pablobm

I have spent almost all my professional career using RSpec to test Ruby code.

Last year I took some time to review my Neovim setup.

.

A quick guide on how to install Calibre in your $HOME directory.

At a recent project, my colleague Oliver Barnes and I were brought in to help with a very slow web app.

- Rhodium. 7 inches of music.

28 February 2025: tweaks to reflect 1st Gen support merged into master branch of alsa-scarlett-gui.

I got a question from a mentee recently, and I quote: How do you improve on talking about how efficient a code is?

10 July 2025: updated final section with answer from RuboCop maintainers.

A happy number.

If you are seeing the error Unable to access CD Drive when trying to play a game on DOSBox, this guide may be able to help you.

A prime number, twins with 41.

HTTP Strict Transport Security, or in short HSTS, is a mechanism that forces web browsers to use secure connections (HTTPS) in order to access websites.

2 × 3 × 7.

If you are using VCR and Selenium Webdriver in your project, there are a couple of common errors that you might see.

A prime number, twins with 43.

So you made some commits with Git, and then you realised that you were not on the correct branch.

This week I was trying to get this Docker-based development environment set up for a project, on macOS.

25 May 2020: did more research, added more detail, changed my recommendation, and linked to the new test site.

Given a test like this one: 1expect(page).to have_css("[data-search-results]") 2click_on "Hide results" 3expect(page).not_to have_css("[data-search-resutls]") # Typo!

11113.

During a mentoring session recently, I had a conversation about using mocks in unit tests: when and how they are appropriate, when I feel they enhance tests, and what I don't like about them.

As part of a larger experiment, I recently played around a bit with CouchDB.

Developing with Ember.js, we are used to dealing with the Store service which many of us associate with Ember Data.

3 + 5 + 7 + 11 + 13 Yttrium Steps Italy Only one left to end the decade

I found myself yak-shaving pretty deeply into a problem today, wondering why Ember was refusing to pluralize the word "beta" as "betas".

The other day I saw this on a pull request: 1start(appointment) <= now && end(appointment) >= now I find this a bit jarring to read and avoid it in my code.

Added the Appendix section on 6 March 2018.

11 June 2018: updated with some errors fixed.

Strontium 22 + 32 + 52 I don't have a Ramanujan at hand, so I'm going to have to leave it at that…

If you are starting out a new webapp using Express on Node.js, do not use express-session unless you really know what you are doing.

Back in early 2016, I ran into a problem while customising a Debian Live CD that I maintain.

There are a few resources online explaining how to reboot a machine using Ansible which didn’t work for me.

I find it funny, how concerts in London tend to run like clockwork.

I ran into the following error this morning, using the Pass utility: 1$ pass -c foo/bar 2gpg: starting migration from earlier GnuPG versions 3gpg: WARNING: server 'gpg-agent' is older than us (2.0.30 < 2.1.21) 4gpg: error: GnuPG agent version "2.0.30"…

You have a float variable, and you want a quick boolean expression to tell if the value has any decimals.

Many years ago, I wrote (bad) code that sent a single marketing email, repeatedly, to addresses in a subscribers list.

If you use a VPN, be aware that it may not be filtering inbound ports.

Updated on 15 October 2017 to support Babel 6.

Permutable, lucky, unique prime Hexagon and Star Human warmth Rubidium My turn

There are too many JavaScript frameworks out there, and I am not a JavaScript expert.

Playing around with GarageBand recently, I had a metal guitar track (a software instrument, not recorded), and I wondered how to make it sound like it was palm muted.

For some time, I had noticed some people taking my name and spelling it as “Bablo”.

The computers where I install Debian Live are used to access a relatively limited set of websites.

As part of my effort to learn Ember.js, I built a relatively simple app that used the TFL API to fetch bus arrival times at nearby stops.

TLDR: Ember.js implicitly creates an index child route for you when you nest under a route This appears to be not so well known on the Ember community, and I don’t think it’s documented anywhere.

On 19 November 2017 I wrote about a better, simpler way of doing this.

Twice in the last three weeks, I have stumped into a relatively recent addition to Ruby’s syntax: a new way to define symbol keys in a Hash literal.

I own an inexpensive netbook that I take with me when I travel.

Just yesterday I learned a little something in Ruby that I found interesting.