MUMPS Programming

MUMPS Programming Language Snippets

Recently I had cause to learn something about the now somewhat elderly programming language MUMPS (“Massachusetts General Hospital Utility Multi-Programming System”), also sometimes known just as M. It’s a very different type of language to modern programming languages, and at first somewhat cryptic. However, with a little persistence, it was intriguing to write a few simple programs.

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Perl Programming

Perl Programming – Bubble Sort a String

After getting familiar with the syntax of a language, performing little challenges – such as sorting a list of items – is often the next thing one might try. So, although I’d previously lots of Perl experience, having focused on other things for a while I was decidedly rusty, and decided to reactivate my Perl braincells, and write a little program to bubble sort a string in Perl. 

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Microsoft WSL

WSL2 – Apache with Named Local Hosts

WSL2 (Windows Subsystem for Linux, version 2) is a great piece of software for all kinds of useful reasons. For one it means you don’t need to have a separate Linux machine to develop on, and it also avoids you needing to install a VM using Oracle VM VirtualBox or Hyper-V, for example. Plus, it’s easy to set up and for most things is probably as close as you’ll need to working on a Linux machine, while still using your trusty Windows machine.

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Perl Programming

Perl – One-liner to Get Local IP Address, No Modules

The code in this post will enable you to identify your system’s local IP address and put it into a variable for your further use. I specifically did this to identify the IP address on a Ubuntu WSL2 instance (i.e. Windows Subsystem for Linux), but it should work on any machine. As anyone familiar with WSL2 will know, unlike prior versions of WSL, WSL2 doesn’t keep a static IP address, which can be a pain, and provides a new one on each startup. So, being able to identify the newly allocated IP at startup can be quite handy.

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Microsoft Windows

How to Hide the Windows Taskbar

If you’re fed up with all of those little icons staring back at you from the Windows Taskbar, eyeing your every move, or if maybe you want an extra half-inch of screen real-estate, then it’s really simple to just hide the Windows taskbar, and then have it appear as you need it. You can do this is in about five seconds or less. I’ll show you how.

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Windows 10

Windows 10: Remove the Weather Widget from Taskbar

If you’re one of the masses who craves for a weather-widget-free taskbar in Windows 10, then help is at hand. Here I’m going to show you how you can quickly turn off that annoying weather widget/gadget in the Windows 10 taskbar. I’m not quite sure why this weather thingy (widget? gadget? feature?) bothers me so much, but I really don’t care for it being there, taking up space and smirking at me all day long!

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Microsoft Azure

Microsoft Azure – Adding Additional Public IP Addresses

The cloud services offered by Microsoft Azure, Google, and Amazon (AWS) are incredibly useful and powerful. However, there is a learning curve to using any of these services, and to a novice the complexity may seem somewhat overwhelming and confusing. One such common task, which may cause confusion or frustration, is adding an additional public IP address to your Azure virtual machine (VM). Here’s how to do it.

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