Blog

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 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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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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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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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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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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Hi again. This will be a short-to-medium length post as I really just wanna save people the annoyance that I had to go through when I installed this earlier.

For those who don't know ExpressVPN is a privacy tool used to hide a user's IP address and encrypt network traffic. It's not the best VPN around but it does the job when you need it to. Installing ExpressVPN on Debian-based systems is really straightforward as they have an official Ubuntu package and tons of do...

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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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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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