Pragmatic IT

IT Infrastructure and Software Development from the Customer's Perspective

Raspberry Pi

I recently bought some Raspberry Pi 4s to use as VPN end-points. Here’s my notes from the build:
Converting HTML Jekyll Pages to Markdown

I had never gotten around to converting the majority of my posts to Markdown after I moved my blog from Blogspot.
Sprockets 4, or Rails Assets Missing

At some point upgrading an existing Rails application, you’re going to pull in Sprockets 4. (Not the sprockets-rails gem. The actual sprockets gem.) At this point, your assets will probably fail to compile.
Changing Fonts on Linux Fillable PDF Forms

I was trying to fill out the Canadian passport renewal form on my Ubuntu 16.04 laptop. I was able to enter data into the fields just fine, but the font that was displayed after I left each field was almost unreadable.

Switching to Headless Chrome for Rails System Tests

I recently switched a Rails 5.1 application’s system tests from Capybara, Poltergeist, and PhantomJS, to Capybara, Selenium, and headless Chrome. We run the development and test environments of the application on a Vagrant box running Ubuntu 16.04 server.

Tips for System Testing With Capybara

One of the great challenges of system testing applications is the fact that there are two (or more) independent processes: One to run the test script. The other to run the browser. The actions in the test script and the actions as performed by the browser and the back end, are not necessarily synchronized the way they are in unit or controller tests.
Changing IP of Brother Scanner Under Linux

We had a power outage this week. Some devices on my home network got new IP addresses when the power came back on. One of the devices that got a new IP address was my Brother MFC-9340CDW printer/scanner/fax. The printer was still working fine, but I couldn’t scan.
Disabling Warnings and Autocorrect in Rubocop

I finally found how to disable Rubocop messages and auto-correction on a file or individual line basis.
Enterprise Challenges to Continuous Delivery

On one of my recent projects I noticed a challenge to a continuous delivery (CD) approach in the enterprise that I haven’t seen mentioned: Software that requires a paid license.

Configuring Applications

I once had experience with a browser-based application that would show pages that were links to another application. Since the URL of the other application would change depending on the environment (development, test, staging, production, etc.), the developers decided to put the URL in a field in a row in a configuration table in the database.

Archive