Gill found these instructions for making plasma in a microwave by carefully cutting up a grape and then nuking it. I finally got around to trying it yesterday, and it’s awesome. Even better than microwaving a light bulb in a glass of water. Check it out:
Making plasma in a microwave!
(Published to the Fediverse as: Grape Plasma #etc #grape #plasma #microwave #video Video of grape plasma in a microwave (be careful if you try this from home). )
3/5
Narrow topic, but an interesting book, especially the frustratingly long effort to reconcile observed electron neutrinos from the Sun with reality. Has a rather repetitive recap at the end that ends up recapping some of the recap which rather bogged things down. I definitely know more about neutrinos than I did before though.
Mark Jackson, my co-founder at Cucku, is blogging re-mastered debugging tips from StackHash. StackHash is now an open source project and all of the great content from the original site has been taken offline. This new project is a great resource for debugging on the Windows platform, especially post-mortem crash dump analysis. If that’s your thing do yourself a favor and subscribe to Mark’s blog.
Slightly easier than Half Dome, and when you get to the top you get to look at Half Dome. What more could you ask for!
(View in Google Earth)
Hike starts at: 37.715495, -119.584577.
(Hike Map)
(Published to the Fediverse as: Sentinel Dome #hike #sentineldome #yosemite Spectacular views from this hike to the top of Sentinel Dome in Yosemite National Park, California. )
Black Diamond Mines Regional Preserve is an East Bay park spanning more than five thousand acres.
I spotted what looked like an easy four mile loop. It was nearly seven, I guess all the .3’s really do add up. The loop we did was a mix of exposed sunny ridgelines and shady canyons. We went on a ‘cold’ day which was still high 80s and a nice sweltering break from the San Francisco fog.
Kate taking a break outside of ‘Jim’s Place’.
Gill and Kate, again outside of' ‘Jim’s Place’.
Gill with a view to Pittsburg and the California Delta.
Hike starts at: 37.958487, -121.862883.
(Hike Map)
(Published to the Fediverse as: Black Diamond Mines Regional Preserve #hike #blackdiamondmines Seven mile hike in the Black Diamond Mines Regional Preserve in Antioch, California. )
Wasted far too long on trying to get WCF to work with custom basic authentication this week. Custom in the sense that I need to look up the username and password in a database and not have IIS attempt to match the credentials to a Windows account. Given how well WCF 4.0 supports RESTful services in general it’s a bit shocking that basic auth over SSL isn’t supported out of the box. It seems like you should be able to derive and hook up a class from UserNamePasswordValidator, set the transport clientCredentialType to Basic and be ready to go. I’ve heard that this works for self-hosted services, but no dice in IIS.
Basic access authentication is a simple protocol and so in the end I added a helper method that checks for access (and in my case returns the user information for later use) at the start of each call into the service. It’s very simple:
This triggers a browser to prompt for your username and password and then try the request again. When calling the service in code you can add the ‘Authorization’ header preemptively and skip the 401 response entirely.
(Published to the Fediverse as: Basic HTTP auth for an IIS hosted WCF 4 RESTful service #code #wcf #iis #rest How to implement .NET Basic HTTP auth for an IIS hosted WCF 4 REST API. )
4/5
Great coverage of exposing and consuming a RESTful service using WCF. Note that you'll need the services of a good WCF book, this builds on existing WCF expertise and doesn't try that hard to bring you up to speed. Which isn't a bad thing, it keeps the book relatively short and focused. I'll be referring back to this one often.
4/5
Stross flips out concepts in a sentence that many SciFi authors would build an entire book around. It's a near-future police procedural set in Edinburgh. Twisted, tongue-in-cheek, profane and most excellent. The only miss is the assumption that people will use Wave in the near-future, let alone now. It's the first book of his that I've read... will be seeking out more soon.
4/5
Epic. A must read for cybernauts who may have forgotten their roots. Good for anyone else interested in what information actually is, and how pervasive information theory has become.
- Password Strength from xkcd.com (Read this now, then change your passwords!).
- Baby sex blood tests 'accurate' from BBC News - Home (Bad news for girls...).
- Microsoft Releases .NET Gadget Toolkit from TechCrunch (Want! #todo @myEN).
- Are your genes somebody else's property? from All Salon (More patent stupidity, this time genes (@myEV)).
- IE users have lower IQ says study from BBC News - Home (Highest IQ? Telnet to port 80 directly).
The Startup Genome people have launched a complicated tool to benchmark your Startup against others.
I’ve developed a simpler model. It used to be you spent too much money on Sun and Oracle. Now it’s fighting off patent trolls.
(Published to the Fediverse as: The startup costs are too damned high #politics #patents #sun #oracle Startups used to spend too much money on Sun and Oracle and now spend too much money on patent lawsuits. )
…after a five year break and while it’s true that you don’t forget how, your knees can stop being quite so flexible. I’m eyeing up the dog’s glucosamine laced treats quite enviously.
CNET stopped being a useful source of downloads for me ages ago. Over the lifetime of my account I’ve had nearly 100,000 downloads through CNET, but these days it’s one or two a week. I left my products up there anyway, but I’ve just asked them to remove everything they have listed for Catfood Software.
The reason is that CNET has rolled out a download manager that wraps every single download. Instead of the customer getting the product they thought they were downloading they are dumped into a CNET experience that tries to install a toolbar and push Bing / MSN into your browser defaults. Yuck.
It’s one thing for a vendor to partner this way. It’s quite another to roll it out site wide with little notification and no opt out, let alone a revenue share. CNET sell this as being about analytics. Of course it’s all about referral dollars. This isn’t the experience I want for my customers and so I’m pulling the plug on download.com.
(Published to the Fediverse as: Download.com goes nuclear #etc #download.com #cnet Download.com hijacked my download to install some toolbar and so I'm leaving the site. )
Download a Sharepoint File with GraphServiceClient (Microsoft Graph API)
Which PG&E rate plan works best for EV charging?
Export Google Fit Daily Steps, Weight and Distance to a Google Sheet
Accessing Printer Press ESC to cancel
Google Photos killed my Aura Frame
Monitor page index status with Google Sheets, Apps Script and the Google Search Console API
