The New York Times newspaper publishes, every day, a file showing COVID-19 cases and fatalities for each county in the USA. They put their file on github here for anyone to use. So, let’s use it. Let’s download it and learn a few things about using SQL to explore data as we dig into it. Their file is called us-counties.csv.… Read more →
Bar codes (QR Codes) for web sites
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. Fixit, so I made her… Read more →
New Microsoft Edge rolls out to everybody this month
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. They worked well enough that… Read more →
Rig Windows 10 to make work easier
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 run X programs. They’ll show… Read more →
Massachusetts town-by-town COVID-19 cases
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 file containing all the data… Read more →
Web Service APIs in dotnet C# made easy with ApiController: Part 1
Setting up your web service Dotnet’s stuff for developing web applications includes an inheritable class called ApiController. This makes it easy to develop REST-style web services, either for standalone API servers or in the context of larger servers. To start using ApiController, however, requires navigating lots of Microsoft documentation; as of early 2020 that documentation is pretty much all machine-generated… Read more →
Web Services in C#: Status, Parameters, Cookies
Status Codes Real Web services have to be able to pass back a status code. Maybe it’s a plain 200 success code, or a 404 not found code. Whatever. We have to be able to control it. Here’s how. We’ll use the NegotiatedContentResult template class in the signature for the Get method. We have to cope with the pickiness of… Read more →
Web Services in C#: Payloads: PUT, POST, PATCH
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? Read more →
