Does finished software really exist?

Does finished software really exist?

A blog post titled “The beauty of finished software” went viral a week or two ago, and it puzzled me a bit. The blog post wasn’t terribly long. It was just a few paragraphs extolling the virtue of something it called finished software. And then it lumped two very different things into the category of finished software. In this blog post, I will explore the concept and explain why being finished software isn’t always a good thing.

Read more

What network drivers are

What network drivers are

What are network drivers? What is a network driver? It’s a valid question, no one’s born knowing this stuff. In this blog post, I’ll explain network drivers, why they’re important, and where to find them.

Read more

What does legacy mean in software

What does legacy mean in software

In computer software and general IT circles, you will sometimes hear the phrase legacy thrown around. And you may hear some conflicting information about what legacy means. So let’s talk about what legacy means and software, and computers in general.

Read more

Make PDFs searchable in Windows

Make PDFs searchable in Windows

PDF, or portable document format, is a somewhat problematic but very useful file format, especially for people who conduct a lot of historical research. But the problem with having megabytes or gigabytes of historical data on your computer is finding the information you are looking for. Here’s how to make PDFs searchable in Windows, because by default they are not.

Read more

Fix a black screen in Firefox

Fix a black screen in Firefox

Occasionally when using Firefox, it will interrupt you by blanking the screen momentarily, and then The screen returns, and it may or may not show the same window it was showing before the screen blanked. Here’s how I fixed my black screen in Firefox.

Read more

Rebuild an XLSX file in Python

Rebuild an XLSX file in Python

I ran into a compatibility issue with the formatting in an Excel file. When I tried to open the file in a Python program using Pandas, as one does, I got the following error: ValueError: Colors must be aRGB hex values.

Very old versions of xlrd (version 1.2.0) can get around the color problem and open the file anyway, but Pandas requires version 2.0.1 or newer. I got around the problem by using an old xlrd to open the file and rebuild the file with a current version of xlsxwriter so Pandas could open the resulting file.

Read more

Twitter vs Mastodon

Twitter vs Mastodon

Twitter’s instability over the course of 2022 caused an unprecedented number of people to seek alternatives. The alternative that appears to be the most viable is Mastodon, an open source social network with some clear similarities, but also notable differences. So let’s look at Twitter vs Mastodon, and I will provide some tips as someone who has started the migration.

Millions of people migrated to Mastodon in November 2022, a migration that rivaled the migration from Digg to Reddit in 2010. And much like how Reddit was like Digg in some ways but not others, Mastodon is like Twitter on the surface but has some differences that can be confusing at first.

Read more

What a sprite is

What a sprite is

What is a sprite? Sprites are a concept in computer programming, primarily gaming, or at least primarily thought of as gaming related. But if you are reading this on a desktop or laptop computer, you just used a sprite to click on this link.

Read more

f strings in Python

f strings in Python

When you first encounter f strings in Python, they can seem like a dark art. And you can use them without understanding them. I’ve used f strings to get myself out of a bind, based on a code snippet I found on Stack Overflow or some other discussion board, with a comment saying not to ask me why it works. But here’s what they do and how they can help your code.

Read more

What is recursion in Python? Here’s an example

What is recursion in Python? Here’s an example

Recursion in computer science is a subroutine that calls itself. So what is recursion in Python? The same thing. A function that calls itself.

Recursion is a concept that first or second semester computer science classes frequently cover, but it can be confusing. I will admit that I generally tried to avoid using it, but it can be useful. I especially find recursion in Python useful when working with APIs, which is a common Python use case.

Read more