Blog

  • replacer.vim and 2021 updates (0 comments)

    Published 3rd January 2022 at 01:31am UTC

    The last twelve months have probably been the busiest I've ever been so I haven't had time to post much lately. Hopefully I'll make up for that this year as things settle down somewhat.


    replacer.vim


    First things first, I made a vim plugin called replacer.vim whilst I was in between jobs and forgot to tell anyone about it. I needed a way to find and replace words within files and filenames in a given folder for another project I was working on. Because...

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  • I heard a rumour that you hate Wordpress (0 comments)

    Published 24th August 2020 at 12:38am UTC

    I started writing this post the week before last when I was having...a bit of a weird weekend. Wasn't sure if I should post it as it's mostly just me complaining and swearing.


    But it's been a while since I've posted anything so I figure, why not?


    So I've been a little busy lately, mostly with my 9-5. I don't want to jinx it but...I actually like working at FutureLearn. My colleagues are pretty cool, the engineering department strikes me as really thoughtful. The work doesn't make me want to die inside.


    Outside of work, I'...

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  • Using QuillJS with Rails 6 (20 comments)

    Published 3rd May 2020 at 04:45pm UTC

    As alluded to in my previous post, I've run into a few difficulties since writing my last technical piece. I recently upgraded the version of Ruby on Rails on the site to version 6. Obviously, it's good practice to keep your application dependencies up-to-date so upgrading provided me with an excuse to do this but in all honesty, Rails 6's major selling point for me was ...

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  • Coronavirus and its heroes (0 comments)

    Published 19th April 2020 at 06:39pm UTC

    Due to technical difficulties, it's been a while since my last post. I've been meaning to write something about code but honestly it didn't seem right to do that without acknowledging the state the country is in right now. So this'll be a short post where I attempt to do something to that effect albeit, a little later perhaps than others have.


    I want to take a moment to pay tribute to all of the NHS staff who've risked their lives during the coronavirus pandemic. They've been failed by the Tory government and by

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  • `relation "action_text_rich_texts" does not exist` in CircleCI (2 comments)

    Published 8th January 2020 at 05:50pm UTC

    Another short post about obscure errors. Ran into this weirdness yesterday/this morning:

    rake aborted!
ActiveRecord::StatementInvalid: PG::UndefinedTable: ERROR:  relation "action_text_rich_texts" does not exist
LINE 8:  WHERE a.attrelid = '"action_text_rich_texts"'::regclass


    Just came out of nowhere.


    Everything I found online seemed to suggest that I simply needed to run the relevant migration or install ActionText again...


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  • "Could not find Firefox binary" in CircleCI (0 comments)

    Published 6th January 2020 at 04:48am UTC

    This'll be a quick-ish post as I haven't finished researching the Rails post that I actually wanted to write for this week.


    Ever gotten this error before?

    Could not find Firefox binary (os=linux).
Make sure Firefox is installed or set the
path manually with Selenium::WebDriver::Firefox::Binary.path=


    This dude saw it in

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  • Selenium, Tor and New Years Resolutions (6 comments)

    Published 22nd December 2019 at 06:37am UTC

    Every year I tell myself that I'll get serious about blogging. Every year, I start a post - sometimes two - crappy little drafts that I never get round to finishing. Something's always in the way. I think I'll aim for something shorter from now on. Shorter posts, more frequent.

    I could talk about some of the awful (and in one case dangerous) people I had to deal with at my last job. That job isn't listed in my "about" page at the moment because I haven't had time to update the site.

    Since I left RPS, I've

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  • How to use a WD MyCloud (0 comments)

    Published 5th January 2019 at 06:39am UTC

    So it's been forever since I last wrote a blog post. To be honest, I'm not overly fond of duplication and so have difficulty coming up with novel topics to write about that won't just add to the noise of endless self-promotion that we're already to exposed to on the internet. But you know, whilst we're on the subject of duplication, I recently discovered the power of NAS backups something like six years later than everyone else in tech and thought it'd be cool to document how I got my WD MyCloud drive to work for me.

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  • The Seed Controversy (0 comments)

    Published 10th April 2016 at 07:39pm UTC

    In the Rails community there is some controversy over where to put seed data. Best practice advises that these are placed in the db/seeds.rb file within a Rails application, which is great if all you want to do is run rake db:seed once throughout the entire life of your application or are ok with deleting everything in your database should you ever have to run the rake db:seed command again.

    So far, so terrible.

    Many Rubyists have opted to place seed data in their migration files so as to avoid this issue. This is however,

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