David L. Farquhar on technology old and new, computer security, and more
Does retail count as sales experience? I think it depends, but there are certainly ways you can make it count. Here’s how.
It all begins with knowing the products the store sells, and knowing what makes one product different from another.
The lowly Countif function is one of the most useful tools for data analysis you’ll find in Excel and other spreadsheets. It’s also not all that well understood, I find. Knowing how to use it sure has made my job much easier since 2013, so I think there’s a chance it will help you too. Here’s a Countif example to show you how to use it.
Sometimes you’ll hear insurance professionals, banking professionals, computer security professionals, and other people who deal with risk talk about inherent risk and its counterpart, residual risk. If these are unclear to you, or you just need a refresher, you came to the right place. Let’s take a look at a simple inherent risk definition and example, as well as residual risk.
Every couple of months or so, we have to collaborate at work on a Microsoft Word document and submit it without all the distracting markup in it. And it seems like it always takes four of us half an hour to re-figure out how to accept all changes in Word and remove the comments. This applies to Word 2007 and all newer versions.
Sometimes I also find the tracked changes and other markup causes weird problems, and the fastest way to make them go away is to get rid of the markup.
So I figured it might help someone. This is something that either takes you 30 seconds or 30 minutes. If you don’t do this every day, it’s likely to take too long. This is for those of you who can’t do it in less than 30 minutes.
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My boss’ management is clamoring for metrics. They want to know, at a glance, what we’re doing and how far along we are. Sounds like a job for stacked bar charts in Excel to me. So here’s how to create a stacked bar chart in Excel.
Figuring out a way to track our progress was fairly easy. Figuring out how to make Excel display that chart in a meaningful fashion… Well, that took about five hours. I’ll try to make it easier for you than it was for me.
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Here’s a good question I heard the other day: What’s the difference between a CPU and cores, or the difference between the number of CPUs and the number of cores in a system? The CPU vs core or core vs processor distinction, it turns out, is subtle.
As far as the operating system is concerned, there is no difference, but I’ll explain why. For you, there might be a difference.
I’ve had a long history with wrist pain from typing, brought on by carpal tunnel syndrome or repetitive stress injury. People sometimes as me to elaborate, so I’ll elaborate on beating carpal tunnel. I was able to beat it without surgery, and you may be able to as well.
It’s something I struggled with off and on for a good 10 years. Mostly off, in recent years, which is good. At one point, it was so bad I wasn’t able to unload my dishwasher, because I couldn’t grip the plates long enough. It was career threatening too. Read more
Anyone old enough to have played with an original Nintendo NES knows the problem: You plug in the cartridge, turn on the system, and get a blank screen and the power light blinks at you. The schoolyard fix is to take out the cartridge, blow into it, then put it back into the system. Then, with a little luck, you can play your game. The trouble is, that’s just a short-term fix. In the long run, it makes the problem worse and eventually the system can’t play games at all. The solution is to clean them. Here’s a process for cleaning NES games.
I’ve talked before about the disadvantages of the Intel 8086. But in spite of its weaknesses, it won. The CPU you are using right now descended from it. Even if you’re reading this on a smartphone, the server that sent the page to your smartphone has an Intel 8086 descendant in it. So what are some advantages of Intel processors? They won for a reason.
In the 1980s, there was a saying that nobody got fired for buying IBM. Intel positioned itself as the logical successor to that, building an ecosystem around its CPUs that allowed it to conduct marketing campaigns as the safe, reliable, compatible choice. It was true enough of the time that Intel built momentum that no other company could match.
In computer security circles, you’ll hear the words white hat gray hat black hat thrown around a lot. Everyone just assumes you know what they mean. If you’re unsure about it, here’s what the terms mean, and what the difference is.