Hello, I'm Mark Fischer. I am a Digital Experience Architect at ArcBest.
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I’ve been learning Hungarian for a little over a month now. Due to being busy in real-life, I didn’t create a “Four Weeks of Hungarian” post. It’s also why this post is a week late. I’m going to switch from this structured-series style of post to posting about my journey...
This week I continued to progress in DuoLingo. My goal for this week was to learn definite conjugations of common verbs, but although I made some progress towards that end, I haven’t made as much progress as I had hoped. Instead I spent my past week drilling my understanding of...
It has now been 2 weeks since I started learning Hungarian. In the past week I’ve used DuoLingo daily, attended a group Zoom lesson, and I attended a private Hungarian lesson last night. I’ve also done independent research into different aspects of the language that interest me, as they come...
Today marks my first ever 7 day streak in DuoLingo. I have attempted to learn Hungarian before, but apparently not for 7 days in a row. During the past week I’ve learned some basic phrases and greetings, some of the basic grammar for the present tense singular, and I have...
Jó napot! ¶ I have decided to finally make a serious attempt at learning Hungarian. I will be trying to blog in Hungarian occasionally, and then posting the English translation in the second half of the post. ¶ Also, in case anyone is curious, I am using the Hungarian 101-key keyboard layout....
There was once a young lady named Bella Who fancied herself at Coachella She wanted a blog post Instead got a blog roast I don’t know how to end this poem wella. ¶
I have finally tried another refill with my Sharpie pen that I think is much similar to the original. The refill is a Schmidt 6040 FineLiner Fiber Tip Metal Refill M. I wish they made a Fine version, but this is close enough. It doesn’t bleed, and feels similar to...
Over the past couple days I have been converting the authentication and authorization method on an existing MVC website to use Auth0, an OpenID provider. During the process of converting the website’s login and logout routines I ran into an issue where no matter what the website would redirect to...
Backstory ¶ If you have owned a Sharpie Stainless Steel Pen, you will know two things. The first thing you’ll know is that it is the most perfect pen ever invented and no other pen will ever compare. The second thing you’ll know, or find out, is that both the pen...
Imagine walking into a new grocery store. What are the first things you notice? Maybe it’s the dim fluorescent lights. Maybe it’s the sound of low quality music on a lower quality speaker, quiet enough that you can’t tell what’s playing, loud enough that you can’t ignore it. ¶ As you...
Ran into a fun little bug with the Visual Studio Team Explorer widget today. I clicked “check in” as usual, and was met with this error: “Value was either too large or too small for a UINT32”. Turns out what that error actually means is that one of the files...
I’ve started implementing automated testing on a project I’m working on using MSTest and Selenium. I’ve run into several issues that I couldn’t find answers for online so I thought I’d document my findings here. ¶ Creating the test project ¶ Create the project using the “Unit Test” template in Visual Studio....
Some poetry I’ve written in the past couple months. ¶ Morning ¶ Soft and warm The golden paths And shadows On the carpet. ¶ Quiet footsteps, It’s morning And the baby’s Still asleep. ¶ Loss ¶ Milky, fuzzy, sweet and soft The odor still remains entombed 'Til mother lifting up the cloth Escapes the scent...
I used the HTML5 notification API for the first time today, it’s actually much more simple than I expected. There are two functions you need to know about: ¶ // to ask for permission Notification.requestPermission(callback); // to display a notification new Notification(message); Before you actually display the notification, you need to...
It took me a bit of searching, but I finally figured out how to get neosnippet to work with deoplete. The issue is that the deoplete auto-complete trigger is <Tab>, which is also the neosnippet expansion trigger. So we want to change the neosnippet trigger to something else, like <C-k>....
I just came across this excellent L-39C this weekend, and I had to share. Interestingly, the only references to it seem to be in a forum thread on SimOuthouse. To my knowledge, this is the first review ever written for it. ¶ Model ¶ Exterior ¶ The exterior model is very detailed, with...
At risk of sounding like I don’t know what I am talking about, I’m writing this post to document something that most programmers have probably known for a long time, even though I only just discovered it. ¶ Often when programming we may write something like this: ¶ // Checks if user...
I bought a Lenovo X1 Carbon (3rd Generation) to replace my old low-end Toshiba Satellite as my primary development laptop. Overall, I am extremely pleased with the laptop’s build quality and performance. I found the keyboard particularly nice, especially for a chicklet keyboard. ¶ Disassembly ¶ The X1 version I purchased was...
Use this chart to decide your first programming language. Hey, come back! I was just making a point. Hello? ¶ For those of you who stayed, charts like this are just about the worst way to choose a programming language. ¶ My Saga ¶ If you don’t want to read the long personal...
This past week I have been making one codepen a day featuring an interesting quote. Here is an example. ¶ See the Pen Quote of the Day - Day 6 (Antoine de Saint-Exupery) by Mark Fischer, Jr (@flyingfisch) on CodePen. ¶ The most challenging part, and the part that spawned the whole...
This is the third of a 3-post series on building a modern website (if you don’t understand the post title, this may help you: the series started with Part 0. Lua developers are excused for not getting the significance.). The demo website is a fictional sailing club’s homepage. This post...
This is the second of a 3-post series on building a modern website. The demo website is a fictional sailing club’s homepage. This post covers the navigation bar and body text. The last part will go over the footer and finishing touches. This is what the site looked like at...
I built a little website that generates Lord of the Rings themed Lorem Ipsum. You can check it out live or view the source on GitHub. ¶ For Geeks ¶ I am hosting the site on a Microsoft Azure Ubuntu 14.04 virtual machine. The setup process for serving Django was pretty straightforward,...
This is the first of a 3-post series series on building a modern website. The demo website is a fictional sailing club’s homepage. This post covers the mockup process and building the header. The next part will go into the navigation bar and body text. ¶ Layout ¶ The first thing I...
Rich Hickey proposed an interesting idea in his keynote at RailsConf 2012. The idea, if I understand correctly, is that if serialization is good between servers as a way to separate concerns, then why don’t we do it between different sections of code on the same server? ¶ Using REST between...
I recently found that the content property can contain cooler stuff than just strings. For instance, you can show the href of a link in a cool popup with absolutely no JS: ¶ content: attr(href); See the Pen Pure CSS link hover popup by flyingfisch (@flyingfisch) on CodePen. ¶ This allows us...
¶ Welcome to my blog. I am a frontend .NET web developer (mainly ASP.net MVC with C#). At home I use Linux exclusively and code in Python, Haskell, PHP (with the excellent Laravel framework), or any other language that fits the bill. ¶ I plan to post about programming mainly, but...