A couple of days ago, while surfing Hacker News, I saw this Quora article entitled “What are common mistakes that new or inexperienced managers make”. Most of the answers are geared towards managers in companies, in particular, tech companies. However, as managers are leaders, I think that some points can also be extrapolated out as tips for leaders in general. In the past few weeks, I’ve been involved in ramping up the volunteer council of the YLM program this year, and I was able to spend some time reflecting on different leadership styles. Based on my personal experience in different roles at work Continue Reading
FreeNAS and ZFS
Since I built my home server back in 2012, I’ve had a FreeNAS virtual machine running on it as the file server of my home network. For the past two years, I’ve been using it for the simplest of tasks (serving files). But over the past week, I’ve started looking deeper at some of the cool things FreeNAS and ZFS can do. The descriptions of each of these are going to be brief; they can probably be expanded to a full blog post, which I may do if I have time. However, until then, if your interest has been piqued, you will have Continue Reading
Secure your Mac’s infrared port against random Apple Remotes
If you have a MacBook with an infrared receiver, did you know your Mac could be open to other people controlling your computer? By default, Mac OS will recognize the signal of any Apple Remote. Although the effect is relatively harmless (they will probably be able to randomly play some tracks on iTunes), it can range from being annoying if you were studying in the library and your friend happened to prank you, to embarrassing if you happened to be doing a presentation. Most people do not need to allow any Apple Remote to control their computer. Why would you Continue Reading
Popes Saint John Paul II and Saint John XXIII
Yesterday, Popes John Paul II and John XXIII were declared saints in a canonization mass attended by over 800,000 people in St. Peter’s Square. For the rest of us who weren’t able to make it in person to Rome, the event was live-streamed and now available to watch on YouTube! Here in Vancouver, the archdiocese held a Mass to celebrate this event with about 10,000 attendees in Pacific Coliseum. What makes a saint? I couldn’t really find a better way to summarize it so here are some quotations from Mark Hart’s blog post on “What makes a saint”: …the Church doesn’t “make Continue Reading
Database query optimization is a useful skill
Recently I read an article titled “Quick tip: Improve developer habits by showing time cost of DB queries” by Dan Birken. He claims that one common reason why websites load slowly are because of unoptimized database queries: Websites can be slow for many reasons, but an overwhelmingly common one is time spent performing database queries. Now database queries are likely a very important part of rendering the webpage – the information to populate a page has to come from somewhere. But sometimes rendering a page is slowed down by either unnecessary queries or improperly optimized queries. I completely agree with his view. For most Continue Reading