I recently purchased a dozen desktops for the office and was tasked with setting them up and installing Microsoft Office 2016. I purchased the Dell Precision towers with Microsoft Office Home and Business 2016 pre-installed on each one. One thing that I did not account for was that Microsoft changed their activation method and now tie each product license to an e-mail address. No problem, right? Except that the activation did not work on each computer. Then another problem occurred: After four installations, there were four different licenses attached to one e-mail account and it was difficult to tell which installation key was tied to which computer. The obvious solution is to use Office 365 and then all of these problems will go away. However, my CEO refuses to buy it. Here’s how I resolved the issue:
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Creating SSL Certification
This guide will walk through setting up an SSL certification and installing it on your server. I used these steps in the past for Jira and Confluence, but there are many uses for this. SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) is the standard security technology for establishing an encrypted link between a web server and a browser. According to Digicert, “SSL allows sensitive information such as credit card numbers, social security numbers, and login credentials to be transmitted securely. Normally, data sent between browsers and web servers is sent in plain text—leaving you vulnerable to eavesdropping. If an attacker is able to intercept all data being sent between a browser and a web server they can see and use that information.”
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How to: Land a Job
I’ve been interviewing for a position at my company for a few weeks now and I can’t help but notice how frequently some (what I would assume) basic concepts of getting a job are completely ignored. I was recently browsing social media when I came across someone complaining about the difficulty of finding a job. Their gripe with the process was someone telling them to try harder. The person argued, “How do I try harder? Do I type my resume harder? Do I hit submit harder? etc.” It made me chuckle. This sparked a response where I decided to write a quick guide on landing a job. Let’s start with the resume:
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Peer-to-peer Lending Evolved
My article relating to Peer-to-Peer Lending is one of my most popular articles with over 6,000 visits. I think that’s a rather huge accomplishment for a personal website with no desire to publically broadcast. One of the items I talk about later in the article is how to reduce risk while increasing rewards. Using backtracked data that spans billions of dollars, I decided to test out a few algorithms that could potentially maximize my return interest.
After testing these algorithms for over a year, I was astonished at the results. I’ll share these in a moment. I thought to myself, “what if I can share this with the world?” It was a unique challenge for me. I knew that Lending Club offered API, as I discussed in the aforementioned article. What I wanted to know was whether or not it was possible to interact with other people’s accounts and share the same algorithm using that same API. It was. While challenging at times, I believe my efforts were worth it.
Today, I introduce to you Flux Robot. You can see the results at the bottom of the page or in the performance section.
Update: This site has since been closed since Lending Club no longer offers peer-to-peer lending. You can find the page and a working version under my portfolio.
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Reading Lines in C#
I came across an interesting scenario today while I was building an application that required me opening a file, reading it line by line, and importing it into a dataset. The reason this was an interesting scenario is because there is data that belongs to a specific identifier on different lines.
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SQL Basic Maintenance Script
I came across a database that has suffered a lot of deadlocks recently. This, along with slow query execution among other problems led me to convince management that the database required downtime. Some of the maintenance I performed was re-building tempdb tables and moving them off the C Drive, which I highly recommend for various reasons. You can read more on that here.
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