because sometimes bureaucracy gets in the way — In De-duplicating Data Storage I, I showed a technique for reducing the storage load on a system, where the system encounters multiple copies of the same file. This is fairly common situation to in data intensive environments as Data Scientists make copies of the dataset they are working on, and…

Because sometimes bureaucracy gets in the way. — A couple of years ago, I was asked to create a file repository for an air-gapped conda repository. The idea was that, for security reasons, we would have a list of allowed libraries inside the very expensive secure environment, and only those libraries. It was a reasonably simple setup, and…

A light-weight tool for comparing similarities between projects — This article describes the use of a browser-based tool for comparing and visualising student assignments. The tool M.I.S.S is a tribute to the classic tool MOSS (Measure Of Software Similarity), but supports organisational privacy and legal constraints by operating completely locally. In a previous article, the use of GPU to…

De-duplicating data storage — Many years ago, I was reading an article about Google’s internal labs having managed to create a sha1 hash collision between two PDF documents. The documents were very different documents, but through clever bit manipulation, resulted in an identical sha1 code. It was a fascinating read for a Friday afternoon…

Planning for things to go wrong, for Dummy Programmers — In any system design, there are several scenarios that should be considered to prevent system failure. Each of these scenarios describes a worst-case scenario that frames planning for catastrophic events. Often, when describing the need for various emergency protocols, the presenter is faced with resistance in the form of “but…

Sending Alerts for Dummy Programmers — In a previous article, I mentioned that I had implemented SMS notifications from a spreadsheet. Want to know how? Before I began my journey in the field of Software, I began a career in Nursing. Working in a hospital, I spent many a day with the ward’s pager stuck to…

A rambling discussion of the implications of “Real-Time” data — My claim: “real-time” is anything faster than a change can be observed Years ago, I got into a lunchtime discussion of real-time data processing and a couple of guys at the table started in with the macho attitude: I used to work on fighter jets … real-time is microseconds I…

Because sometimes bureaucracy gets in the way — Shiny is popular web publishing service, unfortunately, not every application can be deployed on servers. This tutorial demonstrates a simple means by which to deploy a shiny app to desktop by creating a Site Specific Browser. Mostly to skip the bureaucratic begging for a server. Available on GitLab: Jeff Cave…

The business of software. A guide for dummy programmers — I spent 6 hours today trying to buy a printer … and failed. There is money set aside for this purchase in my bank account. There are printers on the shelves Websites advertise printers for sale The reason I was unable to purchase a printer was because a corporation with…