Admit it: there’s a person in your office that you would love to prank or see them get pranked. Whether it’s covering their desk in aluminum foil or the classic Whoopie Cushion, the possibilities are only limited by your mind. But given the ubiquity of computers in the work environment today, why not pull off a prank that only takes …
A couple of years ago, I wrote about a very cool citizen science project called Old Weather. This project was a massively crowdsourced effort to analyze historical weather patterns, based on observations recorded in ships’ logs. At any given time, hundreds of volunteers were logged on to the website, transcribing scans of these logs and noting data such as date, location, …
flWhen buying a laptop, you don’t just buy the laptop. There are hundreds of accessories available for any given laptop brand, from a 4G wireless dongle to a replacement keyboard. Some accessories are just there to serve as conversation pieces, while others you cannot live without. Let’s look at some essential companions that you’ll need along with your new, or …
JavaScript may not be the poster child of object-oriented programming languages, but that doesn’t mean you can’t take advantage of OO principles in your JS app. Plain Old JavaScript Objects, or POJOs, can be a lifesaver when working with complex datasets and databases. They’re easy to set up, and have many use cases such as normalizing data, handling faulty responses, …
For a few days now, my internet has been intermittently shutting off in the afternoon and turning back on in the evening (thanks Comcast?). I want to see the exact time at which my connection drops, but unfortunately the ping command does not have built-in timestamp support. Fortunately, the Bash script below adds a thin wrapper around ping in order …