Small code with powerful results, the occasional opinion … and beer. 

13 Jan 2021
Goodbye cash… we’re REALLY !!! going to miss you.

Over the years I have posted a number of things related to the timing and sequence of removing paper currency and coin currency from all societies.  My earliest post was in 1999 on my own website, as part of a long article on why the Y2K scare was never going to be allowed to happen.  […]

12 Jun 2020
Spare Computing During a Crisis.. Helping to Fight the Crisis

I recently discovered a distributed computing project for COVID-19 DNA research called Rosetta@Home  ( https://foldforcovid.io/ ).  Having 8 Raspberry Pis which are lying dormant after I completed a project with them, I decided to put them online as workers. For security precautions, I decided to create a segmented guest network on my router for the Pis […]

02 Jun 2020
Government… Indirect to You!

You may have noticed a wave of channels removed recently by Google for violating content policies, and the screams from their owners about foul play–even outright censorship.  There are very important constitutional concerns about arbitrary removal of content. And viewed at its face value, it seems like targeted censorship. And then today, there is the […]

16 Mar 2019
Unexpectedly Joining the Distributed Workforce

After an unusual set of circumstances, my company has shifted its IT and software development staff into a distributed workforce even though all of us are within a local drive of the office.  Previously other terms were used for this type of work, like working from home or working remotely.  But it is so much […]

29 Aug 2018
Real Password Security, Using the KISS Principle

Keep It Simple and Stupid! If you hate those extremely over-complicated password requirements which paranoid corporations are embracing, you will love the changes that NIST issued about a year ago.  The problem is, corporations aren’t really showing any interest in it. It is time to point them the the new guidelines, because the current ones […]

06 Aug 2018
Use Meaningful Method Names in WebAPI (.NET)

<rant> I don’t know if it comes from laziness in changing a default name from a template, or a misunderstanding of the attributes HttpGet, HttpPut, HttpPost, HttpDelete or HttpHead.  Regardless, having a WebAPI method name in code called Get() for a single method with an HttpGet attribute, Put() for HttpPut, etc… is bad practice. Use […]

23 Jan 2018
Paper currency… its final countdown has begun

You might think I am writing about Cryptocurrency… but that would miss a much bigger picture. Back in 1999, as the Y2K scare approached, I spent a lot of time diffusing potential panic from people who not only did not understand technology, but also did not understand the book of Revelation and what it actually […]

19 Jun 2017
A Common Template Approach to Iterative Tests in NUnit 3.0 and Microsoft Unit Tests

NUnit and Microsoft Unit Tests use an approach of attributes on a method to identify a test which is expected to throw an exception, to differentiate tests which are expected to not throw an exception and just report success or failure based on Assertions (AreEqual, IsFalse, IsTrue, etc).  For individual tests, this approach is very effective. […]

07 Nov 2016
Google Fiber (Internet and TV): A Tech User’s Impressions

One of the benefits of living in Kansas City is the availability of Google Fiber as my high-speed internet provider. This is something the rest of the country desperately wants access to. It was already installed at my house here in Kansas City when I moved in, and the Google Fiber installation techs merely made a […]

13 Aug 2016
If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it… especially when it has no aesthetic value.

There has been a very aggravating trend lately with banking sites.  More and more banks are finally joining the rest of the world a number of years later, by updating their web sites to support mobile devices.  Not completely surprising, considering bankers are the most overly conservative group on the planet. But without fail so far, each […]