fighting the lack of good ideas
Any time someone who does not understand the practical outworkings of a given topic tries to “teach” it, you end up with a “presentation” – mostly in the form of propositional statements (dogs are mammals; barges are boats), or key-value pairs (in 1492, Columbus sailed the ocean blue; Caracas is the capital of Venezuela). Propositional…
continue “if you do not explain the why, where, and when, the what does not matter” »
I wrote an article on passwords, passphrases, entropy, and data breaches for my employer’s blog: https://augustschell.com/passwords-passphrases-complexity-length-crackability-memorability-data-breaches
Recently on one of the podcasts I listen to, I heard an offhanded comment made about how history is taught not in patterns but as facts. For example, “On the 18th of April in ’75, hardly a man is now alive, who remembers that famous day and year”. Rarely are the “whys” explained – understandably…
To add to my tutorial collection, here’s how to setup EtherPad on CentOS 6 (x64). As in the IRC tutorial, I used a Digital Ocean VM for this 🙂 What is EtherPad? It’s an open-source collaborative text editor that works like Google Docs – ie, all editors/viewers can see changes from everyone else in realtime….
Mike Riley’s entry in The Pragmatic Programmers series, Programming Your Home – automating with Arduino, Android, and your computer – was a lot of fun. While I am not really in a position to do many of the mini projects given in the book (wrong type of house plus we rent), reading some of the…
I first came across Why Nations Fail at my local Half Price Books. After seeing it on the shelves a couple times, but still being unsure about whether I really wanted to read it or not, I reserved it at my local library. Now I wish I had bought it (and likely will) – Daron…
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I recently found The Seven Stages of Expertise in Software Engineering. Stage 1: Innocent barely knowledgeable if at all Stage 2: Exposed seeking knowledge Stage 3: Apprentice has read case studies and tries to apply those techniques Stage 4: Practitioner can actually apply concepts learned in one context to a not-identical context Stage 5: Journeyman…