I was walking by a Post cereal factory in Niagara Falls this weekend, and I immediately thought of this.
Categories
Author: Jack Slingerland
Founder of Kernl.us. Working and living in Raleigh, NC. I manage teams of software engineers and work in Python, Django, TypeScript, Node.js, React+Redux, Angular, and PHP. I enjoy hanging out with my wife and kids, lifting weights, and PC gaming in my free time.
Categories
Student Loan Debt
Most people in my field have attended a 4 year university to learn their skills. While it’s not entirely necissary to do so, it does help expedite and flush out the the things you could have learned on your own. The only problem is money. If you are anything like me your parents didn’t have a lot of money growing up, so you always knew that shouldering the debt of a college education would be your responsibility. It’s only now that I’ve realised how expensive college really is.
Currently, my student loan debt is at $50,000 is government loans and $20,000 in private loans. By the time I’ve completed grad school, I’ll have an additional $21,000 in government loans. All in all, I’ve got $91,000 in student loans to pay off when I graduate. With any sort of luck, I’ll get a job that starts me at $60,000 a year.
That’s great for me. I can easily afford to make a student loan payment of $1000 a month. Maybe less. However, I now have to consider my fiance’s debt. She’ll have roughly $70,000 in student loans when she’s done. So together, we’ll need to pay $160,000 in student loans.
Sometimes I wonder if the education was worth it.
Categories
Virtual Box on Ubuntu 9.04 Host
Ever since I got my new laptop back in April, I’ve been running the latest version of Ubuntu on it. Sometimes though, I do have the need for Windows (when I need to use Visual Studio, for example). In those cases I have a virtual machine with Windows XP installed on it, and any of the often needed Windows utilities available. This worked great for me in previous versions of Ubuntu, but with the new laptop came a weird problem: The VM was transparent. Not completely transparent, but maybe 40% transparent.
Luckily there is a quick fix for this. With your mouse pointer inside of the guest operating system, make sure the “host key” is disabled, and then hit windows key + c. That should remove the transparency and you’ll be good to go.
As much as I despise waking up at 6:15am every morning, there are a few things I do enjoy. I enjoy spending an hour reading articles and catching up with the day’s news. I enjoy the fresh feeling that the world has at that hour. The morning dew is still clinging to everything, and the sun being low on the horizon. Above all else, it’s quiet. Everyone is still sleeping at that hour. That’s probably my favorite part. No phone calls, no talking, just the sound of the wind at my back and the birds singing.
Next time I visit the ocean, I’m making it a point to get up early and watch the sunrise. I haven’t seen a sunrise in ages.
- Day 1: Okay, quick and easy project. I should at least try to have fun with it.
- Day 2: What!? I have to do this in Visual Basic? I don’t even have visual studio, let alone any VB knowledge.
- Day 3: Visual Studio is installed, created a gui for this project. Hey, this gui designer is pretty nice.
- Day 4: Beginning to realize why I love PHP so much. I’ve never had so much trouble connecting to a database in my life.
- Day 5: Screw this, I could make this program in 10 minutes in Python!
- Day 6: Crap, my Python is rusty. Oh well, I’ve made some good progress.
- Day 7: Man, gui programming in python is weird. I guess making a gui in any language kind of sucks.
- Day 8: Bleh, back to Visual Studio.
- Day 9: Suck it up and do is VB. Learn something new!
Categories
Free ISO Mounting Tool
Every so often you need to mount an ISO file. I generally use Linux, so I can just create a loop back interface. On Windows though, things are a bit trickier. If your are lucky enough to have money, you could always buy a tool to do this. However, most of us are either poor or cheap, so that’s where this tool comes in. Microsoft apparently created a free iso mounting tool that it doesn’t support. I have used this with great success over the years, so I wanted to share it with everyone.
Click here to download VCDControlTool.sfx.exe
A few years ago, I worked at the OIT Help Desk at Central Michigan University. While there, I was asked to write a little utility that would pull information about the machine out of the system. In order to do so, I learned VBScript and the WMI library that comes with Windows. WMI is really handy for projects like this because it allows you to pull machine specific information in an easy way. For instance, let’s say I want to get the machine name:
Option Explicit
Dim objWMIService, objComputer, colComputer
Dim strLogonUser, strComputerstrComputer = “.”
Set objWMIService = GetObject(“winmgmts:” _
& “{impersonationLevel=impersonate}!\\” _
& strComputer & “\root\cimv2”)
Set colComputer = objWMIService.ExecQuery _
(“Select * from Win32_ComputerSystem”)For Each objComputer in colComputer
Wscript.Echo “System Name: ” & objComputer.Name _
& vbCr & “Total RAM ” & objComputer.TotalPhysicalMemory
NextWScript.Quit
Easy as pie. The only problem is that you have to have a loop in there. Even with only 1 computer.
Categories
Ajax Utility Function
Edit: This post was made before I started using JQuery or Mootools. This can safely (luckily) be ignored now.
For the past couple months I’ve been playing around with Ajax style events on a few pages I’ve been working on. One of the main problems I’ve run into is cross-browser compatibility (surprise!). To solve that problem, I took the advice of a book that I’m reading and made a utility file for some of the most annoying cross-browser issues: Event Handlers, Activated Objects, and Request Objects. You can download the utility file by clicking the link below.
Enjoy! If you have any questions, please leave them in the comments and I’d be happy to get back with you.