Last weekend, my two oldest kids and I attended the 2018 Linuxfest Northwest conference in Bellingham, WA. The best way I would describe the experience was that I worked at reducing the size of my Third Order Ignorance. Here is a brief summary of the talks I attended and the things I learned that I didn’t know that I didn’t know.
My wife and I got several cooking appliances this holiday season. We got an amazing smoker that I will likely write about later; a multi-purpose Cuisinart thing to replace our electric griddle, waffle iron and George Foreman grill; and an Instant Pot to replace our crockpot, pressure cooker and rice maker. Unless you have been under a rock, the internet has been buzzing about the Instant Pot, for good reason. Last night we made a clam chowder so good, I felt like I had to share it. We made up the recipe, but I had a lot of help. First, we found the following recipes on the internet.
Instant Pot New England Clam Chowder
Pressure Cooker Recipe: New England Clam Chowder
New England Clam Chowder In Pressure Cooker Recipe
New England Clam Chowder (Pressure Cooker)
Lower Carb New England-Style Clam Chowder
Light Low-Carb New England Clam Chowder Recipe
SLOW COOKER LOW CARB CLAM CHOWDER WITH BACON
Creamy Paleo Clam Chowder
KETO CROCK POT CLAM CHOWDER
I even found a Ketogenic Diet Pressure Cooker Recipes cookbook that I plan to order. After that, I took my favorite ingredients from all of the above, together with advice gleaned from friends who have Instant Pots, Keto and Instant Pot groups on Facebook and of course, /r/ketorecipes and improvised the rest.
I had to throw the family name in there because even accidentally being associated with a hate group is offensive and we can’t have that. That’s four K’s not 3. Besides, this recipe turned out so good it can only improve the family name.
This is not how I did it, but how I will do it again. I had tried to saute the Bacon and Onions in the Instant Pot but the bottom was getting crusty and it didn’t seem to get hot enough to caramelize the onions. I remembered being told that the Instant Pot might not come to pressure if the bottom was scorched so I transferred it to a non-stick pan and my wife finished frying it up while I deglazed the Instant Pot on Saute with the Clam juice.
I just finished my first week as a full stack web developer. It was awesome, mostly because of the great people I get to work with, but also because there were so many new things to learn. Developing on a Mac, using Git and Github for source control, PivotalTracker for scrum management, Slack for chatting with everyone whether they are in the office or not, oh yeah and Google Apps for everything else. Aside from the technology change there is also a culture change. Where at Microsoft, I worked in my own private office and everyone used email to communicate with everyone, even if they were in the office next door. Here, the whole company is in one big room and so you just look up and chat with whoever or maybe they slide their chair (or roll their yoga ball for the younger employees) over and work in a spontaneous group. So what did I learn in my first week?
The following are two things you can try when Windows Update fails with a mysterious error such as 0x80240004
Fix #1 – Rename software distribution folder.
net stop wuauserv
net start wuauserv
Fix #2 – Hack the registry
We had an awesome week out at Mayfield Lake. We managed to record some of the action and I used MovieMaker to put together a summary video. A good time was had by all and we plan on making this an annual event.
To great videos from Microsoft that demonstrate a future where information is at your finger tips.
And just in case you are inclined to be skeptical, consider a similar video from 1993
Ahhhhh, I spent thrity minutes scratching my head over this before a a coworker pointed out an easy solution my problem. Since most of my time was spent searching the web for a possible solution without finding any, I decided to post this entry in hopes that a search engine or two might pick it up and help someone else who doesn’t have awesome coworkers walk past their office on a regular basis.
I just used Visual Studio 2010 to create an ATL project and added an object to it and added a method to the object. This is all the stuff you see on stage at every PDC. CodeProject has a tutorial very similar to what I did. Anyway I write a quick 2 line test.js file that uses ActiveXObject to create it and call the method and I get the following error (0x800A01AD).
test.js(1, 1) Microsoft JScript runtime error: Automation server can’t create object
So what did I do wrong. Turns out, nothing except trying to run the test.js file from a 64 bit command console. All I had to do to get it working the way I expected was launch the 32 bit command console (commonly found at C:\Windows\SysWOW64\cmd.exe) and run it from there.
Another cool video on YouTube. This one contains some very innovative use of text.