This "Coding and Techy Stuff" category is here because peripatetically I make a living as a software engineer. This is where I put anything related to coding and technology, and sometimes just unrelated information such as you might find posted on ycombinator's always-intellectually-curious Hacker News.
If you have not already seen the famous 'Expert' comedy sketch, you're in for a treat. It's had 26 million views so far, so maybe you already know it. The sketch illustrates in a very funny way how badly an expert can be treated by a team of non-experts who all depend on his expert knowledge, but […]
If you get this error while running the iRedMail install script: [FAIL] Starting nginx: nginx failed! invoke-rc.d: initscript nginx, action "start" failed. dpkg: error processing package nginx-full (--configure): installed nginx-full package post-installation script subprocess returned […]
Yes, it can be done. You have to use the 2014 version of Sketchup, and you have to tweak the Windows Imaging Component DLLs which are not installed by the .NET 4 installer. The .NET 4 installer only installs a couple of the 4 DLLs you need, so you have to deploy the other two and install/register […]
Reads article about a rogue process in Windows related to Microsoft Store. Reads enough of the article to recognize it's a component he never uses, so can be safely disabled. Opens command prompt, uses it to invoke regedit to edit registry to disable the subprocess that is most suspicious, leaving […]
It took several attempts, but I eventually found out why I could not access the value of a "parsed" variable within Twilio Studio while using the HTTP Widget. Someone else may encounter this error, so here's how I resolved it. The following 3 attempts are screenshots from the log viewer […]
This closely follows the excellent and very concise instructions at another site: "FreeSWITCH 1.8.2 on Ubuntu 18.4 LTS". I found a few unexpected twists and turns before it was working, so I've put this information together to help others who encounter these or similar issues. Dependencies […]
In a blog post too obviously spreading fear, uncertainty, and doubt regarding Iota, writer Nick Johnson declares, among other things: "Iota is a bad actor in the open source community." Here is his justification: Next, and in my mind most damningly, Sergey Ivancheglo, Iota’s cofounder, […]
I've been researching voiceprints, Kaldi, and speech-recognition in general, and stumbled upon this gem. It's clear that voiceprint is going to be around for a long time to come, because it sits in a sort of "Goldilocks zone" of the ease-of-use vs. secure spectrum in several ways. Look at […]
Secretary of Defense Neil McElroy said: "I want an agency that makes sure no important thing remains undone because it doesn’t fit somebody's mission." And so IARPA was created. IARPA / DARPA was involved in creating Babel and Kaldi, among other things of course. Now I'm learning Kaldi. […]
Linden Gledhill, a pharmaceutical biochemist, builds custom gear that can record the beautiful, weird, and sometimes bizarre intersection of science, art, and nature. His latest photographs of cymatics, or standing waves in water, are breathtaking. Source: Trippy photos show how beautiful water […]
If you're new to Asterisk, you can spend many hours and even days figuring out how things work before you get something working. And then as soon as you have it working, you'll get slammed by hackers trying to break in. I recently spent those hours and days getting asterisk working. So I have […]
The information on installing and configuring Asterisk, fail2ban, and VoipBL is all over the map. It is hilariously not easy to find what actually works. Way more confusing typos and important pieces left out on numerous sites, like there is some sort of conspiracy to make it difficult to install […]
After using "apt install asterisk" on Ubuntu 18.04.2, I noticed when running "service asterisk status" that there was a problem with the radius radcli configuration. It looked like this: radcli: rc_read_config: rc_read_config: can't open /etc/radiusclient-ng/radiusclient.conf: No […]
The instructions in a blog post for Ubuntu 14.04 (linked below) worked for me on Ubuntu 18, with one extra step after you complete the following: I tried to run it after these steps and got this error: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory on pocketsphinx So I ran the following […]
It was ironic, really, that I pretty much did exactly what the intro to the RealWorld project described as a frustrating path in its "this is what we're fixing" introductory post at Medium. Without going into detail, let's just say I spent the past few months doing a lot of stumbling while […]
What to do when you see the following in Visual Studio? "Error TS6053 File '...node_modules/keycode/keycode.d.ts' not found." I have learned that whenever I see this error, to simply restart Visual Studio and recompile. The error goes away. If anyone knows of an easier way to resolve this, […]
Have you gotten this error? Is it sometimes accompanied by the even more rare Failed to load view '...' because it's not a React element If so, restart Visual Studio. These errors seem to go away when you do that. Wasn't able to find this information by Googling, so here it is for you. Hm, that 2nd […]
Simplicity is so nice. I just spent two hours zooming all over the web looking for a very simple HTTPClient code sample. Of dozens that I saw, all of them were overcomplicated. I knew it was just a matter of a few lines of code, and couldn't believe the poor quality and needless complexity I was […]
After wrestling for a while trying to get CrowdStrike's falcon sensor app running properly in Ubuntu, we found that the online documentation is incomplete. A round trip to their support team got us this PDF (Falcon Sensor for Linux Deployment Guide Documentation Support _ Falcon), which gave us the […]
Enter new UNIX password: Retype new UNIX password: passwd: password updated successfully Changing the user information for clearhat Enter the new value, or press ENTER for the default Full Name []: Clearhat Room Number []: Work Phone []: Home Phone []: (816)xxx-xxxx Other []: @@clearhat.org Is the […]