Monthly Archives: April 2017

Screen Scraping

At my PHP meetup the other night some of the folks were discussing upgrade paths for content management systems, especially Drupal. They noted that there isn’t yet a good upgrade path to the most recent version from the previous version. … Continue reading

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The Confederation Bridge

This weekend I finally made it to my twelfth Canadian province (only Nunavut remains) when I drove across the Confederation Bridge into Prince Edward Island (see also here). The bridge is seven miles long, 40-60 meters (about 131 to 196 … Continue reading

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I Helped Design This

In 2004 or 2005 I attended a series of meetings where I helped do traffic projections for this new port of entry (and bridge) at Calais, ME. I also built and ran models of different port designs using the BorderWizard … Continue reading

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Simulating Human Action

I used the book “Fundamentals of Classical Thermodynamics” by Van Wylen and Sonntag for my thermodynamics classes in college. In the first chapter it discussed the magnitude of relativistic effects compared to the magnitude of the general effects that would … Continue reading

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Model-Predictive Control

Model Predictive Control comes in different forms, but all variations work in roughly the same way. Traditional forms of control act on signals derived from a currently-determined (usually by sensors) state and the difference between that state and the desired … Continue reading

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“What is a Mutex?”

This was the first question I was asked in an interview sometime around 2006. I didn’t know the answer, which is exceptionally annoying because I’d been using them for years without knowing what they were called. This is a danger … Continue reading

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Course Wrap-up: JavaScript: Understanding the Weird Parts

I finished plowing though Anthony Alicea’s Udemy course, JavaScript: Understanding the Weird Parts, and found it to be quite satisfying. To answer the question left hanging yesterday, yes, the course did describe more details of prototype inheritance, and it did … Continue reading

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JavaScript Inheritance: A Form of Composition

Lectures 53 through 56 of JavaScript: Understanding the Weird Parts discuss more about the creation and manipulation of objects under the hood. I’d seen different aspects of this material previously, which gave me a different take on how to build … Continue reading

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JavaScript IIFEs

The Udemy course, JavaScript: Understanding the Weird Parts, includes 85 lectures. In lecture 45 I finally encountered something meaningfully new, IIFEs, or Immediately Invoked Function Expressions. This construction is unique to JavaScript in an explicit sense, though there is mention … Continue reading

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A Better Insight Into Agile and Scrum Roles

I’ve been attending a lot of meetups over the last few months and the one for the Pittsburgh chapter of the IIBA (International Institute of Business Analysts) was special because of the terrific speaker. A gentleman named Rick Clare gave … Continue reading

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