Articles by John Iacovelli
This presents the official version 1.0 of our Tarot Wheel of the Zodiac. The .SVG file, plus a PDF of the graphic (hint: SVG is better; Visio’s PDF export mechanism leaves a bit to be desired) are available to download without registration. For those with Microsoft Visio, you’ll find the Visio and Excel files plus a document describing how t customize.
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We have noted that Microsoft appears to be creating inbound firewall pinholes for some of its apps, even in installations in which a user has specifically indicate the local network is not to be trusted. This post reviews how the pinholes are implemented. It also provides illustrated examples for closing those rules, by disabling the default rules that Microsoft uses to provide exceptions for its apps.
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Recent trends that have loosened some of the Windows 10 inbound firewall rules. The other day I installed Windows 10 with a private IP address. During the installation, I specified that my local network was not to be trusted. What should have been a pretty restrictive set of rules… wasn’t. I’ve summarized them here as the first part of a series in which we’ll discuss how to tighten up such rules. Additionally, we’ll look ahead over the next few years, in which we can probably expect more and more people will be working with publically accessible IP addresses. We’ll then discuss remote desktop protocol access from when your away from work (or home), which we’ll try to make as safe as possible.
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Tiamat’s Wrath is undoubtedly the strongest entry in the Expanse series in several books. It returns the focus to the technology and other clues left behind by the Godlike species that sent the proto-molecule to the solar system, of their unknown killers who still linger, and of men who would re-engineer the human race. But the authors are also deft at depicting the rest of humanity, as they take baby steps into the wide reaches of the galaxy to homestead it, aided by the wormholes of the “roads” left behind by the “Roman” proto-molecule engineers. There is a renewed emphasis on minor characters, who are beneficial to the plot, and interesting, too. There is even a happy ending (sort of a “puttin’ the band back together”). Fans of the Expanse series will enjoy Tiamat immensely. For those who read the first book or two, they can jump right back in and enjoy: it has that same feeling, renewed.
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The tarot deck and the interpretation of tarot share key characteristics of a computer database: storage, access and organization. In particular, the organization of a given tarot card into discreet pieces of information (such as the name) and the collections of multiple discreet pieces of information (the symbols) mirror the flexibility of the data structures in a modern computer database.
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