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Administrative Note (3/2018)
Just a note. Today I upgraded the PHP framework for my WordPress blogs to version 7.2, which is good in the sense that an upgraded infrastructure is good for overall security in any service or application, but it seems to be generating a warning in the header of pages on the site. Hopefully Automattic, the…
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Memory Management
I don’t mean this to be metaphorical, but maybe 10 or 20 years from now it will be. Computers and computing require memory. The reason is they need to keep quick calculations and values close at hand, because of communication speeds, because we need them to be quick and responsive, particularly for video displays and…
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More on Home Automation, Homebridge, Nest, and Apple’s HomeKit
I got Homebridge, the Node.js-based software Bridge for use with home automation and Nest (and other Internet of Things – aka IoT) home automation devices, working and running in my environment. And then my WeMo bridge started failing. But more herein about getting Nest to work with Homebridge and Apple Homekit because, as usual, the…
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Getting better at customizing WordPress
Since last year, I’ve been volunteering on a Taproot Foundation Website grant, and we’ve been setting up WordPress for a nonprofit that got awarded the grant for them to use as a replacement website for their content and publications. I’ve been working as the “lead developer” and my various hard and soft skills (including mentoring…
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Adventures in Home Automation
For me, it started with the Nest Protects (Smoke and CO detectors), then a Nest Thermostat, then more Protects, now some cameras, and some other products: A WeMo (Belkin) smart outlet plug, and now a Philips Hue bridge and two lights. It’s a slippery slope. A gateway drug. But it’s also a huge technical PITA.…
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2017 Thanks Taking
Let me start with a statement about “Thanksgiving”. We’re supposed to give thanks for all that we have. That’s great, but it elides the genocides, massacres, and wars that US settlers had with the natives of North America before taking possession. It elides the biological warfare. It elides centuries of neglect, abuse, and outright murder…
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What happens when Facebook goes down?
Answer: Then Twitter goes down, then Livejournal, then Blogger (briefly), then YouTube (briefly), then LinkedIn (briefer than Facebook and Twitter). I think part of this is user migration, but probably a lot of it was that one of the big Content Data Networks (CDNs) may have gone down. I don’t have proof. I was watching…
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The dreaded rebuild
I don’t know about you, but I am rough on computers. In the course of the weeks and months I spend doing geeky shit, I tend to load and overload and reload and reconfigure and rebuild and reinstall a bunch of different kinds of development tools and platforms and language interpreters for different purposes and…
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Javascript geeking – p5.js and matter.js
I haven’t done HTML/Javascript geeking in a while, but thought while I’m in downtime between courses for my Data Science studies, I’d noodle around. I’ve been idly watching instructional videos by The Coding Train (Dan Shiffman) on YouTube for a while, but I was intrigued by both p5.js and matter.js (as an aside, there are other…
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Taoism and the Sage
By sagely, what I mean is that there is an oft forgotten set of ethics that are meant to apply to all Taoists, especially the successful ones. It’s a mix of altruism, governance, manipulation, idealism, and pragmatism, and the idea is that each Taoist follower, each potential sage, is supposed to be doing a lot…
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Tools
Just a note: I’d like to thank the freeware program, Lyx, for helping create LaTeX markup for various mathy-sciency things I post about. Very helpful. You have to know what to include/not for Jetpack’s LaTeX interpreter, Beautiful Math (most especially the preamble that makes a Lyx document a document, and various carriage returns that tend…
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Statistics – This could be you! – Bayesian Conditional Probability and Medical Tests
As many of you know, I’m taking, for career change and self improvement, a certified curriculum offered by Columbia University and Microsoft and edX.org, on Data Science. With this, I hope to be able to change careers from Systems Engineering (which I love, but had become limiting) to a job in Data Analysis/Data Science, which…
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The notability of $latex (82,000)_{10}$
The title is meant to read , but WordPress’s Jetpack Plugin’s Beautiful Math component doesn’t execute latex markup in the Title/Subject. I’m still keeping it in the subject, though. This post is about bases and numbers and elitism and of course, math and meta discussion. If you are interested, please read on!
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Visual Rhetoric – Some feedback for MSNBC
Over the years, MSNBC has been using and reusing a particular visual rhetorical style for presenting job growth numbers since Obama’s taken office. And it’s not bad for presenting good data consistently over time, for keeping the range of values within a reasonable scale. All good things, but what it lacks is punch.
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Misascribed – Chinese things
Fire drills, whispers, curses, checkers – since I’m half Chinese, I know how often these things get misattributed to folks of my ancestry. The fire drill article on Wikipedia provides a pretty whitewashed version of the fire drill’s origin from the one taught me by oral history from my elders. I don’t really fault folks for…
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Measuring and Calibration – Science Geek Series
A lot of bakers and chefs and chemists will tell you that they’re in the same business. So, in a way, are bartenders and cheese makers and drug dealers and brewers and vintners. Because we all need to measure things a lot and we need both accuracy (the ability to measure amounts reliably) and precision (the…
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Reporting Issues – Geek-as-a-Trade series
One of the geeky intersections I have in personal and professional geekery is that of reporting issues. Sometimes this is with an online shop or app or web service. Sometimes it’s with a network provider, or a cell phone service provider. Sometimes I have to report to a professional IT Networking team. Other times I’m…
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Philosophy and Introduction – Geek-as-a-Trade series
I’ve been a geek all my life. My work, my play, my housekeeping all involve geeking at some level. While plenty of geeks involve geekery in all parts of life, here is how I think I differ from most geeks especially at work and what’s important and valuable about that difference: I write stuff down and…
