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Assets precompile without a database in Rails 4 and 5
The other day I had a request from my IT guy. He asked: “Hey, can you make rails not connect to the database when running assets precompile?” I said sure… So why would we need to run a precompile without db connection? Well, for one thing, we are deploying to gcloud. For our current set…
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Kubuntu made me love linux on my surface again
I have been using Ubuntu Gnome for a long time. Then ubuntu decided to ditch unity for Gnome, at first I thought this was great news. When Ubuntu 18.04 came along, I eagerly installed ubuntu in my surface pro 3. from the get-go things weren’t smooth. Something happened during the install that broke everything and…
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Special Character Macros in DP2
Due to encoding limitation in DP2, sometimes it is better to replace some common special characters by their macro equivalent. Here is a list of some of the most common ones:
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College pranks. A clear example of why you shouldn’t marginalize knowledge
A friend on mine tells the next story from his college days. Apart from being hilarious, I think it is a great example of why knowledge should not be marginalized but instead embraced. I preface this with: I’ve never been a hard-core programmer, certainly wasn’t Matthew Brokerick in War Games, but I had a trouble-maker’s…
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Surface Pro 3 no longer needs custom linux kernel
Good news! As of Ubuntu 16.04 and linux kernel 4.5, there is no need to create a custom kernel for the SP3. Most things work right away except for the touch pad that needs to be enabled by editing the following file sudo nano /usr/share/X11/xorg.conf.d/10-evdev.conf and adding this to the end Section “InputClass” Identifier “Surface…
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Calculate the Size of Base64.strict_encode64 in Ruby
I was in need to calculate the size of the output of Base64.strict_encode64. I wanted to get this value to determine if the file was too big to send to an API endpoint. If the file was too big I didn’t want to spend time processing and trying to send the data. So I put…
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Build Linux Kernel 4.2.0 for Surface Pro 3
Ubuntu got updated to 15.10 and along came an updated kernel My previous post will not work with the provided patches so I had to apply the code changes by hand and then roll out my own patch. Assumptions You have followed the instructions on this post replace with version 15.10 Installed Ubuntu or Ubuntu…
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Invoking a Rake Multitask in a loop
I am running selenium tests that I launch using a rake task. Recently I wanted to run a bunch on them concurrently every so often. The problem I ran into immediately, was that the tasks were only executed once. It turns out that, when calling a multitask multiple times, you not only have to .reenable…
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Building and installing a patched ubuntu kernel for the surface pro 3
Some of you have been asking for this tutorial so I hope this is easy to follow. I am sort of repeating the instructions here Assumptions You have followed the instructions on this post Installed Ubuntu or Ubuntu Gnome 15.04 Will be using an Ubuntu machine to perform the following steps. I recommend a faster…
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Dual boot Gnome Ubuntu 15.04 on a Surface Pro 3
update 6: I have rolled a new kernel surface-pro-3-linux-kernel-4.2.0-34.40 Good news everyone! the latest version of Ubuntu 15.04 works really good with the Surface Pro 3 Things that immediately work The TypeCover Keyboard The TypeCover backlight can be adjusted by pressing F1 and F2 The mute button in the TypeCover F3 works The WiFi is…