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 […]
Category archives: Computing
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 […]
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 […]
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. […]
The problem with renaming a model in Rails
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. Suppose you have model Foo, which you want to modify (e.g. add a column). So […]
Renaming a model in Rails
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 controller (if required) Modify routes.rb Modify any links in views. Rename views. Rename the model […]
2 years of the iMac
After 2 years of using the iMac, what do I think of it? Hardware After 2 years I’m really quite happy with the Mac. Hardware-wise, the Mac itself has been fine. The only negatives are that there is a speck of dust behind the screen glass. I don’t feel like taking the iMac apart, and […]