Category: Geeking Out

IBM 360/65 mainframe Credit: John Sloan I worked in a wide variety of development environments as an independent contractor in Washington DC, mostly on small teams or individual assignments, but I’ve found there’s an incredible wealth of learning opportunities that come with working in the large-team environment we have at the Coast Guard. In addition…

For seven years, I wrote computer programs in Visual Basic Script (VBScript), a Microsoft programming language used in building WebPages from information in a database. As part of a paradigm shift where I work to open-source software, in the last six months I have had to learn and develop software in Hypertext Preprocessor script (PHP).…

A PDF of this Paper is available here. I. Introduction The book Systems Architecture describes the function of the systems analyst as performing “activities of the business modeling and requirements disciplines,” and goes on to expand the possible responsibilities into “business modeling, requirements, design, and management of a development project (Burd, 2006).” As this paper…

When you make the finding yourself – even if you’re the last person on Earth to see the light – you’ll never forget it. – Carl Sagan Inspired by Oranchak’s post on Genetic Algorithms, I decided to revisit a project I left off on a few months back, the end result of which is to…

A PDF of this Paper is available here. I. Organization Environment and Requirements A. Hospice Care Although Hospice Care makes no attempt to prolong life or cure patients, the service of caring for individuals in their final days is an extremely demanding profession. Hospice Care volunteers provide basic medical care, including prescription medicines and non-invasive…

In his lecture, The Humble Programmer Dijkstra argues that programming is the only activity in which humans have to master nine orders of magnitude of difference between the lowest level of detail and the highest: Hierarchical systems seem to have the property that something considered as an undivided entity on one level, is considered as…

I know from previous experience that I need to be careful about what I put in the root directory on my development box at work, but I recently discovered it’s probably best not to have any open ports on my box at all, when a coworker showed me this in my Apache server log: Retina…

Why didn’t somebody tell me the Windows Calculator, found under Start->Accessories, has a “Scientific” mode, found under View->Scientific??? Windows Calculator, Scientific Mode This is like waking up one morning and noticing there’s another room in your house that you just didn’t know was there before. This functionality is fairly frakin’ sweet. It’s got Hexadecimal, Octal,…