I have recently been planning upgrades for an application which runs on both an old version of Ruby on Rails and an old version of Ruby. The recommended upgrade path for rails is to upgrade through each version, rather than try and jump several versions in one go. I.e 3.2 to 4.0 to 4.1 to […]
Author archives: hmallett
Better broadband for North Powys
I’ve lived in Powys for 10 years, and I’ve always had good broadband, as I live only 200 metres from the telephone exchange. This means that I’ve got used to being able to watch Netflix, stream music, backup devices to the cloud, FaceTime people and work from home, connecting back to work. Many people in […]
VAT registration and the flat rate
Disclaimer: I’m not an accountant, this is not tax advice, this contains assumptions and simplifications. Also, apologies to the accountants I know for mangling accounting theories and terms. When the time comes to register for VAT, there are two schemes available to register for: The standard VAT scheme, and the flat rate VAT scheme. The […]
Starting out alone in Information Security and IT consultancy
After 10 years with my previous employer I was made redundant at the end of January. Rather than rush straight to the job boards in a state of panic, I’m looking at this as an opportunity. For several years I have considered Information Security and IT consultancy as a career path, but never been in a […]
BitTorrent Magnet links for FreeBSD
Since the FreeBSD torrent tracker has been taken offline, and it appears that it won’t be coming back, you may be able to use a magnet link, so here they are. Each magnet link announces to three public trackers, to try and increase the size of the swarm. Current FreeBSD versions FreeBSD-7.4-RELEASE-amd64-all FreeBSD-7.4-RELEASE-amd64-bootonly FreeBSD-7.4-RELEASE-amd64-disc1 FreeBSD-7.4-RELEASE-amd64-disc2 […]
Installing sqlite3 ruby gem on FreeBSD
If you try to install (or update) the sqlite3 ruby gem on FreeBSD, you might get the following error: sudo gem update sqlite3 Updating installed gems Updating sqlite3 Fetching: sqlite3-1.3.5.gem (100%) Building native extensions. This could take a while… ERROR: Error installing sqlite3: ERROR: Failed to build gem native extension. /usr/local/bin/ruby18 extconf.rb checking for sqlite3.h… […]
Netgear DGN1000 review
After an intermittent failure of my previous ADSL router, I thought long and hard about whether I could justify spending many hundreds of pounds on a nice Cisco 1800, I decided to go cheap and buy a bottom-of-the-range Netgear. After all, I’d had Netgear routers in the past, with few problems. So I bought the […]
Daily Mail corrects incorrect facts, but not the biggest ones
The BEA released a briefing about the loss of Air France flight 447 today. The flight involved a descent of 3 minutes 30 seconds, during which the aircraft was stalled. All 228 on board lost their lives. The briefing specifically says the engines were operating and always responded to crew commands. Earlier in the day, […]
To the Daily Mail – people in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones
The Daily Mail try to have a laugh at the expense of The Independent in this article. The article points out that on The Independent’s site you can alter the URL as long as you retain the article number. Of course, The Independent “were embarrassed”. Ho ho, we’re The Daily Mail, other newspapers aren’t as […]
My Ideal Operating System
What would my ideal Operating System look like? Really small minimal installation. You know, like OpenBSD. Thorough and comprehensive help pages. You know, like OpenBSD. The ability to simply administer the OS remotely. You now, like SSH on OpenBSD. Excellent, easy to configure firewall. You know, like pf on OpenBSD. Easy to configure network redundancy. […]