During the course of the day I encounter lots of challenges, some of which take minutes to solve and others that take much longer. My goal for this section is to keep track of these challenges and their solutions. I will turn the longer ones into articles, while the shorter ones will stay as blog entries. You can expect topics to range from very specific programming challenges to broader topics like life.
Below is a list of the recent blog entries. You can also browse the blog by using the tags on the right side, or if you know what you are looking for then you can use the search box at the top right.
I have recently been working on a SMART on FHIR integration with an EHR vendor. One of the REST calls required posting some data and retrieving a launch code. During development, I use Postman to test the functionality. This call kept failing, and I could not figure out why.
I am cautiously and excitedly looking forward to the upcoming revolution of connected and self-driving vehicles. This advancement is bound to change so many things and the ways that we do those things. Taxis and truck driving are the most apparent professions that will see the initial impact, but this will also impact many other occupations and areas.
Read full post… “Long-term Impact of the Upcoming Self-Driving Vehicles”
I have had a backlog of changes that I wanted to make to the iTunes patch. I finally took some time this weekend to work on those and release version 1.1. The major improvement in this version is the check for System Integrity Protection.
Take a look at this commit for more details about this round of changes. You can download the latest version on the project page.
If you talk to anyone that has interacted with me on the entrepreneurship front you will learn that I am a big fan of the E-Myth Revisited book by Michael Gerber. I really like this book, and especially like the three roles that it defines. I have blogged about it in the past, but there is one thing that I don’t like about it: i.e. calling one of the roles the “technician.”
The title of this role has bugged me ever since I have read this book, but it wasn’t enough for me to go searching. Interestingly, on January 16th, I finally ran into someone that had the same issue!
I had a need for downloading all of my facebook photos. One way you can do this is by downloading a full copy of your facebook data. Unfortunately, this only includes the low-resolution version of your photos. There are some other options online, but most looked pretty sketchy.
I knew about facebook’s Graph API and played around with it a little before. So, I decided to use this as an opportunity to work with that a little more and play around with the go language.
Read full post… “Downloading All of Your High-Resolution Facebook Photos”
I have worked in numerous job functions ranging from front-end programming to high-level business planning and execution, and lead two businesses so far. After recently reading The E-Myth Revisited I wish someone would have suggested it to me some time ago because it provides a great perspective, especially for folks like myself who are coming from a very technical background.
Read full post… “Starting a business? Make sure to read this book!”
SSL has been the flashy new thing lately so after realizing that https://thebitguru.com was pointing to my old Django site I decided that it was time for me to fix that and migrate all traffic to https. The first question, as you can imagine, was where to get the SSL cert.
I am excited about the Internet of Things (IoT) phenomenon that we have been going through over the past few years. Some old timers might even bring up X10, from who knows how long ago, but for my generation, I feel like the Nest thermostat was really the intro of IoT to the mainstream. I see the value of IoT devices and I have a few IoT devices at home myself. This list has only grown over time. There are two major concerns with IoT devices that are always in the back of my mind: 1) Security, and 2) Privacy. I will focus on Security for this post.
Apple will be releasing macOS Sierra this coming Tuesday, September 20th. This also means that the rcd file will be replaced with the stock version so you will have to patch it again. I upgraded one of my computers and was able to verify that the patch still works as expected.
Read full post… “Play Button iTunes Patch Works on macOS Sierra”
I have been looking for personal task tracking systems for a while. I ended up trying a few of the expected ones like simple lists in OneNote and Wunderlist. I was hoping to find something that was simple to get started with, but also had enough features to make it effective.