The Problem Chat tools are great for being able to work remotely, at least until you get bombarded by one chat after another. I’ve often wondered if I could come up with a way to track who my chats are with and how much time was spent chatting with each person. My initial attempts involved […]
Author Archives: ThomasPowell
Removing a Broken Headphone Plug from an iPhone
Broken Headphone Plug and iPhone. 😱 The headphone jack is a pretty key port for anyone not on an iPhone 7 or later, so a broken headphone plug shoved in the jack renders a phone pretty much useless. It’s also too small a space for needle nose pliers. So what do you do if something […]
Dyson DC 40 Shuts Down from Overheating
This is the second time in about a month that my Dyson DC 40 has shut down from overheating. The symptoms start with loss of suction from the head assembly (leaving dust bunny trails, etc.) while the hose end still had good suction. I started out by disassembling the head unit and cleaning out the […]
rspec-rails tricks: Hacking Your Routes for a Spec
I don’t know that this is so much a reminder of “What can be done with rspec-rails” as a note that, “If you do this will rspec-rails, you will also need to undo it.” Today’s note: If you hack the application routes for a controller test, you have to reload routes. The original problem This […]
Apache Crashing with PHP 7 Enabled after High Sierra Upgrade
Upgrading (partially) for a System PHP 7 I finally got around to upgrading to High Sierra, which has PHP 7 as a system PHP instead of PHP 5.6. As part of that upgrade, my quick hacks of httpd-vhosts.conf for a couple of small projects had disappeared, since bringing up those virtual hosts would bring up […]
2017 Year in Review
January Pigeon Forge field trip as chaperone Pinewood Derby February Double Bridge Run Manatees Mardi Gras Parade in Pensacola March New Pergola New Patio New Piano Trip to Louisville to meet Poland team New beds April Mad Violin Blueberry Festival May Wife quit job Savannah to OBX June Lighthouses Sea Catchers Dan TDM in Jacksonville […]
IntelliJ Spring MVC @RequestMapping Not Registering
I’ve been trying to reintroduce myself to Spring MVC @RequestMapping and working with Java in IntelliJ after 5 years away from Java and having primarily used Netbeans for any development. My last experience with Java was with Netbeans helping manage a Maven build. I had my @RequestMapping annotations set up, and IntelliJ is launching Tomcat […]
Multiple Postgres Schemas and Rails db:test:prepare
In our Rails databases, we use multiple Postgres schemas. This is partly for partitioning archive data from fresh data. On a new Rails 5 project, I started having tests fail once the models had the “archivable” concern added, which depended on an archive schema existing. Ultimately, the problem is that the archive schema wasn’t being […]
Postgres 9.4 via Homebrew on macOS
I needed to run an old version of Postgres in order to be supported by the version of Rails I was working with, and I had a new Mac with High Sierra installed. Found out after a bit of “Why doesn’t this postgres formula link its executables?” that it was precisely because of the age […]
Go Concurrency Benchmarking on a Raspberry Pi
In hindsight, no one claimed that a Raspberry Pi of any model was a powerhouse machine. However, I had thoughts about how to benchmark computing power after leaving Dreamhost and noticing that even tar and gzipping my WordPress installs performed like an ancient machine despite the processor statistics. That made me think about a raw […]