There’s a company here in Colorado that I’ve gotten to know over the past three/four years. They’re pretty successful in their particular market segment (which isn’t software or related to software, as it happens). To help with their success they use a database/web app from a third-party company (I’ll call them Hackjob Software) that essentially just targets this particular company’s market. […]
READ MOREYeah, right, I’m sure you suffer from them too. You learn to suffer them, and just delete them without deigning to read them. I get 50+ marketing emails (or phishing ones) every day on my work account from people I’ve never met or companies I’ve never used. It just stuns me that marketers think these emails (and how they structure them) are worthwhile. […]
READ MOREI have a fun website that displays a couple of business cards, the intent being that, when I meet someone I don’t know and they ask me for something like my work phone number or my email address, I can just say “My name is Julian, so go to IMetJulian.com, it’s all there.” […]
READ MOREA weird post this one, but it’s a reflection on how much the event described affected me. Two weeks ago, on the Saturday morning, I was in a positive mood but, for reasons I’m not going into, my wife was not. I know, I thought, I’ll take her car in to be washed and detailed and that’ll make her happy. I knew the car wash place I was going to, it’s about six miles south of where we live, and they do a good job. […]
READ MOREOne to be put squarely into the head-meets-desk section. For a little while now, I’ve been meaning to update how I minify and compress the JavaScript files used by this website (and others that use JS to some lesser degree). For ages I’ve been using compressor code that runs as a Java app (I know, I know! Just step away from the pepper spray right now!) – first it was the YUI Compressor (last release: eight years ago), and then a couple or more years ago I moved to the Google Closure Compiler because I was now using the more modern ES5+ syntax that the YUI Compressor couldn’t parse. […]
READ MOREWe have a NAS (Network-Attached Storage) device on our network which is basically used a repository for the backups from our laptops. It’s a Synology DS418, and I bought it nearly 4 years ago when we moved into our house. At the time, I bought four WD Red 2TB drives to go into it in a RAID format (Redundant Array of Independent Disks) and it’s done some stellar work since then. […]
READ MOREOne of the sets of algorithms that developers tend to learn pretty early on is sorting a set of items. Bubble sort, selection sort, insertion sort, Shellsort, Mergesort, quicksort. Yeah, these days, your fave set of libraries give you all the sorting methods you’d ever use on, say, an array or list (and probably use quicksort internally), so you’d probably never code one from scratch (and, I’d have to say, even I would have trouble doing so without looking it up). But how about shuffling a set of items? […]
READ MORELook I know, I’m with you: the keyboard you use is of supreme importance to you and your work. Once you find one you like – mine is (still!) the Microsoft Natural Ergonomic Keyboard 4000 – you never want to use another. […]
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