Posted on

Online learning conferences

While many of us may not be going to favorite programming conferences, there are some interesting upcoming conferences to watch or watch the videos:

Digital Ocean TIDE – Going on now, a bit like the AWS free conference – a bit of an infomercial.

Knime – still a few upcoming live dates coming up on this one and the previous sessions are up, explaining this powerful machine learning tool.

May you go fourth and program!

Update –

200 OK conference – tomorrow, May 15th

Enthusiastcon – 10min talks June 6th

Posted on

FastOrSlow – the new site checker from WordFence

Today the Wordfence developers announced the new fastorslow.com tool, a handy tool for seeing how fast your site is in various parts of the world. The Wordfence folks build a quite useful plugin used by many sites – and this one – to keep reduce risk of attack.

This new tool however can be used to see the performance of any type of public site and recommendations on speeding it up. It also would be a much easier way to time requests to a server like in the World Network Requests Measurement post.

Continue reading “FastOrSlow – the new site checker from WordFence”
Posted on

Mathematics with Pi – and earth measurement with network requests

In Ian Stewart’s book, Professor Stewart’s Casbook of Mathematical Mysteries, he writes about an easy way one might prove that the earth is not flat. His “easy” proof can be done by booking some flights and timing them… or, simply looking up actual flights from certain cities to other cities. If it is much much shorter for a certain flight from A to D while A to B to C to D in a nearly straight line is much longer, it’s effectively a proof you can go around the world without falling off…

Continue reading “Mathematics with Pi – and earth measurement with network requests”
Posted on

Google breaks all Google calendars for the public (Update: Fixed!)

As you may have noticed if you have Google Calendar anywhere on a public website, recently these went down – and are still down, for the general public. View a page with a Google calendar embed while logged out of Google (or try any other browser that is not logged in), and you will get a blank page. This has been reported with dozens of “me too” upvotes.

Continue reading “Google breaks all Google calendars for the public (Update: Fixed!)”
Posted on

Speech recognition made easy

There are numerous howtos for Raspberry Pi and other portable computer voice applications, like this one, but generally they are using Google’s voice api. This may work… when the wifi or network is working, but not only is this sending your voice to google, it requires payment for usage over a certain amount. Users of your robotic application may be not so thrilled when they see it is sending audio samples to Google, and that it does not even work if there is a wifi hiccup! Instead, let’s go through a simple on-device installation that works fairly accurately with no external dependencies!

Continue reading “Speech recognition made easy”
Posted on

Laravel deployment on your server, step-by-step

Laravel is a widely used, useful web app framework to use, but one thing you may notice is it can be a bit complex to set up on production server. I recently set up a small webapp I had been working on for Amateur radio operators (hearham.com), and there are several steps that are not so well documented. If you self host or host on Amazon or Digital Ocean these steps should help you to also get a simple webapp up and running:

Continue reading “Laravel deployment on your server, step-by-step”