The nslookup command is really easy to use. You just type nslookup [host-name] and you get an answer. But what do you do when it looks like it is working, but your monitoring is detecting intermittent issues connecting to a website? The answer is, you check each nameserver individually to make sure they are all […]
Categories
Awesome Microsoft Edge Vertical Tabs
I’ll be honest, it has taken a day or two to retrain my cerebellum for this one, but it is totally worth it. Modern day displays happen to be wider than you need. Horizontal real estate is in surplus and is cheap, but vertical space is more valuable. That’s why Microsoft Edge is getting a […]
The full title of this article should really be “Increase Productivity by Quantifying Simple Tasks; Protect Complex Task Productivity by Not Quantifying It”. This is the result of a study by Aruna Ranganathan, co-authored by Alan Benson, that studied workers in a garment factory and I’ve added my opinion because sometimes I’m a narcissist like […]
Full credit to Geoffrey Moore, whose seminal “Crossing the Chasm” keeps proving to be a useful book thirty years after it was written. Credit also to Hans Baumhardt who introduced me to the book and who critically shaped my thinking about work and life. What I hope do, now that the credits are over, is […]
Most of the time, Entity Framework Core will just do the right thing. Every now and then, though, you’ll find that it’s doing something in a bit of a sticky way and you’ll want to take control. Usually it’s when you’re deleting a range on a table with cascading deletes. Here’s an example of the […]
When you accept a view model in your .NET Core MVC application, you can request that only certain fields are bound, like this [Bind(“Title”)]. Neat. But when you want to apply the changes to your domain object, you often want to do a similar thing and only update certain fields (and only if they really […]
Categories
The Fly on the Windshield
Every organisation has to deal with this problem. It has been described in many different ways, including the famous quaductionism of “Urgent vs Important” to the simplicity of phrases like “firefighting”. Yes, it’s all those tasks that people seem to want now, which are stopping you from doing the real work. My analogy for this […]
Categories
Switch Off Rich Link Pasting in Edge
There is a cool new feature in Microsoft Edge that pastes links with rich formatting. If you copy a link from the page or from the address bar, it will paste in a rich format, so instead of seeing https://www.example.com/ you’ll see Example Website (example.com) and it will already be linked to your selected destination. […]
Categories
What Data is Missing?
When you start collecting data at scale, you need to decide when to invest in keeping “all the datas” and when to keep only a sample. When it comes to sampling, you need to ensure that the parts you discard and the parts that you keep are a truly representative sample. That means you need […]
Categories
Working With Public Coronavirus Data
The UK Government provides public datasets that can be used by the media or the public. One such dataset contains information collected for the Coronavirus pandemic and its impact on people living and working in the UK. The problem with this dataset, though, is that we weren’t able to record the data until after the […]