and it’s actually making your passwords weaker. — Before we start, try to forget everything you know about passwords. Rules like “Passwords must include a capital letter and a number” or those little “strength meters” that give you the reassuring green checkmark that your password is impenetrable are dangerously misleading and incomplete. Some of the reasons are mathematical…

AWS S3 storage is a flexible and handy service. Integrating it into your Python scripts can provide solutions for many applications, such as logging, data warehousing, automatic backups, file bouncing, etc. Maybe you already use S3 as part of your business’ ETL systems or DevOps backend and need a reliable…

Automating tasks can be one of the most satisfying applications of programming. Until you’ve logged a few projects under your belt, it can feel opaque and hard to see a solution. We’re going to discuss ways to approach and think about the steps necessary to accomplish automation tasks. …

Keep yourself and your business safer with just a few basic strategies While it’s impossible to be 100% secure online, the reality of cybercrime is much like physical crime: Most thieves are opportunists, and you can avoid a huge amount of vulnerability with very little effort. …

Whether you’re leaving school, changing careers, or jumping back in the job market, writing a resume can feel pressured and stressful. There’s lots of conflicting advice and arbitrary choices to make, and often no feedback to steer you in the right direction. The most important things are never discussed, and…

Sometimes the case arises where a vertical line makes for a better visual than a dot, e.g. when you’re trying to clearly demarcate intervals in plotted discrete data, but don’t need error bars or axis ticks (or anything that would overcomplicate things). …

Using Python with your shell is great combination. Complex conditionals and logic flow are much simpler to write in Python, but it can be slooowww for processing large amounts of data. For many applications, shell builtins will likely perform much faster. To take advantage of both these strengths, we can…

This article has two sections: Retrieving IP geolocation data from within the R environment, and then graphing the results on a world map. The latter can be generalized to any latitude/longitude data, so if you’re just looking for info on world-map graphing, skip to Section 2. Section 1: Geolocating IP…

An Open Letter To President Garimella, Provost Prelock, Dean Falls, the Board of Trustees, and current and future students: When I heard of UVM’s decision to cut departments and programs in the Humanities, I was shocked and disgusted. It is obvious that the abolishment of smaller departments serves to perpetuate…