Author: tor

Could you make parking more complex?

From a parking lot in Hailsham – these 4 signs are posted 10 metres apart – and to put it mildly – making it very difficult to find out if you have to pay if you go to the restaurant. 

It’s also seriously next to impossible for anyone to read the poster in the top image, as it’s place to far off the road surface and printed in too small fonts for anyone to read everything on the poster.

Serioussly – I assume the comapny behind the green posters is called “Your Parking Space” – they need to improve on this.

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Interest 0 Spark and AI

I have been a long term user of Spark – and I am even a subscriber to their paid-for version.

This was released yesterday – and I look forward to playing with it to see if it can live up to the hype in a real user setting :

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Categorised as email

Pricing is relative

We talk a lot about “cost of living” in the UK, and energy pricing is often used as the example.

An example from Octpus

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A spot example from Norway this week

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For ease of reading – 0.24 NOK is about 0.024GBP.

And Norwegians are complaining about the pricing and cost of living as well.

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Categorised as Norway

Karma

While cycling down to Waterloo station I passed Buckingham Palace, and as the cycle lane light was red I pulled in behind the wating policeman on his bike.

The guy on the rigth decide to ignore the red light and the police, and cycled on, shortly pursued by the police.

The second picture is him arguing with the poiice – which I feel is a lost cause, and rather stupid.

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Categorised as karma

Rekindling my love of all things Ruby

Ruby on Rails (RoR) used to be one of the favourite frameworks for rapidly creating very coomplex websites. But RoR and Ruby has fallen out of favour with the majority of developers – at least until now.

Ruby 3 has been launched, as is back faster and better than ever, and on top of this Ruby on Rails version 7 was released, taking into account learnings from the best of the web development from the last 5-10 years.

I have always loved Ruby for UI-less programming, enjoying its flexibility to write the kind of software I enjoy writing, and I “feel” the momentum building to a place where I may be able to recommend Ruby to the kind of companies I work with and consult for.

A couple of weeks ago I got annoyed with the lack of good backend for a project I have been working on, and decided to see what I could do with RoR. And lo and behold I managed to crank out something that was reasonably good looking, fast and functional in one afternoon and evening.

Ok – this was not super complex, except for using MongoDb Serverless at the backend – which it looks like very few RoR/Ruby developers have embraced this so far, leading to a fairly steep curve when I movef from my locally hosted “standard” MongoDb installation to MongoDb Serverless running on Atlas. But I cracked it yesterday, and I must say I enjoy it.

MongoDb Serverless is extremely cost effective for development teams and Proof of Concept (POC) development – more about this in a later post.

But so far I’m inpressed by the combination or Rails and MongoDb Serverless.

Going to the boat (Not)

Yesterday morning (Sunday) I drove up to the marina our boat is moored in to do some updates and repairs – but when I turned on to our pontoon this was the sight that met me :

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The whole end of the pontoon our boat is moored at was a crimescene! I was (politely) turned away, and had to drive home.

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Categorised as Boat

Docker and Synology – routing

For anyone that is using Synology NAS and is running applications in Docker you already know that Synologys visual interface to mnage Docker is less than perfect, and you have to dive into using the Terminal and issue commands there if you want to get anywhere.

One of the problems I originally was accessing any ports on the Synology NAS itself from any Docker container, and finding a solution was time consuming. It turns out to be simple compared to most solutions I could find on the Internet.

 

Go to the Synology Control panel -> Network -> General ->Advanced settings and turn off “Enable Multiple Gateways”

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