Rick Gouin

Author: Rick Gouin

New WordPress Theme

· Rick Gouin
Logo for the Polar Wave wordpress theme

Its been almost 3 years since I updated the theme on this website.  You can see the article about that here.  At the time, I didn’t want to spend any time on it at all, so I just found the quickest and easiest theme to implement with minimal changes.  I never really liked the theme, it lacked some features I wanted, and had a lot of wasted space. Even though I am VERY MUCH a back-end sort of developer, I decided to create my own theme from scratch, which is what you are looking at now!  I call it “Polar […]

OutOfTheLoopAI Release

· Rick Gouin

Everyone who has used an AI chatbot knows that it can be a very iterative process.  One approach to integrating AI into workflows is called “Human In The Loop”, which describes an approach that uses a human as part of the process to achieve better outcomes.  What if we could take the human out of the loop?  Why not replace the human in the loop with another AI? To test out this theory, OutOfTheLoopAI was born. What does it do? OutOfTheLoopAI is a PHP script that creates a standalone webpage where you can setup conversations between different AI systems.  You […]

AI Writing Style Detector Release

· Rick Gouin

AI has a certain style of writing.  We can’t always put our fingers on it, but we can often spot the influence of AI in written communication. I recently had a discussion with a friend who is an engineering professor, and I can see their concern as it relates to AI.  On the one hand, you want students to develop certain skills.  On the other hand, you don’t want to create another “You’ll never have a calculator in your pocket” scenario that everyone will call up as a failure of your course for years to come. How to find the […]

CCSP Exam Thoughts

· Rick Gouin

I took the Certified Cloud Security Professional (CCSP) exam from ISC2 a while back and wanted to share a few thoughts.  As you may be aware, both the CISSP and CCSP exams are managed by the same organization: ISC2.  After getting my CISSP in June of 2022, I started looking for another certification to tackle over the winter.  At that time, I had some AWS certifications that were expiring, and I was annoyed that AWS didn’t provide any way to maintain them other than to just re-take the same exam again.  I can see re-taking an exam when there are […]

CISSP Exam Thoughts

· Rick Gouin

I took the CISSP exam a while back and wanted to share a few thoughts.  I’ve long been a security practitioner, going back to my teenage years attending local 2600 meetings.  I got my Security+ back in 2004.  Yikes!  With the current ransomware driven technology climate, it seemed like high time to put some effort into that part of my background.  I’d say my primary interest was to validate my credibility when speaking at events or directly helping organizations deal with present day security challenges. About The Certified Information Systems Security Professional (CISSP) is an advanced security related certification managed […]

PowerStore 3.5 Gets Real Immutable Snapshots and More

· Rick Gouin

The latest code update for the Dell PowerStore (Dell’s Flagship Midrange Storage Array) adds a few cool new features that I think provide some additional value for people who are already using it.  Most of the details were released at Dell World 2023 in Las Vegas.  Several of the new features are focused around cyber security, so I want to take a moment to look at those features in particular. Immutable Snapshots I’m going to start with my favorite one.  Truly immutable snapshots.  Dell has long maintained that PowerStore snapshots were already immutable, such as in this article.  If that […]

Adding Status LEDs to Our Email Button Device

· Rick Gouin

After putting this email button device into service, I discovered that I really wanted some instant feedback to know if the email was sent successfully or not.  I decided to add some LEDs into the mix that would illuminate on success or failure. At left you can see a mock up of a version that used one LED.  You could use a single LED and have it perhaps blink of success or stay lit on failure.  You could also do a single LED build with an RGB LED.  I elected to build this with 2 separate LEDs, so that success […]

Build A Device To Send Emails At the Push of a Button

· Rick Gouin

I had a need for a device that would send an email at the push of a button.  I also needed it to send a different email when I push a different button.  My use case here is related to a Homeowners Association (HOA) that requires me to “check-in” on arrival and “check-out” on departure.  In this case, that is done via email.  So, I wanted a device with a “check-in” button and a separate “check-out” button, so I could just push those buttons to satisfy the requirements.  The the finished product is shown at left. What Does This Project […]

Website Overhaul

· Rick Gouin

I had to update my website today.  I’m definitely a function over form person, and I don’t care much for frontend development.  I thought the old design was fine, but I was running an abandoned theme that was no longer being updated.  While I was looking around to see if anyone still supported my old theme, I came across this site which showed what must be some of the few remaining sites using it.  2 of their 12 sample sites were me – not a good sign! Why did I have to upgrade? I run my own webserver in AWS […]

Perform Data Conversions in Windows Calculator

· Rick Gouin
calculator

I don’t know about you, but in my line of work, we frequently have to convert between various data measurements.  Whether this is storage capacity or network throughput, we convert between TB, TiB, GB, GiB, and others every day.  If you visit my calculators page, you’ll even find a converter I wrote available there.  Believe it or not, I actually used that converter sometimes… until today, when I was shown this tip: Windows Calculator can do these conversions right out of the box! First, what are we talking about? Ever notice how if you buy a 1 TB hard drive, […]