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Neil Robinson

Blogs

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Joining Toastmasters

I joined a local Toastmasters club to practice my verbal communication. At first, I wasn’t sure if I should join program because I didn’t know what to expect. However, I am glad I participated as a guest to get a feel for what this program is.

The style of meetings and all the different roles give you the opportunity to practice many different styles of communication: impromptu extemporaneous speaking, conducting meetings, being positive, confidence body language, feedback, filler word elimination, and all sorts of other minor things you don’t think of but is necessary when conducting yourself in a public view.

Diagram showing various tags wired an application server

Content Security Policy

Content Security Policies.

History

When the World Wide Web was created by Tim Berners-Lee back in early 1990s, the idea was to share information, particularly at CERN where Tim worked. The idea was to coalesce all the information throughout CERN in a unified system. Sharing of information was the major problem he was solving. The idea of hyperlinks to various URIs or URLs was the goal to spread and share information at CERN. But as Internet became popular and used outside of CERN, and malicious actors started to appear, and site owners needed a mechanism to restrict hyperlinks or URLs on their websites.

Picture of a Rails ActionView field_for :tag example

Rails Transaction Do

ActiveRecord Transactions

You can commit atomic transactions on an ActiveRecord model by calling class method Model.transaction do. This allows the update controller action to update all associated models in one transaction. I have previously wondered how to make sure you can update all your associated models in one big committed transaction and ensure all models are updated through the controller. Now I learned it is using the transaction do block.

Screenshot of Browser Inspection Tab

MSI Mime Type

What is the name for the MIME Type for MSI Files?

I searched for it on multiple web search engines. I thought this would be an easy answer. Instead, I found multiple conflicting sources of what a MSI file MIME type is supposed to be. For those who do not know what a MSI file is, it is a Microsoft installer file, which installs windows applications.

With all the inconsistent search results and without having to rely on the AI output, the only way to settle this answer was to see what Microsoft’s application type is on their MS installers MIME types. I downloaded PowerShell MSI file, but before I did, pressed CTRL+SHIFT+I to inspect the network, viewed the response headers, and discovered that Micrsoft uses the application type of application/octet-stream for their MSI files.

Picture of a target with Goals mind mapped toward the target

2025 New Year Goals

I want to focus on achieving three primary goals in 2025:

  1. Improve Communication Skills (i.e. speaking)
  2. Rails - Build more applications
  3. Fitness - Get Moving

Improve Communication Skills

I want to focus on verbal communication skills. To accomplish this goal, I am going to start building more in public, record videos of myself talking on an array of subject matters (maybe programming, spreadsheets, or other doing things I enjoy).

The goal is to take action on something I learned and share it with the public.