The Good Samaritan Principle

Sometimes a quick consultation with Professor Google or Doctor Bing just doesn’t bring you any satisfaction - and you end up having to work.

Richard Dingwall suggests that when this happens, you should consider blogging about the issue, sharing your experience so that others can benefit. (In many ways, this is a capsule description of all human progress!)

Blog about your problem - and its solution if

  • It took you more than 2 hours to solve;
  • and you didn’t find the answer in Google
  • or you did find the answer by searching but it took you an hour to find it.

This is the Good Samaritan Principle - and here are some of my (often offtopic) posts.

Browsers and WSL

Sunday, March 31 2024 good-samaritan

The integration between the Windows Subsystem for Linux (aka WSL) and Windows works spectacularly most of the time, but occasionally things get a little troublesome. One such case was a change in browser behaviour that I noticed recently after upgrading to a new laptop.

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A bash puzzle, solved

Saturday, July 02 2022 good-samaritan

When we finished last time, I’d just run a simple bash script with some surprising output.

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A bash puzzle

Saturday, June 25 2022 good-samaritan

Here’s a bit of a puzzle - all of the clues in this post, and the answer will follow in the next one. It starts with trying to write a simple bash script to create an Azure Resource Group.

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Fixing Azure DevOps Pipeline Build error NU1604

Saturday, May 18 2019 good-samaritan

I had an interesting problem updating my GherkinSyntax project when my Azure DevOps Pipeline builds started failing with error NU1604. Local builds worked fine, only the cloud builds were failing.

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Bootstrap Image ratios Fix

Saturday, April 27 2019 good-samaritan

While developing the website for Code Camp Wellington 2019, I ran into an odd problem - the images for our organizing team were being squished on narrow format screens.

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Older posts

Assembly binding redirects for the fail  02 Dec 2017
High CPU Usage by Windows Update on Windows RT  04 Jun 2017
Finding source code in .NET Core  10 May 2017
FTP, Unicode and the inconvenient bug  28 Jun 2014
Endless loop accepting new Xbox Live Terms  30 Dec 2013
Fixing Share to Mail App  13 Apr 2013
Of Google Calendar and my Phone  29 Jun 2012
When Live Mesh fails  19 Nov 2011
Code Analysis failure  11 Nov 2011
Sometimes, the answer is simple  25 Jan 2010
The "Good Samaritan" Principle  12 Oct 2009
A Drupal Views "Date Trap"  19 Jul 2009