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Engineering & Code

Engineering & Code explores the full stack of modern tech—from bits and transistors to cloud fleets and formal proofs. Here you’ll find clear, rigorous walk-throughs of software design, embedded hardware, security architecture, and the physics that underpins them, always paired with code, schematics, and reasoning you can put to work.

Congressional District GIS Exploration

MathJax.Hub.Config({tex2jax: {inlineMath: [[‘$’,’$’], [‘(‘,’)’]]}}); I wanted to be able to do this with my ip address: I do development and consulting in two areas I really love: fitness and political engagement. For some work I’m doing on the latter, I needed to figure out the latitude and longitude of the geographic center for each of […] read more

Paperless Archive Makeover — ruby and unix to the rescue

I recently had to clean out my digital paperless archive — a task made much more difficult by encrypted PDFs and a bunch of lint in my directory. We have been paperless since 2001 and have many gigs of files in a hierarchical file structure that was becoming difficult to use and maintain. (i.e. Where […] read more

Generating PDF files with RTeX

I love LaTeX and I love ruby/rails. I want to use rtex, it seems perfect for me. But, I am having trouble and am looking for help — once i get this working i’ll make a blog post for the world. First, do i have what it takes? tim@polycarp:~/test_rails$ which pdflatex /usr/bin/pdflatex tim@polycarp:~/test_rails$ which latex […] read more

pdf rtex

I love LaTeX and I love ruby/rails. I want to use rtex, it seems perfect for me. But, I am having trouble and am looking for help — once i get this working i’ll make a blog post for the world. First, do i have what it takes? Now I need a rails app to […] read more