Category: Nerd Babel
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Would It Hurt To Document The Device You Sent Me?
I am actually good at this computer stuff. It is what I do. So I get frustrated when I order hardware and it doesn’t work. A month ago, I ordered a Mini-ITX board. It was cheap, and it wasn’t 17×17 cm, it was 17x19cm. Which didn’t fit in the case. The low profile CPU cooler/fan…
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Document Object Model
A modern website is a complex system of inter related pieces. Each of which must work correctly and communicate correctly with the other parts of the system. As website creators, we break the design into the Frontend and the Backend. The front end is anything the end user sees, while the back end is responsible…
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Unit testing
This is boring geek babble. Quality Assurance is not something computer nerds are good at. It is boring, repetitive, and difficult. That doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be done. Instead, it means that you need somebody to do QA for you. You cannot do QA on your own. You won’t see your own errors. Consider a…
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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…