Doing a bucketing exercise on coderpad.io [https://coderpad.io/] which supports 30+ languages, but in actuality a language is only as good as its tools and libraries and in that respect coderpad.io is sorely lacking on many of the languages it supports.  In truth coderpad.io is built

Currently expanding my python [https://www.python.org/] knowledge by doing Advent of Code [https://adventofcode.com/] 2021 [https://adventofcode.com/2021].  This forces me to look up a lot of python libraries and syntax, but I feel like I am really getting a pythonic mindset now.  Learning a lot

In Linux/macOS you use the su [https://linuxize.com/post/su-command-in-linux/] command Windows does not have this and the closest thing it has is runas [https://ss64.com/nt/runas.html] with /user option.  It will then prompt you for the password of this particular user.  Key point here

PDFs are great for presenting information, but due to their structure and formatting getting structured data out of them is difficult and tedious and they could be considered unstructured data in my opinion. Say you have a PDF document like this, which is really a long table with a lot

Code review doesn't do what I hear people tell me it does in every organization I have worked for For example * Makes code readable * Shares knowledge * Standardizes approach What it does do in my opinion (read earlier thoughts I had on this here code review [https://siliconheaven.info/

Experimenting with python templating of jinja2 [https://jinja.palletsprojects.com/en/3.0.x/] and finding it quite a bit nicer than the razor [https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/aspnet/core/mvc/views/razor?view=aspnetcore-5.0] syntax in ASP.NET for one big reason to me that extracting the

Needed to deploy a pretty cool dynamic proxy called traefik [https://github.com/traefik/traefik], which is built on golang [https://golang.org/] and can be deployed as a single binary and along with some simply configs can take a lot of difficulties of say an nginx reverse proxy [https:

Capturing a screenshot in Linux/macOS is documented and can be done in a single command as detailed here [https://siliconheaven.info/capture-url-screenshot-chrome-ubuntu] Doing this in Windows is a lot less clear and more painful, but you can do it like so I am not running with administrator rights so

Capturing a screenshot documentation Setup 1. Add google chrome package location: wget https://dl.google.com/linux/direct/google-chrome-stable_current_amd64.deb 2. Install: sudo apt install ./google-chrome-stable_current_amd64.deb Capture 1. Capture the url contents of siliconheaven.info [https://siliconheaven.info/] google-chrome --headless --hide-scrollbars --window-size=1920,2000 --screenshot=

Reading text from images using the Tesseract Code import cv2 import pytesseract if __name__ == '__main__': # setup the path for the tesseract tool pytesseract.pytesseract.tesseract_cmd = r"C:\Tesseract-OCR\tesseract.exe" #load the image img = cv2.imread("code.png") #convert to grayscale gray = cv2.

Scaled Agile Framework [https://www.scaledagileframework.com/]

- Pretend I'm not a tech person. Can you explain REST in simple terms? Everyone can be a tech person and I hope that my explanation covers the concept and intentions behind REST (REpresentational State Transfer). Executive Summary: REST is an informal software specification/guideline/principle to creating

Asynchronous Python is a pleasant experience to work with.  Nothing unexpected or weird about using the await/async keywords and how they work. Basic example of an asynchronous function async def this_takes_awhile(wait_time_seconds=1): await asyncio.sleep(wait_time_seconds) That's all it takes

Individual lookups against a rules system stored in a database can add up to a lot of computations and depending on the size of your ruleset cause delays.  There are ways around this with caching [https://aws.amazon.com/caching/], in memory hashmaps [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hash_table]

Wanted to create a chain of method call backs with some simple JavaScript [https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript] as in startMethod -> calls function on success and another function on failure and it had been awhile since I did this refreshed my memory on Promises and

Working on a task to create a relational ordered set of prompts from rules with dynamic model binding.  This is one way to do it with JSON and SQL.  In this case the prompts may change, but it is a rare event.  The goal is to make the SQL server

Again I am fighting with a MySql [https://mysqlserverteam.com/new-defaults-in-mysql-8-0/#:~:text=The%20default%20value%20of%20the,vast%20majority%20of%20MySQL%20users.] collations and character sets.  Why would this be a problem when I have set the default collation and changed all the tables to character set utf8mb4 and collation

Putting this here to remember how to query out the metadata of a view, using the AdventureWorks2017 [https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sql/samples/adventureworks-install-configure?view=sql-server-ver15&tabs=ssms] database view vAdditionalContactInfo for reference. use [AdventureWorks2017] SELECT [c].[column_id], [c].[name] AS [ColumnName] FROM [sys].[columns] [c] INNER

Needed to alter a particular stored procedure over a few thousand databases.  Here is an example script that uses a cursor and dynamic sql to do this.  Key point here is to have the USE statement switch the database prior to issuing the CREATE OR ALTER command so that each

Got some quirky unexpected behavior when loading data from text files and SQL [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SQL] statements when working with extended ASCII [https://theasciicode.com.ar/] characters and Unicode. These files in particular are UTF8 [https://www.utf8.com/] encoded as is standard when doing text editing

In the commit early and often strategy means checking in and commit code all the time like saving a file and sometimes when you do this you accidentally check in something that you shouldn't have and even push it up to the remote server(s) Do this to

User defined functions suffer from inability to be query plan optimized, but this is a nice function I wrote to find ASCII control characters CREATE FUNCTION [dbo].[ContainsControlCharacters] ( @textToCheck NVARCHAR(MAX) ) RETURNS BIT AS BEGIN DECLARE @invalidCharCount INT; -- Sadness that it came to this -- Splits the input text

Sometimes due to circumstances beyond your control you get garbage in your database.  Optimally you would filter this data out from getting to and residing in your data storage, but decisions are made and things are built to allow for partial mistaken data rather than complete perfect data.  Today I