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Natural Algorithms - Simulated Bee Colony (SBC) algorithm in Erlang

Natural Algorithms – Simulated Bee Colony (SBC) algorithm in Erlang

The other day at the local Erlang users group, the presenter asked for other people to come up with topics and presentations. I decided it would be fun and interesting to work on some algorithm related projects. The original credit for this specific project idea has to go to James McCaffery for his original article in MSDN. I highly recommend looking up his articles.

Important Notice: Please…

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StackOverflow Excavations

StackOverflow Excavations

It’s fun to dig around StackOverflow to find interesting questions that haven’t been answered. This was one about StructureMap.

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Architecture - Business First

Architecture – Business First

Wait, I do put business first!

In software architecture, business is everything. This doesn’t mean ignore the best practices and slap together a design dictated by a business manager. It means that the objectives of the organization should dictate your architecture.

Most people that have done any software or systems architecture should be saying, “Of course! That is obvious!” However, in practice…

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Corporate APIs - No, I'm afraid that API isn't private after all.

Corporate APIs – No, I’m afraid that API isn’t private after all.

In software development there are often events that can have the long term ramifications for the health of a company, for better or worse. One of these is the creation of an “internal” or “private” API. For the sake of this post, let’s assume we are talking about a service oriented API; though this could be applied to a lesser degree with any shared API layer.

Seeing as how important an API can…

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Software Research, Development, Testing, and Education

Going to start working on some of his articles as an excercise to better understand some of the machine learning approaches I haven't done before. He has some great articles.

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Two Types of IT Projects

Light and Dark

In most business organizations, there are two types of IT projects. A chosen few live in the light, projects visible and championed by the business (sales, marketing, product management, etc.). These are outnumbered by projects that lurk in…

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Using SessionID's for security in a database.

If you are trying to use SessionID's to track access attempts or some other security event in your application, don't. This creates the ability for someone with access to that table to hijack an existing session.

Use a non-reversible hash of the SessionID for tagging the events. This is much harder to exploit.

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Why do we build frankensteins?

Old Code Never Dies

Old code never dies, it just gets abstracted away.  In my experience, it is rare for business systems to be completely retired. Look at many of the applications you probably work on in your day to day programming. They may contain bits…

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Getting started..

Sometimes getting started is the hardest part for me. I come from a great and storied line of procrastinators. This is my line in the sand. Today I start a new blog with the goal of sharing some tidbits of knowledge that I run into in my day to day. 

In addition I'll be sharing personal development goals in work on AI/Machine Learning and other personal projects.