Rick Gouin

Author: Rick Gouin

3 Vibe Coding Lessons I Learned the Hard Way – PART 1

· Rick Gouin

I’ve been writing PHP since 1996, and consider myself a competent developer. At various times, I’ve run some pretty popular open source projects and have written and released a gajillion lines of code, translated into 30+ languages, deployed all over the world. Until a couple months ago, I hadn’t really tried to use AI to generate code. Software development seems to be among the leading use cases for large language models and there are a bunch of high valuation companies doing AI based code generators. I decided it was time to give vibe coding a real chance. I decided that […]

AI Humanizer Release

· Rick Gouin

AI Humanizer is a tool I created to make LLM generated content sound more natural by removing common indicators of AI created text.  The idea is that you can run your AI written documents through the humanizer, and it automatically gives you something that sounds more natural than what you started with. A few months back, in this project, I dove into the detection of AI generated text to see if I could discern LLM and Human created content.  The genesis of that tool was described here.  During that project, I learned a lot about what distinguishes human created text […]

Release: CondoTel WordPress Plugin

· Rick Gouin

Announcing the Release of Condotel A WordPress Plugin for Property & Unit Management I’m excited to announce the release of my first WordPress plugin: Condotel.  Condotel is a lightweight, open-source plugin built especially for homeowners associations (HOAs), condo/hotel hybrids, and rental-unit operators who want an easy way to track stays, check-ins/check-outs, occupancy rates and unit utilization. Many organizations like these are required by law to maintain a register of who is “on-property”.  Condotel provides a legal way to maintain those records while also getting some useful information from it.  The plugin can also be used by anyone who wants to […]

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 […]