Suppose, not entirely hypothetically, that a vendor tells you that you need 32-bit Office. With 2016 and 2019, this is not so easy. Microsoft has official docs that explain how to do it, but of course, they are outdated and no longer work. Here’s the trick: install any 32-bit Office component, and then the Office […]
Preparing to teach CS theory
I am gearing up to teach some computer science theory. I feel well-prepared to teach the basics of discrete math: set theory, graphs, cardinalities, basic recurrences, proofs, and so on– but when considered as a whole, the subject is incredibly broad. I’m hoping to structure lectures as 75 minute periods twice a week, but the […]
An incomplete list of my excellent teachers
It’s just about that time to get back to school, so I wanted to thank some people in my life, from preschool through to teachers in my career: Mrs. Hsu Miss Wheeler Mrs. Owens Mrs. Hood Mike Gajewski Wade Jackson Ken Drury Mr. Anderson Mr. Evans Mrs. Chilson Mr. Chilson Nancy Black Joan Twillman Leigh […]
Brother Printers on Raspbian
It turns out that Brother doesn’t seem to be very serious about publishing driver packages that work for ARM machines. The easiest way I’ve found to deal with this so far– and still have quick, good-quality color printing– is to use the MFC-9840CDW PPD. Verified working on HL-3170CDW, MFC-8480DN, and I’ll test it on HL-2170DW […]
Oddly missing core functions
MSSQL is terrible for lacking some seemingly straightforward functionality- like the ability to drop a table only if it exists and has no rows. Salt to taste: — TODO: accept an array of tables, check all of them for existence and zero rows, then perform drop CREATE PROCEDURE DropTableIfEmpty(@t as nvarchar(max)) AS BEGIN SELECT @t […]
Strong self-signed SSL certificates for development on IIS
openssl req -newkey rsa:4096 -nodes -keyout key.pem -x509 -days 3650 -out certificate.pem -sha256 openssl x509 -text -noout -in certificate.pem openssl pkcs12 -inkey key.pem -in certificate.pem -export -out certificate.pfx openssl pkcs12 -in certificate.pfx -noout -info Links: Generating a self-signed certificate using OpenSSL Generate an OpenSSL Certificate Request with SHA256 Signature Create a .pfx/.p12 certificate file using […]
Splitting LDIF files
I went to the St. Louis PowerShell meetup last night, and someone had an interesting issue. They were dealing with a 4.5 gigabyte LDIF file- it needed to be somehow processed, and the issue of processing had already been dealt with. However, it turns out that PowerShell wasn’t cranking fast enough for the application. Most […]
Embroidery the Hard Way
With tens of thousands of dollars of equipment on hand, one would think that the seemingly simple would be possible. Oh dear. Not even close. For years I’ve been putting binding on blankets and embroidering them with, generally, just a couple words- a name or something. I wanted to do a bigger project- a quote […]
Metrics for sunsetting systems
Really, these are similar metrics to what you would use to choose systems- except they’re often on the tail end of a choice made years ago. I frequently see multiple systems run in parallel that really should be integrated (e.g., why would one have separate time and access cards?). If you’re going to choose between […]
Assessing risk (and pitfalls)
I’ve already mused a bit on project estimation, and I have an upcoming post about how to think about sunsetting systems. It occurs to me that there are at least two more fundamental questions to address: what does it mean to talk about the risk in a system, and what biases might we have when […]