The Gun Range – North Highlands, CA

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I recently had the opportunity to attend an event taking place at The Gun Range in North Highlands, CA (right outside of Sacramento, CA). This was more or less a low key “open house” event for the shop where they had some vendors come in to show case some of their products, and gave the shop the opportunity to outline some of the services and amenities that they offer. More on all of that to follow…

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MVEL Templates with Java

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I recently had the need to develop a Java application that allowed the creation of HTML templates that could contain some basic if-else logic as well as bind some calculated parameters. The key around this was to make the templates editable, since they contained a lot of frequently changing content.

What I found to use was the MVEL 2.0 expression language.

What is MVEL, well I think their site says it best, “MVEL is a powerful expression language for Java-based applications.”

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Aeries PIC Table – Saving Student Pictures with C#

Eagle_Software-Aeries_SIS2

If you are a school district using the Aeries PIC table for saving student pictures, you may have the need to extract pictures for use in other applications.

As districts switch over to use the “new” PIC table, this will become especially important if your district has a site that may update it’s pictures frequently or has a large turnover of students and new pictures are added throughout the year.
 
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3D NAND Flash Memory

3D NAND - Die with M2 SSD

On 3/26/2015, Intel Corporation and Micron Technology, Inc. posted a press release touting their new 3D NAND Flash Memory.

In short, what this means is that they have created a new way to create higher density solid state memory… 3D Memory! They boast that this increases capacity by 3x and that boost of capacity comes along with a “significant cost savings, low power usage and high performance.”

Highlights

  • New technology that uses floating gate cells – 3x capacity than other production methods
  • Enambles the creation of smaller form factor devices with large storage – 2.5″ SSDs with greater than 10TB
  • New processes and techniques that will extend Moore’s Law for flash storage
  • Expected to increase both performance and endurance of the storage

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Multiple Maps On a Single Page with jQuery

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I recently added a “locations” page to my website and was looking for a simple way to display multiple maps (Google Maps) on the page for the corresponding locations, without having to do a ton of coding or having to maintain a lot of JavaScript.

What I decided on was a simple jQuery implementation that uses data- elements to supply latitude (lat) and longitude (lng) vales for the map rendering.

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Google Maps API Simple Async Loading

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In doing some page testing on my site using the Google PageSpeed Insights tool I found that on a couple of my pages, one of the things slowing my page loads down was the loading of the Google Maps API.

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There are a lot of articles out there talking about a ton of different ways to load the Google Maps API in an asynchronous (async) manner, this basically sums up what I found… Basically the simplest way, that actually works (and a way that didn’t work).
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Ubiquiti UniFi Hotspot Customization

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After getting a Ubiquity UniFi AP and controller setup, I decided to get the hotspot running, just for the fun of it.

The default UniFi hotspot is not bad, as far as a free setup goes, but it’s not very “clean” as far as a web system goes. I’m sure as the product develops along it will get cleaned up. But for a businesses use, out of the box, there is a lot to be desired.

So what I decided to do was to clean up the HTML, integrate a responsive UI template, and get things matched up to my website a little better with a logo and a similar color scheme.

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