Tomorrow, I'm going to participate in Cranksgiving Raleigh 2015. This will be my first year doing it, and my goal is to carry 30-40 pounds of food.
WinHTTrack
I picked up on a tool called WinHTTrack from Dale Meredith's Pluralsight course on reconnaissance (which I will review in a couple of days). The tool has a simple premise: grab website files based on links. When I ran it against Catallaxy Services, it pulled back results based on each link. The app handles subdomains…
The Cost Of Synchronous Mirroring
About a month or so ago, I started dealing with a customer's performance issues. When I checked the wait stats using Glenn Berry's fantastic set of DMV queries, I noticed that 99% of wait stats were around mirroring. This says that 99% of the time that SQL Server spends waiting to run queries is due to the…
Visualizing Map Data In R: Heat Maps
Not too long ago, I looked at using dplyr and tidyr to clean up data, and ended the post with an ugly-looking plot on top of a map of the Raleigh area. Today, we're going to look at using a heat map to understand crime data in Raleigh a little easier. Let's Heat It Up…
Watson Personality Insight & Tone Analyzer
Here’s a fun pair of tools out of IBM’s Watson project: the Personality Insights and Tone Analyzer. Personality Insights For Personality Insights, I decided to put in two separate blog posts. The first blog post is my listing of three essential concepts in economics, written back in 2007. Because that’s only 3101 words and I…
Spinach And Databases
The pseudonymous Phil Factor explains the necessity of constraining data, preventing as much as possible the entry of bad data: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nnJKPOMaO2o A few thoughts on the video: When reading Phil's work, I got an impression of him. Phil on video is pretty similar to that impression, though I can't say his appearance is exactly as I expected. This…
Scheduling Strategies
Recently, I've decided to change the way I schedule blog posts. For a very long time, I would schedule blog posts for 5 PM Eastern, with the idea being that my employer would know I wasn't blogging on the job. I also would sprinkle in posts whenever I could on whatever topics I wanted. After going…
uMatrix
Not too long ago, I was using ScriptSafe selectively to block Javascript on webpages. Back in about June, that started breaking Google searches, and I had to abandon it---which makes sense because it looks like ScriptSafe itself has been abandoned. Since then, I’ve come upon my new Javascript blocker of choice: uMatrix. uMatrix is definitely…
Curated SQL Is Live
Curated SQL is now live. I've been putting links in for the past week, and I'm slowly starting to advertise the site. My goal is to build it out further over the next several weeks, improving the Twitter account, trying to draw in a regular viewership, and showing the value of curating technical posts across…
Beware Functions In SQL Server
Aren’t Functions A Good Thing? As developers, we want to modularize code in order to present duplication. There are several laudable reasons to prevent code duplication. The simplest reason is that we all have better things to do than type the same lines of code over and over. Putting code into a common module or…
36 Chambers - The Legendary Journeys: Execution to the max! 