Adrian Frutiger

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

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

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

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

Vaccination rates by school in Massachusetts

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

Google Chromecast digisign references

These are notes on digital signage on the Google Chromecast. Google’s docs https://cast.google.com/publish/#/overview   Console https://developers.google.com/cast/docs/custom_receiver   Writeup SaaS vendors. https://www.signsimple.com/ (local launch) http://launch.signagely.com/  (not up yet) Chromecast code repos https://github.com/pjjanak/chromecast-hello-world "C" is for Chromecast: hacking digital signage Limitations The Chromecast device does a good job of displaying media at 1080p resolution.  However, any web … Read more

Starting a new web site or blogging project? Read this! Seriously.

Mr. Ognjen Duraskovic first got in touch with me with an offer to translate my MMWW WordPress plugin to Spanish and Serbian, which of course, I gratefully accepted. Gracias! хвала! It was an extra-cool offer because MMWW contains all kinds of readable text strings for the photographic details embedded in Exif metatdata. He dealt with all … Read more

Fast nearest-location finder for SQL (MySQL, PostgreSQL, SQL Server)

I’ve spent enough time goofing around with location-finder software that it’s worth writing up how to do it.   Of course, finding distances on the surface of the earth means using Great Circle distances, worked out with the Haversine formula, also called the Spherical Cosine Law formula. The problem is this: Given a table of … Read more