Windows 10 flickering on top few pixels after update

A bit of history first.

My laptop was originally a Windows 8.1 machine, and was updated to Windows 10 when that became available (although it took two attempts).

It has just had the November update applied (which took a long, long time).

Post update, I have noticed a flickering across the top few pixels of the screen. A quick look at recent posts didn't give many useful hints.

I had a look at the advanced screen settings, and saw the screen was set to 1366 x 768 picels - this wasn't the resolution I was expecting. I dropped the resolution to 1360 x 768 and this seems to have stopped the issue.

The recommended resolution is 1366 though, and I don't understand why changing the horizontal resolution has stopped the issue.

Ruby, Windows and Timezones

With the current builds of Ruby on Rails, there are a couple of problems with a default installation.

The first is that Windows environments seem to need the timezone data gem including.

The second is to do with the initial layout file.

Timezone data

If you have a Rails folder already, you might just be able to get away with the following:

Details about the timezone gem are in github. Add the following line to your Gemfile:

gem 'tzinfo-data', platforms: [:mingw, :mswin, :x64_mingw, :jruby]

then run 

bundle update

as usual when you change your Gemfile.

To build a new Rails project

Follow Fletcher Nichols' instructions, (basically running this gist, then adding a new environment variable SSL_CERT_FILE with the value C:\RailsInstaller\cacert.pem.

application.html.erb

The line:
<%= javascript_include_tag 'application', 'data-turbolinks-track' => true %>
is currently failing on Windows environments. Replace the line with:
<%= javascript_include_tag 'default', 'data-turbolinks-track' => true %>

Adding the coffee-script-source gem to your the Gemfile seems fix the issue:
..
gem 'coffee-script-source', '1.8.0', platforms: [:mingw, :mswin, :x64_mingw, :jruby]
seems to fix the issue.


Edit: added the coffee-script-source notes.
Edit2: Added the SSL_CERT_FILE notes

Googlewhack! alfridariaANDxystarch

Googlewhacking is finding a pair of words that give just a single hit on Google.

Today's effort was made with the aid of a dictionary of less-commonly used words.

Googlewhack! XystarchANDyarker

Googlewhacking is finding a pair of words that give just a single hit on Google.

Today's effort was made with the aid of a dictionary of less-commonly used words.

This is the second one I've found today.

Googlewhack! xystarchANDsnaggers

Googlewhacking is finding a pair of words that give just a single hit on Google.

Todays effort was made with the aid of a dictionary of less-commonly used words.

Googlewhack! XystarchWitnessfully

Googlewhacking is finding a pair of words that give just a single hit on Google.

Todays effort was made with the aid of a dictionary of less-commonly used words.

I've no idea how long it will remain true, but at least I have a screenshot taken today (17th August 2015) with evidence.

[Partial Solution] Unable to access rails server on a VirtualBox guest

I've been having problems accessing my Linux VirtualBox guest from my windows machine.

The solution turns out to be fairly simple and is explained in more depth here. However this only applies when ran from the command line, running via Guard this solution doesn't work.

A change to the default host in the rails server means that the server will only listen for requests from localhost.

The solution is to start the server with rails server -b 0.0.0.0 to get it to listen to all interfaces.

I edited my config/boot.rb to say:

require "rails/commands/server"
module Rails
class Server
def default_options
super.merge({
:Host => 'my-host.com',
:Port => 3000,
:environment => (ENV['RAILS_ENV'] || "development").dup,
:daemonize => false,
:debugger => false,
:pid => File.expand_path("tmp/pids/server.pid"),
:config => File.expand_path("config.ru")
})
end
end
end

Now I don't need to remember about including the switch.

This doesn't help when running guard, a temporary hack is to use

rails server -b 0.0.0.0 & guard

but this is a bit of a klunky solution. I've posted a question in StackOverflow

A little something for the weekend

I signed up for an online course on learning to create Android applications this weekend. The course is Programming Mobile Applications for Android Handheld Systems: Part 1 and runs for approximately four weeks.

This isn't my first foray into online courses, I have completed a Software as a Service course and a Music Production course (thinks: I must look into a photography course as some point as well).

I've signed up fairly late to the course, so am busy setting up the development environment as well as listening to the lectures. It is only supposed to take 4-5 hours a week to do.

The development environment I'm going to use is the Android Studio, although the course recommends Eclipse (I've used Eclipse a few times before, and the Android Studio is relatively).

The emulated Hello Android Application

So far I have installed the main development environment, created and ran a basic "Hello World" application on my phone, and am setting up the emulated devices so that I can simulate running on other "phones".

The format of the course is a number of videos (with questions built in) followed by quizzes. There may be other things associated, but I'll discuss them later.

First of the quizzes completed today, and somehow I managed to get 100%. Good enough to start with. Last time I did one of these courses, I created a spreadsheet with my scores and a prediction of what result I should get. I'm not sure if I can be bothered to do that this time (unless I get some encouragement).

I'm also thinking about signing up for the signature track, this will give me an exciting certificate to wave at people. I'll have to look at the cost and what the extras are worth to me before committing myself. I do have two weeks to decide.

There are some labs I still need to look at, I'll use my spare time to work through those tonight.

The only thing I'm worried about is finding around 5 hours a week to watch the lectures, carry out the lab exercises, and complete the quizzes.

Googlewhacking Diddlecum-existential

Googlewhacking is finding a pair of words that give just a single hit on Google.

I have a word of the day desk calendar, todays word was "diddlecum" meaning Half mad or sorely teased (from Walter Skeat's Glossary of Devonshire Words, 1896).

This is what I got back from Google.