Category Archives: Computing

Better broadband for north Powys – part 2

Posted on January 8, 2020 by hmallett

Following my previous post about better broadband for north Powys, I tried to do some initial investigation on Facebook to see if this was something that would have enough interest to investigate further. I posted on local pages, mainly for … Continue reading →

Posted in B4RM, Computing | 2 Comments

Ruby and Ruby on Rails version compatibility

Posted on August 11, 2018 by hmallett

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 … Continue reading →

Posted in Rails | 1 Comment

Better broadband for North Powys

Posted on August 11, 2017 by hmallett

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 … Continue reading →

Posted in B4RM, Computing | 1 Comment

Starting out alone in Information Security and IT consultancy

Posted on February 16, 2015 by hmallett

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 … Continue reading →

Posted in Business, Computing, Information Security | Leave a comment

BitTorrent Magnet links for FreeBSD

Posted on February 14, 2013 by hmallett

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 … Continue reading →

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Installing sqlite3 ruby gem on FreeBSD

Posted on December 3, 2011 by hmallett

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: … Continue reading →

Posted in FreeBSD | 4 Comments

Netgear DGN1000 review

Posted on August 25, 2011 by hmallett

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 … Continue reading →

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My Ideal Operating System

Posted on January 27, 2011 by hmallett

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, … Continue reading →

Posted in Computing, FreeBSD, Windows | Leave a comment

The problem with renaming a model in Rails

Posted on January 12, 2011 by hmallett

So you’ve decided to rename a model in Rails. What could be simpler than renaming and editing a bunch of files? You make your edits in development, run migrations and so on. There’s a potential issue you might hit though. … Continue reading →

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Renaming a model in Rails

Posted on November 1, 2010 by hmallett

When renaming a model in Rails (2.3), there are a range of files you may need to change: Create a migration to rename the database table: (rename_table :oldname, :newname) Rename the model. Edit any associations in other models. Rename the … Continue reading →

Posted in Rails | 1 Comment