Geek Wisdom

 Agile is a specific approach to project management often seen within software development. It tends to promote itself over the classic "waterfall approach" using different terminologies such as 'iteration', 'sprints', 'user stories'. In fact the only reason that the non-agile approach is called "waterfall" is because it was adopted as Agile gained momentum to distinguish from the 'traditional' in much the same way we had no need for the word "analog" until the term "digital" was coined. A Traditional drawing of a project broken into stages where one stage is 'dependent' upon the other does in fact look like a waterfall. It is important to note that any set of tasks which are dependent upon one another when drawn will also look like a waterfall. Agile is not 'against' dependent events as these are a reality of any project. Rather the potential problems that may arise from 'forcing' work into...

/   When you think about 'mind control'. You may envision people wearing tin foil hats , or about government experiments trying to take over your mind. Or perhaps hypnotists trying to get you to  assassinate a political figure Some of these are purely fictional or conspiracy theories, but you maybe surprised to know that real life 'mind control' does exist, and is used very often in society -  just not necessarily in the way you think. In psychology circles we have the term 'cognitive dissonance'. When we are faced with contradictory  information our brain becomes uncomfortable in this state and  'rushes' to resolve the apparent conflict. A simple example that many people may be able to relate, consider the action of eating a hamburger . If you are like me you love hamburgers, but if you stop to think about it, that hamburger (the meat) came from a cow, a pretty innocent animal just going about it's life which then came to an unfortunate, and early ...

 Disclaimer: I am not a medical expert, these thoughts and opinions are my own. You accept full responsibility for any 'advice' you take from this blog entry.  TLDR;  - Overall improvement by analysis of TRENDS - Make a change, note the TREND, not the individual measurement! Your blood glucose (sugar) is probably not as 'good' or 'bad' as you think! I have had Type 1 diabetes for over 25 years. When I started, 'test strips' were something you applied your blood sample and then compared to a label on the bottle to get your 'blood sugar value'. Not unlike the way pool 'PH' testers work today. Later the first 'glucose machines' came out, and cost like $500.00. The strip went into the machine and it gave you a numerical number of your blood sugars. (These machines are almost always free today, with the purchase of a box of 100 strips) Today we have continuous glucose monitors (GCM) (ie: DexCom) and Flash Glucose Monitors (ie: Freeest...

I was reminded of something I learned way back in my third year of computer science 'Numerical Method's' the other day..the fact that computers can't really do math! No I'm not taking about the Pentium flaw from 1994 , which was a big thing back on those days. I'm taking about the magic number  e min    Many people know that computers only speak in binary (1's and 0's). So everything you see on the screen has to be somehow represented as a sequence of 1's and 0's. In Mathematics we have irrational numbers, and repeating decimals.  1/3 for example is an infinite sequence of 0.3333333, and Pi is a long infinite sequence of numbers that does not even bother to repeat (so far as anyone has calculated so far) So the other day, I was doing some calculations on currency. Specifically it was a sequence of additions and subtractions. The number I was adding/subtracting was 5.32. Here is the debug of the output of that program. Now if you look carefully, y...

Windows has some odd quirks that have been around probably since the dawn of Windows 3.11, and which still exist (at least in part) today for backwards compatibility. One of these has to do with connecting to remote file shares over SMB (CIFS). When you try to connect to a share - \\mycomputer\myshare.  By default windows will attempt to login to that share using the same username/password combination that you are currently logged in with. This is rather convenient, because otherwise every time you connect you get prompted, again & again & again for your username and password. But..it's also a bit of a security problem, if I setup my own share on my own computer, and send links to others, and those others click on those links, windows will send my computer your username and password (though technically it sends me a secret code that is derived from your password, not your password itself). I can then use this information to calculate what your password could be, using somet...

Recently in the news , you may have heard about the #LastPassHack . According to this thread on Hacker News  multiple people received notifications appearing to originate from LastPass in Dec 2021 saying that their master password was successfully used to access their vault (but was flagged as it was from another country  Brazil it would seem).  At least 1 twitter user seems to have lost his life savings as they had their master password compromised and money emptied out of their accounts This of course calls into question the great password management system provided by LastPass. One I myself used successfully have used for many years. Of course with any online storage of secured passwords, there is always the risk of the password getting stolen. There is a trade-off between the convenience of generating and storing complicated secure passwords, and trying to remember them all in your head.  And it certainly beats the alternative of using the build in browser metho...

  The week just before Christmas, I had the opportunity to complete my last speech for the dynamic leadership level 1 of Toastmasters . The speech was a mix of a collection of research both on Eco-Cycle Planning, and practice opportunity from the U.N.I.C.O.R.N.S.  Some important resources to go with the video can be found here: a) The original start of unicorns which can be found on this apolitical.co post: Let's save the unicorns in government b) EcoCycle Planning from the book Liberating Structures , as well as the related image/worksheet as used in the video c) Much thanks to the excellent 4 part series Bountiful Harvest by TadZo Consulting, without which I would not have nearly as much content for the video.                 Part 1 - Creative Destruction                Part 2 - Sowing                Part 3 - Birth    ...