Category: Computers

  • Thoughts on the Red Hat Source Issues

    Thoughts on the Red Hat Source Issues

    Now that we’ve had a few months to consider Red Hat’s new course code policy, I wanted to share my thoughts since I’ve been a user of Red Hat’s Fedora since it started back in 2003. I’ve also made heavy use of CentOS and am currently running a server using one of the free RHEL…

  • Miscellanea: D&D, Disney, and French Browser Proposals

    Miscellanea: D&D, Disney, and French Browser Proposals

    This post contains my thoughts on a few stories I’ve been saving up that don’t merit a post on their own. D&D Romance Just a day after posting about my kids getting into D&D, I came across this article on Tor.com about The Golden Age of D&D Romance. I had no idea it was a…

  • Excited about KDE Plasma 6

    Excited about KDE Plasma 6

    If you’ve been following my blog long enough, you know that the KDE 3 -> KDE 4 transition was a mess, but somewhere around Oct 2010 (2-3 years after the 4.0 release), it really started to get stable and become my daily runner. By Feb 2011, I was loving the fact that KDE Plasma 4…

  • Programming Update: March 2023

    In March I continued to work on my programming projects as well as a little more Advent of Code. Things started off with me finishing up my dreamhostapi and Dreamhost_DNS_Go projects in Golang. I got the API working under all the conditions that I need and I worked on both the output of the program…

  • Podcasts I’m Listening to In 2023

    Podcasts I’m Listening to In 2023

    Once again I used a script to pull out the official descriptions of the podcasts as well as the URL where I access the feed. After the official description you’ll see my commentary about the podcast. Politics 5-4 Pod – Official Description:5-4 is a podcast about how much the Supreme Court sucks. It’s a progressive…

  • How Go Helped Save Healthcare.gov!

    How Go Helped Save Healthcare.gov!

    I recently used Mastodon to ask for recommendations for Go podcasts and one of the suggestions was Go Time. One of the recent episodes in the feed was a rerun of an older episode about “How Go helped saved HealthCare.Gov“. This was extra interesting to me since I wrote my Master’s Special Project on Healthcare.gov.…

  • Programming Update: Jan 2023 and Feb 2023

    Programming Update: Jan 2023 and Feb 2023

    January January was a relatively light programming month for me. I was focused on finishing up end of year blog posts and other tasks. Since Lastfmeoystats is used to generate the stats I need for my end of year music post, I worked on it a little to make some fixes.  The biggest fix was…

  • An Update on Fedora 36, Plasma 5 and Wayland

    An Update on Fedora 36, Plasma 5 and Wayland

    KDE Wayland has come a long way support has come a long way since I last wrote about it 8 months ago. Yakuake now shows up in the correct place (although it seems to have a hard time remembering to start up upon login). The lock screen bug hasn’t hit me in the past month.…

  • 2022 In Programming

    2022 In Programming

    I started off the year mostly working on Python projects. For January and February I finally started making some great progress with understanding modern web frameworks and use of CSS frameworks rather than rolling my own. This not only helped with the Prophecy Practicum project, but would form the backbone to a lot of coding…

  • Programming Update: December 2022

    Programming Update: December 2022

    December was wholly dedicated to solving the Advent of Code 2022 problem set. Our job was to help the elves trek through the jungle to get magical starfruit. It was a lot of fun to do it live once again! This year I also had experience from the previous years (both live and on my…

  • Software I used for Programming in 2022

    Software I used for Programming in 2022

    Python This year I really worked a lot on Python web technologies so I came to appreciate all the work that the JetBrains team does to make all the little things (like running Django test server commands) incredibly easy. I essentially did all my Python development in Pycharm.  I’ve had access to the paid JetBrains…

  • TIL: mIRC is still a thing

    TIL: mIRC is still a thing

    Back when I first started getting into the internet and hadn’t started using Linux yet, I needed a way to get onto the chat protocol known as IRC. Back then I used mIRC. Later on I started using Linux and used all kinds of IRC programs including XChat, BitchX, and Konversation. But recently most open…

  • Programming Update: Nov 2022

    November was not a huge programming month for me. On the weekends I was a little more focused with family stuff and videogames. But I did manage work on a couple projects. Ever since 2010, I’ve been been using Python to automatically post my top 3 artists to Twitter. In 2020, it even became my…

  • Is there a replacement in the Fediverse for the Creative Class?

    I was on Identi.ca back when it first launched and I joined Mastodon a few years ago. Identi.ca had a decent number of FLOSS devs at the time, but by the time of Mastodon, Twitter was ascendant. So “no one” was on Mastodon. Even a few of the FLOSS developers I followed on Mastodon never…

  • Review: Data Visualization with Python and JavaScript: Scrape, Clean, Explore & Transform Your Data

    Data Visualization with Python and JavaScript: Scrape, Clean, Explore & Transform Your Data by Kyran Dale My rating: 4 of 5 stars While a book about web technologies is undoubtablely going to get out of date (especially when Javascript is involved), I would definitely recommend this book if you want to do some data visualization…