Technology – Page 2 – Chad Dotson

Saving Console Messages in JavaScript

By chad April 17, 2016Doing Things Better, Programming, Software Engineering, Technology, Tips, UncategorizedNo Comments

Have you ever encountered a situation where it would be beneficial to save whatever is written to the console across browser sessions? If you have, you know there are not many solutions. I recently decided that localStorage would be a good candidate to implement a solution to this problem with.…

Raspberry Pi 7" Touchscreen Unboxing and Thoughts

By chad February 21, 2016Raspberry PiNo Comments

This week I ordered and received the official Raspberry 7" touchscreen ($60). I've been tinkering with some ideas for it (some car based projects) and wanted it on hand to try out. Opening the Box The screen is packaged and presented really well. It comes with all that you need…

Bringing the Internet to Mars and Beyond

By chad February 6, 2016Doing Things Better, Neat Stuff, Space, TechnologyNo Comments

With the exploration of space and the eventual colonization of Mars humanity needs to establish a method for improving internet connectivity for people on the surface. One method of achieving this is to place one or more satellites in high orbit around the planet. These would use interplanetary internet(delay tolerant)…

You're Too Close

By chad December 9, 2015Doing Things Better, Programming, TipsNo Comments

Have you encountered the following scenario? You are trying to solve a problem (or helping solve a problem) and know or at least think you know the solution. You are in the middle of implementing it when someone else looks at it and says, "why don't you do it this…

Python Logging – Best Practices

By chad November 25, 2015Doing Things Better, Key Concepts, Programming, Software Engineering, TechnologyNo Comments

The python logging module offers a wide variety of logging options and handlers. One thing missing from the documentation is when to use each level. A quick foreword You really should familiarize yourself with the logging package. How to create new loggers (I find creating them by module very useful). …

Creating Web Workers From Functions (No File Needed)

By chad October 31, 2015Programming, Software Engineering, TipsNo Comments

So, you want to create a web worker from a function, the problem is all the examples examples show creating a web worker using a separate JavaScript file or from embedded JavaScript source. There is a way to do it and that is using Blob URLs. In the example below,…

Creating Downloadable CSV (Or Any Other) Files In Browser With JavaScript

By chad October 25, 2015Programming, Software Engineering, Technology, TipsNo Comments

Many of us have wanted to create downloadable content straight from the browser. I remember several years back where it was more difficult and the solutions were not clean. Today, it is much much more simple and clean. Enter Blob URLs. In this example, I have an object of arrays. …

"On The Job Training" vs "On The Job Learning"

By chad September 13, 2015Key Concepts, Programming, Software EngineeringNo Comments

A career in programming consists more of "on the job learning" than "on the job training." Training Training as something someone else teaches you to do. There may or may not be any real expectation of advancing the concepts covered in the training. The analogy would be that if you…

Installing Technical Analysis Library for Python

By chad August 23, 2015Programming2 Comments

I'm tinkering with some financial analysis scripts so when I got to looking into some useful python packages, Technical Anaysis Library popped up. The python bindings require the TA Lib (Technical Analysis Library) which on osx is available via homebrew. Now, when I originally installed I didn't want to install…

Authorizing a twitter-bot

By chad August 16, 2015Programming, Programming Live BlogNo Comments

So last night I ran into a small issue, how to authorize a twitter bot to use an application without stubbing together a website and logging in with the bot account? The answer, this little script using twython: import twython app_key = raw_input("Your app key: ") app_secret = raw_input("Your app…