Technical on Jeff Casavant

JWTs

Mon, 22 Oct 2018 17:47:00 +0000

There’s a lot of talk about whether or not to use JSON Web Tokens and how to use them if you choose to. I’ll go over some of the basics here.

Tim Cook, Facebook, and GDPR

Mon, 22 Oct 2018 17:47:00 +0000

Tim Cook said this past week at a privacy conference that he, and Apple, are “in full support of a comprehensive federal privacy law in the United States.” I’d like to take a look at one point in his argument.

Choosing the wrong abstraction: Tesla Autopilot

Mon, 04 Jun 2018 22:29:00 +0000

I talked last week about choosing the right abstraction to present to your users. Tesla’s Autopilot feature is a textbook case of choosing the wrong abstraction.

Choose the right abstraction

Mon, 28 May 2018 20:05:00 +0000

I think there are a lot of issues that stem from the wrong choice of abstraction - either in a user interface or deeper within a system.

Project idea: identifying influence and subgroup identity with TF/IDF

Sun, 01 Apr 2018 18:50:00 +0000

I wonder if you can pick out what writing influences someone, and what subcultures they identify with, based on what terms and phrases they use.

Matrix: bridges, rooms, and clients

Mon, 26 Mar 2018 22:07:00 +0000

I’ve spent the past week using Matrix, and here are my general impressions so far.

Matrix: distributed chat that talks to everything

Sun, 18 Mar 2018 20:21:00 +0000

Matrix is the chat platform of the future.

My Linux desktop setup

Mon, 05 Feb 2018 19:22:00 +0000

I run Arch Linux both at work & at home and I use a few utilities between them to make them reliable and myself productive. Here’s an overview of some of the choices I’ve made to make it that way.

Propercasing last names in Python

Sun, 28 Jan 2018 19:49:00 +0000

I wrote the first draft of this article around three years ago. I found it in my drafts and touched it up for this week’s post.

PostgreSQL text search

Sat, 09 May 2015 21:05:00 +0000

Happened upon another good writeup on PostgreSQl’s excellent text search functionality. It details an actual use-case where speed is required, and how to extract that speed from PostgreSQL using indexes and a modified search function.

Bournegol

Wed, 08 Apr 2015 10:45:00 +0000

The original Bourne shell, the ancestor to the Bourne-Again Shell (bash) was written in C.

Well, almost.

PostgreSQL basics

Thu, 26 Mar 2015 19:00:00 +0000

I gave this talk at OSU’s Open Source Club on 2015-03-26.

A simple service status page in PHP

Sun, 11 Jan 2015 19:53:00 +0000

I’ve recently added several services to my hobby VPS, including GitLab, Neo4J, and some custom-written Python stuff. I figured that it would become necessary for someone not logged in to the server to see the status of these particular processes, possibly for external monitoring purposes.

PostgreSQL materialized views, functions, and unrestorable dumps

Fri, 09 Jan 2015 16:27:00 +0000

I recently had to upgrade a PostGIS-enabled PostgreSQL 9.3 database to 9.4. In the process, it was decided that the server itself should be rebuilt and expanded. I accomplished the upgrade by dumping the data from the 9.3 installation (with pg_dumpall -c), transferring the file over SCP, and loading it into the new database with psql.

Unfortunately that wasn’t enough - psql kicked back an error:

Simple branch-by-feature in git

Tue, 16 Dec 2014 12:00:00 +0000

I’ve been working heavily with Git, and the more I get into it, the more well-designed I find it to be.