Robert LaThanh

Author: Robert

  • Home Electricity Fundamentals

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    Electrical Energy Fundamentals While energy generally flows in one direction through the network of wires in your home — from the grid, towards your outlets — they don’t have to. You could plug a generator into any outlet in your home (but don’t do this, it’s dangerous) and energy flows “backwards” from that outlet to…

  • Use ‘%%’ to indicate a percentage change of a percentage?

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    “40% of people clicked through when the button was blue. When we changed it to green, the click-through rate increased by 20%!” We all know that the above statement is ambiguous; we can’t be sure whether the writer intends to let us know that the final percentage is 60% (40% + 20%) or 48% (40%…

  • Reader-augmented Writing

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    Words gave us the ability to effectively share ideas and knowledge, and writing allowed those words to spread further and be carried across time. The printing press accelerated that spread, and electronic mediums allowed even more people to share ideas more quickly. Yet articles and books — even e-books — are still largely static and…

  • Containerized Passenger Transportation

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    Getting someone from point-A to point-B will often — even in the distant future — involve a variety of methods of transport. For example, getting someone from their home in San Francisco to an office in Los Angeles might primarily (the majority of the distance) be served by something like high-speed rail or Hyperloop. However,…

  • Schrödinger’s Laugh

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    Schrödinger’s Laugh [shroh-ding-ers laf] -noun The strong expression by one that paradoxically may be either laughing or wailing, this being tied to an earlier random event. It creates an awkward period during which the observer does not know which and thus how to properly react.

  • HTTP Status Codes 401 Unauthorized and 403 Forbidden for Authentication and Authorization (and OAuth)

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    When a client requests a resource from an HTTP server and it’s not allowed to access that resource, the client needs to know enough about why in order to present the right message or options to the user. Basically, we need to know whether the user can do something about it or not. HTTP status…

  • Protected: Now Entering Germany

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    There is no excerpt because this is a protected post.

  • My Experience with Carbonite Home and CrashPlan+

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    I don’t like losing data, and I’m guessing that you don’t, either. I already do local backups, but not only can it a little cumbersome and easy to forget (not to mention drive failures), fire or theft could result in the loss of the both the data and the backup. So, I also want a…

  • OpenVPN over DSL with PPPoE

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    I work remotely and use OpenVPN to access development services such as SVN and our file server, both of which are at our colocation facility. While at a new location, I first encountered a problem trying to do any SVN operations. Turned out that any significant traffic to any server at the colo would cause…

  • Logging Levels

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    Trace/Verbose Use this logging level to help you develop or find bugs in something you’re currently working on, and when the information being logged is not useful once the current task is done. So, trace logging should usually be removed when the task is done, which often means that it should not be committed. Pair…