Category: Nerd Babel
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Project Management
Love it or hate it, project management is a thing. It has to be there. If you don’t think it is there, you are just doing it badly. Project Managers are a different kettle of fish. Some need to be boiled alive. Others can just dance on hot rocks. And a very few can sit…
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How Many Languages Do You Speak?
In computer languages, there are very few that are structurally different. FORTRAN is like COBOL, which is like Pascal, which is like BASIC, which is like ADA, which is like … Forth is not like those above. Nor is APL or Lisp. Assembly languages can be used in structured ways, just like FORTRAN, COBOL, Pascal,…
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Remote Repositories for GIT
Definitions When working with git, there are several areas we might be discussing. The most important areas are “working directory”, “staging”, “local repository”, and “remote repository”. A repository without a working directory is called a “bare repository”. The working directory is a location where your files live, with a reference back to the repository. It…
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Source Code Control for Beginners
Update My introduction to source code control came at University. The name of the program was “update”. It took an “update deck” which described lines to remove, by line number, and lines of code to insert. This format allowed us to inspect the code that was actually being changed, as well as the surrounding code.…
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Eating Crow
Or “You don’t know what you don’t know.” The short of this is that I’ve been building PCs for years. They are LEGO blocks. You make sure the parts will fit together, and it all just works. As an example, I “knew” that LGA sockets were for Intel CPUs. Last night I learned that LGA…
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Coordinate Systems
When I started writing, regularly, for Miguel, I took it upon myself to cover legal cases. Since that time, I’ve learned more than I really wanted to about our justice system. As my mentor used to say, “The justice system is just a system.” As a systems’ person, that allowed me to look at cases…
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Dunce of the Week
That would be me. Everything finally came together with the new system. Then I went and messed it all up. The motherboard has a weak Ethernet. It is a 10/100 Ethernet, which is NOT a problem for a management interface. When I upgrade the box to have full redundancy, it will get a dual port…
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Thank You for the tools…
There are a few servers that are too old. There is a need for a few more servers to get a room level redundancy. These things can be expensive. As I’m cheap, I’ve been using older servers that accept 3.5″ disk drives. Some except 2 drives, some 6, some could accept more, but the case…
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Tick Tock, The Clock is Done
The amount of grief I’ve put up with to get this working buggers imagination. To have a NTP stratum 1 server, you need to have a certain set of capabilities. First, you need a stratum 0 device. This is an atomic clock or a GPS receiver. You need a method to communicate with the GPS…
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One Step Forward n Steps Back (geek)
I’ve known about “System On a Chip” and “System On a Board” for many years. I have one of the early embedded software development kits, including some TI chipset. The most common style of these today is likely the Arduino class of SoC. These things are incredible. An idea I pitched years ago, for potential…