What we need is a good bootable live USB stick for Windows. I’ve said this many times over the years, and hacked together things to make that very thing happen, but nothing that worked really well. So when the folks at Spyrus sent me a Windows to Go USB to check out, I was pretty excited.

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I'm often asked this question: "hey, you're a Linux guy right? What Linux should I use? I have this friend who recommends _____ and I want to know what you think?" I usually reply with the same question: what do you want to do? So I decided to make a blog post about it that I can send people to instead.

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You may have heard the term “code smells” lately, it seems its being talked about frequently again. In this short post I’ll explain what they are, and a few of them you may run across.

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A peek at my Virtualization setup that I use to develop software, create courses, and write articles. A detailed step by step, with Debian 9 and VirtualBox.

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All the theory, calculations, and estimations in the world aren’t going to tell you how your website will truly perform under a load. If you’re deploying a new server, or doing any kind of performance enhancements you don’t want to test your results in production. It’s always a good idea to see how your system behaves before your visitors do. To do that, you can use a load testing tool, and here are a few I use quite frequently.

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In less than 5 minutes you can have a real Microsoft SQL Server installed on Ubuntu Linux. Full instructions, and super easy.

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This is a hotfix reccomended for those using Azure Compute Emulator with Visual Studio on Windows 7.

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Let's say you know the thumbprint of a certificate and want to see if it's installed. You can go through and check the properties of each certificate, but it's kind of a pain. You can do it much easier from Powershell.

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I saw an advertisement for dry ice claiming it cools 5 times better than wet ice. Out of curiosity I had to know if this were true, or at the very least see how much better dry ice performs. I thought I’d gather up a Raspberry Pi and some sensors and find out, using some techniques from my Hands on Internet of Things course released recently.

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Recently I found an ORM that I really like: Dapper. It’s small, simple, and fast. It can be useful on even the smallest of projects. Dapper is a simple object mapper for .Net that extends the IDbConnection interface. It contains helpers that execute queries and map results in a very elegant way. The best part is the performance is close enough to plain old SQL that it’s well worth it. It will reduce the amount of code you write as well, by a long shot.

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