We took the kids to Orlando in 2015 (Universal and Disney). Since a lot of folks have asked about the specifics, I’ve written up a detailed series of posts about our trip. Read at your own discretion: http://derekhat.com/orlando-2015-trip-recap/. Read more →
I’ve been known to use the phrase “full stack developer” sincerely, even somewhat recently, but it’s a label that makes me feel ill-at-ease. I’ve seen it bandied around a lot lately and it’s got me wondering whether I really believe that such a person truly exists. I’ve heard people I respect argue persuasively that such a person exists and I’ve… Read more →
I once encountered a small web development team that kept all its source code (Classic ASP) on a shared network drive. No version control. No organized backup. When someone was going to work on a file, he announced it verbally. If someone made a mistake that had to be rolled back, the sysadmin would grab the latest version of the… Read more →
Short questions destroy progress. They are the payday loans of the knowledge transfer economy: small, seemingly expedient transactions that frequently extract disproportionate costs. If you are a source of domain knowledge or the in-house expert on some technology or the original developer on a code base, you are an easy target for lots of small questions. If you get them… Read more →
Five years is a shamefully long blogging hiatus. It’s been long enough. I’ve set myself the goal of writing 12 posts this summer. In years past, I thought of derekhat.com as my venue for less technical writing and ardentdev.com as the place I would post content intended for a more technical audience; but I don’t write enough to justify two… Read more →
The hard core geeks know that to optimize your wireless networking experience you want to select a channel that is unused by other nearby wireless devices. If you run Windows 7 (or Vista), use the following command at the Command Prompt to see the channels and signal strength of nearby networks: netsh wlan show networks mode=bssid The channel numbers will… Read more →
Chances are good that you already have a credit card with a microchip in it. Transactions using the chip require you to enter a PIN rather than signing a receipt. It steals from you the tactile pleasure of scrawling your chicken scratch on a scrap of paper, but otherwise the new system is intended to be less susceptible to fraud.… Read more →
…please do not start your video with “I haven’t made a video in a while… I just figured I’d get on camera and talk to you a little bit… Not much been goin’ on here lately…” You should produce online video that informs, entertains, or baffles the mind. Please. Viewers will move on quickly if a video does not respect… Read more →
Several times a day I find myself launching a set of desktop shortcuts at the same time: I had keyboard shortcuts set up but it was still a multi-step process for opening up my main communication tools (HootSuite, my webradius.com email account, and my hatchard.net email account). Here’s a simple way to create a master shortcut to launch everything:… Read more →
I have been thoroughly satisfied with my Dell Latitude E6400 except for one large annoyance: it regularly hangs when resuming from sleep mode. It isn’t completely frozen when this happens – some applications will respond to mouse clicks but my web browser, IM, and Skype windows become unresponsive. Eventually things come back to normal but the wait is embarrassing if… Read more →
