Social Networks for the life of the world
There are a lot of uses for hard-to-guess random text strings in the world of web applications. They’re good for session keys, nonces, and other such things to slow down cybercriminals. I had the occasion to figure out how to generate them in SQL Server. That DBMS includes a source of random numbers. Here’s what … Read more
Here’s a pdf. PDF
If you do any software development, you probably use the Google search engine to look up lots of details. Have you ever had to pick through your search results to avoid websites whose search engine optimization is better than their information? I’m looking at you, W3 Schools and Experts – Exchange! There’s a free Chrome plugin called … Read more
RabbitMQ is a message queue system. It lets computer programs send each other work to do, without waiting for them to do it. I’ve been getting this working on the open-source FreeBSD unix-like system. These are notes on getting started. This writeup was helpful to me. Install it and get it working As with any … Read more
The GM company recently disclosed, to their vendor’s dismay, that they can buy electric-vehicle batteries for their new Bolt EV for US$145 per kilowatt hour. It’s rare enough to find costs for these batteries that it’s worth doing a scratchpad computation of what the payback might look like for home electric use. My home electricity supplier … Read more
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.
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
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
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
Joseph Banks at NASA’s Glenn Research Center has put together a good bunch of material on how they use WordPress. It’s here. https://wordpress.grc.nasa.gov/