Amazon Instance vs Dedicated Server comparison

Why smarthomes are hard

Why automated learning is hard for a smart home. The perils of over-fitting, under-fitting and how the general unpredictable nature of life makes it hard to build a system that learns your behavior.

Ian Mercer

ATAN curve for probabilities

In a home automation system we often want to convert a measurement into a probability. The ATAN curve is one of my favorite curves for this as it's easy to map overything onto a 0.0-1.0 range.

Ian Mercer

Home Construction Advice

Several years ago we did a major remodel. I did all of the finish electrical myself and supervised all of the rough-in electrical. I also put in all of the electrical system and water in our barn. I have opinions ...

Ian Mercer

T-Mobile home internet

I'm testing a T-Mobile Home Internet device as a backup to XFinity and a way to offload half our monthly traffic to avoid the XFinity 1.2TB cap

Ian Mercer

My love/hate relationship with Stackoverflow

Stackoverflow is a terrific source of information but can also be infuriating.

Ian Mercer

iBeacon meetup in Seattle - January 2015

My notes on the iBeacon meetup in Seattle held in January 2015

Ian Mercer

Logging with Xamarin Insights (but not on Unified App)

Ian Mercer

Xamarin Forms Application For Home Automation

Building a Xamarin Forms application to control my home automation system

Ian Mercer

A strongly-typed, RegEx-based parser for handling input strings

Ian Mercer

The future of user interface design is multi-modal and context aware

Ian Mercer

Websites should stop using passwords for login!

A slightly radical idea to eliminate passwords from many of the websites you use just occasionally

Ian Mercer

VariableWithHistory - making persistence invisible, making history visible

A novel approach to adding history to variables in a programming language

Ian Mercer

Neo4j Meetup in Seattle - some observations

Some observations from a meetup in Seattle on graph databases and Neo4j

Ian Mercer

Updated Release of the Abodit State Machine

A hierarchical state machine for .NET

Ian Mercer

My first programme [sic]

At the risk of looking seriously old, here's something found on a paper tape

Ian Mercer

Building a better .NET State Machine

A state machine for .NET that I've released on Nuget

Ian Mercer

A simple state machine in C#

State machines are useful in many contexts but especially for home automation

Ian Mercer

Dynamic persistence with MongoDB - look, no classes! Multiple inheritance in C#!

Ian Mercer

Home network crawler - cataloging every file on the home LAN with C# and MongoDB

Ian Mercer

Stop writing rude software! Use LASTINPUTINFO instead.

Ian Mercer

Finally got the 1U Atom Server racked up

Ian Mercer

Timelapse video using the GoPro HD Hero

Ian Mercer

Class-free persistence and multiple inheritance in C# with MongoDB

Ian Mercer

Extending C# to understand the language of the semantic web

Ian Mercer

Custom Serialization for MongoDB - Hashset with IBsonSerializable

Ian Mercer

File and image upload security considerations and best practices

Ian Mercer

Algorithm Complexity and the 'Which one will be faster?' question

Ian Mercer

A Semantic Web ontology / triple Store built on MongoDB

Ian Mercer

Task Parallel Library: A scheduler with priority, apartment state and maximum degree of parallelism

Ian Mercer

MongoDB Map-Reduce - Hints and Tips

Ian Mercer

Continuous Link and SEO Testing - Announcing LinkCheck2

Ian Mercer

A Bayesian Spam / Relevance Filter for Seesmic / Twitter

Ian Mercer

Constrained parallelism for the Task Parallel Library

Ian Mercer

Sequential Logic Blocks - compared to the Reactive Framework

Ian Mercer

Tidy Up! for Mac, a short review, clean up missing thumbnails in iPhoto??

Ian Mercer

I should have created Four Square ...

Ian Mercer

How can I tell if my house is smart?

Ian Mercer

Asian Gadgets

Ian Mercer

A great video explaining the Semantic Web

Ian Mercer

Why functional programming and LINQ is often better than procedural code

Ian Mercer

10 reasons my O(n²) algorithm is better than your O(n) algorithm

Ian Mercer

Why don't you trust your build system?

Ian Mercer

Interesting Twitter Posts March 15th-

Ian Mercer

Twitter links for Week beginning March 8th

Ian Mercer

Elliott 803 - An Early Computer

Ian Mercer

Facebook, social gaming and points

Ian Mercer

Twitter links for the week beginning March 1st

Ian Mercer

Interesting or useful links on Twitter this week relating to .NET and C#

Ian Mercer

Useful Twitter links Feb 8-Feb 15 2010

Ian Mercer

Continuous Integration -> Continuous Deployment

What is "quality" in terms of a released software product or website?

Ian Mercer

When will people learn to backup?

A rant about RAID

Ian Mercer

Making a bootable Windows 7 USB Memory Stick

Here's how I made a bootable USB memory stick for Windows 7

Ian Mercer

Tip: getting the index in a foreeach statement

A tip on using LINQ's Select expression with an index

Ian Mercer

Future proof your home with a new conduit system?

Running conduit can be expensive but maybe you don't need one to every room

Ian Mercer

SQL Server - error: 18456, severity: 14, state: 38 - Incorrect Login

A rant about developers using the same message for different errors

Ian Mercer

WCF and the SYSTEM account

Namespace reservations and http.sys, my, oh my!

Ian Mercer

Mixed mode assembly errors after upgrade to .NET 4 Beta 2

Fixing this error was fairly simple

Ian Mercer

Balloon Boy was much ado about nothing - Twitter

Some of the more witty comments on Twitter about the Balloon Boy hoax

Ian Mercer

Shortened URLs should be treated like a Codec ...

Expanding URLs would help users decide whether or not to click a link

Ian Mercer

Tagging File Systems

Isn't it time we stopped knowing which drive our file is on?

Ian Mercer

A great site for developing and testing regular expressions

Just a link to a site I found useful

Ian Mercer

WMPnetwk.exe started using 50% of my CPU

Uninstalling Windows Media Player - the end of an era

Ian Mercer

Introducing Jigsaw menus

A novel UI for menus that combines a breadcrumb and a menu in one visual metaphor

Ian Mercer

Why Amazon should get into the dedicated server business

Ian Mercer

Fix for IE's overflow:hidden problem

Ian Mercer

A better Tail program for Windows

A comparison of tail programs for Windows

Ian Mercer

Measuring website browser performance

Found this great resource on website performance

Ian Mercer

Generate a SQL Compact Database from your Entity Model (EDMX)

Ian Mercer

Agile Software Development is Like Sailing

You cannot tack too often when sailing or you get nowhere. Agile is a bit like that.

Ian Mercer

Javascript error reporting

Sending client-side errors back to a server for analysis

Ian Mercer

AntiVirus Software is the Worst Software!

When your anti-virus software starts stealing your personal data, it's time to remove it!

Ian Mercer

ASP.NET Custom Validation

How to solve a problem encountered with custom validation in ASP.NET

Ian Mercer

Optimization Advice

Some advice on software optimization

Ian Mercer

It's all about disk speed

Why disk speed is the most critical aspect for most modern PCs and servers

Ian Mercer

Google Chart API

Ian Mercer

Cache optimized scanning of pairwise combinations of values

Using space-filling curves to optimize caching

Ian Mercer

Threading and User Interfaces

A rant about how few software programs get threading right

Ian Mercer

Take out the trash!

Why Windows shutdown takes so long

Ian Mercer

Giving up on Internet Explorer

Ian Mercer

New Home Automation Server

Ian Mercer

Dell upgrades - a pricey way to go

Ian Mercer

Programming mostly C#

Ian's advice on programming

Ian Mercer