This post contains a few details on implementing a Quick Access Device Control for Android 11+. As of writing (Jan ’21), this is a relatively new feature and there aren’t many support resources out there for it. To help address this in some small part, here are a few gotchas I stumbled on while implementing …
I was recently exposed to the idea of Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs) through Twitter. I’ve struggled to wrap my head around them ever since. What does it mean that people are willing to pay millions to own a Tweet or JPEG? How does that sentence make any sense? And why do the concept of NFTs reliably …
It’s interesting how learning is sometimes like travel. At the end of the journey, you end up back where you started, only with a broadened perspective. Trivial example: code comments. As a new programmer, I commented my code extensively. This was probably to compensate for my difficulties in reading code. It also allowed me to …
To show a specific selection of your posts in the sidebar, contrary to what some top-ranking search results will tell you, you don’t need to install yet another spammy WP plugin or write any HTML. All you need is the standard Text widget. Here’s how to add your own “selected posts” section. Steps: Go to …
How to Display Selected WordPress Posts in a Sidebar (no plugins or HTML) Read More »
The Law of Conservation of Testing Effort: Like energy, the total testing burden for a piece of software is constant. It can’t be added to nor reduced, only transformed. However, the cost to your business (in terms of time, money and trust) of these different forms is variable. Here’s an example. Let’s say I’ve been …
Multicast DNS service discovery, aka. Zeroconf or Bonjour, is a useful means of making your node app (e.g. multiplayer game or IoT project) easily discoverable to clients on the same local network. The node_mdns module worked out-of-the-box on my Mac. Unfortunately things weren’t as straightforward on a node-alpine docker container running on Raspberry Pi Zero, …
Publishing your node service with DNS-SD/mDNS from an Alpine Linux docker container Read More »
Why “balancing customer needs with business needs” is short-term thinking.
Anti-Fragile by Nassim Nicholas Taleb is a goldmine of practical ideas for software developers, despite it not being a software development book. Redundancy is one example of such an idea that is explored. Taleb explains how having some redundancy reduces fragility, and means we don’t need to predict the future so well. Think of food …
Beyond DRY – Why Redundancy Makes Your Code More Robust and Less Fragile Read More »
Last month I was fortunate enough to spend two weeks traveling around southern China including Hainan, Guangzhou, Macau and Hong Kong. It was an awesome trip; I would particularly recommend stopping by Hong Kong for a few days to check it out if you get the chance. It’s an amazing, vibrant city. At some …
How to connect Python programs to a MySQL database using ODBC on Ubuntu 10.04 LTS (Lucid) This guide assumes you already have a MySQL server set up somewhere Install needed packages: sudo apt-get install unixodbc unixodbc-dev python-dev libmyodbc (libmyodbc is the MySQL driver for ODBC) Get current version of pyodbc: If you have python-setuptools installed: …