I would hazard a guess that the vast majority of people who have ever had to enter in a "subnet mask" into their network settings have no idea what it means, much less the amazingly powerful and beautifully simple solution to the problem it solves.  In this post, we'll peel back the mystery, talk a little binary and basic computer operations, and hopefully do it in a way that even a non-technical person could understand.

This weekend I wrote a Javascript AAMVA Driver License/Identification Card Parser for use with USB 2D Barcode Scanners.  The result was an interesting reading through specs for the PDF 417 and DMV websites, but I did get a rough proof of concept together to at least show it works.  I spent a fair amount of time searching the interwebs for something out there to do this, but most all the libraries I did find were more about scanning/decoding the image of the barcode itself (like with a webcam).  I didn't need any of that as I was using a hardware …

Over the last year I’ve been teaching programming.  The language of choice where i’ve been working is Python (which I had not used very much before going in).  Because of that, I’ve been making it a point to code as many of my personal projects as I can in the language.  Despite a long “love/hate” relationship over the first few months (python was my first language that uses syntactical whitespace), I’ve really grown to love it.

I’ve also become quite fond of the Flask framework for developing web applications.  I love its minimal approach to things, really getting out of …

I've recently been doing some teaching on the side at Hackbright Academy and today was all about Markov Chains.