Officially disguised as a Canadian
Two blog posts in a week! It’s like 2006 all over again. But seriously, I figured out a really annoying side-effect of moving back from WP Engine to my own hosting six months ago, and that is that file and folder permissions were set incorrectly (WPE for some reason uses 700 for folders, and 664Continue reading Broken links aren’t broken, after all
On 24 January 2022, I started what I suspect is the last stage* of my IT career, at Microsoft. I joined the Database Docs team, one of 8 people (including our manager), together responsible for over 16,000 articles on the Microsoft Learn platform. I am the owner of the SQL Server on Linux and SQLContinue reading I work at Microsoft
Recently, a friend (Janie Larson, A.K.A. the Red Queen Coder) asked me to take over hosting of her website. Unfortunately, because of boring technical reasons, she wasn’t able to back up the WordPress database, and so I used a tool called SiteSucker Pro to download it as-is as a static HTML entity. We would comeContinue reading Reverse engineering WordPress, kinda
(Originally posted on LinkedIn.) OpenAI’s ChatGPT is not intelligent. It is distilling knowledge fed into it by humans mining billions of data points. It’s a glorified chess computer. I am deeply concerned that this will increase the amount of misinformation floating around, because it has the confidence programmed into it by the very people whoContinue reading On the real meaning of intelligence
I purchased a Synology 1813+ in … 2013 (it took me a while to figure out that the last two digits in a Synology model number refers to the year), and in the last week or so I kept getting warnings about imminent failure of at least one hard drive. We’re currently undergoing a smallContinue reading PSA: Check your hard drive health with SMART
Recently I was able to install a new application on macOS that monitors network traffic. Useful for limiting bandwidth usage on the data bundle of your mobile device when travelling, you can limit all or a subset of your apps. It’s neat. A few months ago I was using my mobile data on my laptopContinue reading Surprising data usage in macOS with Apple News+
Via Washington Post: Elliot Page, the Oscar-nominated actor best known for the 2008 film “Juno,” came out as transgender on Tuesday, sharing the news in a long social media post. “Hi friends, I want to share with you that I am trans, my pronouns are he/they and my name is Elliot. I feel lucky toContinue reading Hello, Elliot
I wrote three tweets last week which I’d like to summarise here: #BlackLivesMatter #TransRightsAreHumanRights #StayHome The last one — about COVID-19 — is difficult to do if you’re protesting, so stay safe and wear a mask. Remember that the mask must cover both your mouth and your nose. I also wrote on this website aContinue reading Change by a thousand choices
I will be stepping back from a number of things in 2020, for personal reasons. I am still attending SQL Saturday Victoria, the MVP Summit, and SQLBits, plus I have the Calgary PASS user group to run, but I have yet to decide on PASS Summit. I love the SQL Server community and I’ve lovedContinue reading Some personal news
When I was born, the doctors, nurses, even my own family, assigned me as male. As I grew older, I came to realise (at around 18 years old) that I was not in fact a man. It took another couple decades to understand what this meant because I’m also slow. Here’s a list which mayContinue reading Gender-neutral terminology