I haven’t posted in a while because I spent all of last week in Boston, MA, the latter half of which for the annual convention of the National Puzzlers’ League. The convention was fun, and I’ll make some time soon to tell you more about it and the other sorts of puzzling I do in [...]
Every once in a while, I think I know exactly what the code that I’m writing is doing, and then I discover, often through some catastrophe, that I didn’t quite understand all the details. One particularly instructive (or would that be destructive?) example that comes to mind is a T-SQL mistake that ended up deleting every [...]
Stupid Remote Desktop trick #1 Connect to a remote machine using Remote Desktop. In device manager, right-click on your network card and choose “Disable“. Kick yourself for being so stupid, go to the machine’s console (hopefully it’s within walking distance), and re-enable your network card. Stupid Remote Desktop trick #2 Connect to a remote machine [...]
Let’s begin with a simple experiment that you can perform on your own computer: Count the number of icons in your Taskbar Notification Area, including any rarely used icons that Windows XP may have hidden under the little blue less-than button. The Taskbar Notification Area is that part of your Windows taskbar near the clock where [...]
Tribal Librarian? What on earth does that mean?! To understand where I got such a strange name for my blog, we first need to understand “tribal knowledge”. iSixSigma.com defines tribal knowledge as “any unwritten information that is not commonly known by others within a company” [1]. For our purposes here, I’m using it slightly more [...]