30Apr 2025 by Grant Fritchey No Comments

So You Think You Should Get a Radio

Misc
This is not database related, so if you're not interested in hearing about something besides SQL Server, PostgreSQL, DevOps, community or data management in general, time to move on. Figured I'd just let you know up front. In the last year there have been several very large scale emergency events, examples include Hurrican Helene in the US and yesterday's massive power outage in Spain, Portugal and France. There have been others as well. Before I go further, my heart goes out to all the people affected in Europe. I hope no one was too hurt by the outage and you all recover quickly. What's been somewhat unique in all these cases is that cel phone services have gone out, on a massive scale. Which means everyone is cut off, and…
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11Apr 2025 by Grant Fritchey 2 Comments

Using AI for Data Conversion

Tools
I'm sure I've never mentioned that I'm an amateur radio operator. Like Vegans and Cross Fitters, we tend to be shy and withdrawn about our predilections. BWA-HA-HA! Ok, like Vegans and Cross Fitters, you can't get a ham to shut up about playing radio. Anyhoo, I've been experimenting with a brand new, and somewhat buggy, radio, the Baofeng DM-32UV. I'm writing this blog post about how I am using an AI for data conversion to make it a little easier to use this radio. The Problem The DM-32 is a Digital Mobile Radio (DMR) as well as an analog radio. You can follow the link to understand all that DMR represents when talking radios. I want to focus on the fact that you have to program the behaviors into a…
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22Jul 2019 by Grant Fritchey No Comments

Importance of Testing

DevOps
I've always said if you're running a script for the first time in a production environment, you're doing it wrong. Testing is fundamental to technology, yet it is one of the single most frequently skipped processes. Let's talk about this a moment. Developing in Production Through my work, I travel quite a bit. That means I get to meet a lot of different people with varying circumstances on their systems. I've even met someone who did all their development directly in production. Why? They ran a software that ran an assembly line. There wasn't a test assembly line. Oh yeah, they had checks and validations that all their inputs and outputs were valid prior to ever putting the code into production. However, they had no mechanisms, of any kind, for…
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