A couple of weeks back, we went to the Pasta in the Park gala evening for TESSA, a charity that provides help for victims of domestic and sexual abuse here in Colorado Springs. Taste testing of pasta sauces by sponsors, silent auctions, raise the paddle auctions, drinking, eating, and supporting a great cause. […]
READ MOREA photography topic this time: HDR photos. HDR stands for High Dynamic Range and is a set of algorithms that attempt to widen the range of detail in a photo from the darkest shadows to the brightest highlights to more closely mimic what the human eye can see. […]
READ MOREAfter part one (generating the board) and part two (hooking up some basic mouse handlers), it’s time to refine the interactions. Specifically last time I noted that, as written, it was possible to change the preset 0s and 1s of the initial game, and it was all too simple to select the 0s and 1s as we navigate around the board. Let’s fix those issues right now. […]
READ MOREPossibly a rather lightweight topic this one, but at the time (and frankly since) it was certainly in the news. The topic? Websites getting hacked, having customer data downloaded, including passwords. Sometimes the hacks are really simple, and I talk about a couple in the article: SQL Injection (which, even after all this time, is still one of the primary ways to hack a website) and XSS (cross-site scripting). Sometimes users bring the problems upon themselves by, say, having the same passwords for several sites (your password then is only as safe as the security at the weakest site). I also talk about the need to salt-and-hash passwords in your database if you are a website developer, and the need to use a good password manager if you are a user. […]
READ MOREIn part one of this series, I coded up a basic 8×8 Tazuku board as a web page and populated it with an initial game. Time now to make the board interactive: I want to allow the user to alter cells with their guesses (or rather, “logically deduced answers”). […]
READ MOREI’d have to say this article is perhaps the most satisfying of all the articles I’ve written for PC Plus. For a start, it did not even start out as an article but as some research I did to help my wife with a case (she’s a prosecutor). Some of the cases she prosecutes involve computers, and some involve some kind of techy knowledge she has to understand in order to present it to a jury. Seeing as I’m a kind of captive techy guy at home: I get asked questions about hashes, about deleted files, about browser caches, and all sorts of other things. And then there was this case… […]
READ MOREWhen I described my newfound fondness for Takuzu, or the binary puzzle, I had in mind writing some code to implement it as a playable game. Because I’m into JavaScript these days, I decided to attack the project as a web page. […]
READ MOREAn article detailing the history of JavaScript, as well as a discussion about its major functionality. I’m going to guess I was late on this deadline, because I probably wrote it in my sleep, the topic was so familiar. […]
READ MOREA quick article about what SSDs (solid state drives) are and one that necessarily talks about NAND-flash, SLC (single-level cell) and MLC (multi-level cells), wear-leveling, TRIM, and all those other acronyms and jargon that crop up with them. I also detail the main difference between SSDs and USB thumb drives (the former will perform some kind of wear-leveling, the latter won’t). All in all, quite a fascinating article to research and to read. […]
READ MOREAs mentioned in this post, I bought a Synology DS212 NAS for our home network, especially as our Acer WHS had a minor hiccup from overheating during the Waldo Canyon fire (we had to keep the windows shut from the smoke on some of the hottest days of the year). […]
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