-
Truk Lagoon – tech diver’s survival guide
Last April I had the bucket list opportunity to visit Truk Lagoon with Mike Gerken of Evolution Underwater Imaging aboard MV Truk Odyssey. The Odyssey is extremely well set up for tech divers, with 21/36 and 10/50 trimix on tap, and 50% and 100% options for decompression. While oxygen and trimix are extra, nitrox 30%…
-
Weather IoT Data Hub with AWS Lambda and DynamoDB
A project that I’ve been meaning to work on for a while was a collection point for bulk IoT device data using AWS. Having had fun with various small, non-PC devices like Arduinos, it made sense to see if I could use these devices to send data of interest and build a collection point for…
-
Load-balanced SSL WordPress on AWS
Introduction I recently deployed a load balanced production WordPress system on Amazon AWS. For the most part, the process was mostly time-consuming with the only major issue dealing with SSL. First off, it is definitely viable to run a load-balanced WordPress infrastructure using all of the AWS infrastructure goodies and no expenses beyond the AWS…
-
Newspaper article processing with Azure Cognitive Services and Python
The challenge: process 100 years of newspaper articles related to Scottish associations in Vancouver to try to make sense of what each means. My wife is currently working on her Master’s dissertation in family and local history and exploring the Scottish association culture in Vancouver. Much of the association history in the city spans from…
-
Resolving WordPress “The response is not a valid JSON response” error
Recently I ran into the following dreaded error when trying to save a Block Editor’ed post: the response is not a valid JSON response I had just started testing the Gutenberg block editor on the site, and one of the often-mentioned troubleshooting steps was to disable plugins (All WordPress troubleshooting seems to eventually boil down…
-
3D Printing: My Jumpstart
During the Time of the Virus, I decided to jump into 3D printing. I’d been looking at printers for a while, probably since 2018, when I had a colleague who talked about 3D printing the odd part for his cars. Finally, this March, I pulled the trigger on the Ender 3 Pro, from Amazon. Mostly…
-
Developing for newer versions of iOS using an older version of Xcode
I recently ran into a situation where I wanted to hold off upgrading to MacOS 10.15 (Catalina) but needed to develop and test on my iPhone XS running iOS 13.5, which requires Xcode 10.4 that only runs on Catalina. When running an app on the iPhone (rather than the simulator) in this situation, Xcode displayed…
-
Building an Agile Organization from the top down
The Scrum Team stuff is Easy (Sort Of) Scrum has its roots in team empowerment. From the very beginning, teams are told to make their own decisions – “let the team decide what to do” is the oft-repeated mantra when a team faces a challenge. These ideas can seem foreign to teams that have been…
-
Moving from User Story to Product Backlog Item
(Originally written in 2018, but still relevant today) It’s become somewhat fashionable to gather requirements in User Story format to put into a product backlog. Pioneered some time ago in the early days of Agile, Extreme Programming, and other uprisings against the Great Gathering of Requirements up Front before starting work, it had a purpose…
-
How to be a rockstar designer
Web design is increasingly becoming something that can’t exist in isolation without knowledge of good user interface design guidelines and working well with developer types. I’ve noted a difference between designers (and their designs) who have started out in print first versus those who start out in web. You can span both successfully, but have…