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Have been needing to programmatically fill out an I9 PDF, retrieved from gov site. Should be fairly straightforward, right? Well… the field names are… a mess. Field names like topmostSubform[0].Page1[0].U\.S\._Social_Security_Number__Last_4_numbers_[0]topmostSubform[0].Page1[0].expiration_date__if_applicable__mm_dd_yyyy[0] topmostSubform[0].Page2[0].Employers_Business_or_Organization_Address_Street_Number_and_Name[0] and so on make it pretty… not straightforward to create a usable key/value combination to search and replace. But… today, I noticed it got…

I get an email newsletter from Martin Joo every week or so. The newsletters generally have some useful tips around the Laravel framework or sometimes just general development tips. I’ve learned a couple of neat tricks here and there, and will continue to receive. This morning I received an email with a Laravel ‘tip’ regarding…

I’m starting to read “Four Thousand Weeks” from Oliver Burkeman. I initially listened to much of the audio book, then bought a copy (link above to Amazon – no affiliate link). Have not finished yet, but the core message of the book seems to be There’s certainly more to it than this, and again, I’m…

This has been a thorny issue for a while, and *may* have been resolved in Laravel 9 (have not upgraded projects to 9 yet). Testing both that an email was triggered in a Laravel test, as well as verifying the content of the mail body – that has often seemed to be a tricky step….

Small note, mostly for myself, as a reminder that when doing large imports of data, you may not need each block to be processed as an Eloquent model. That code above would generally be faster as Obviously there are even faster ways – preparing your data in some text format, and using your DB cli…

There are a number of UI toolkits in the JS (and specifically VueJS) space. BootstrapVue, Vuetify, VueStrap, Ionic, Quasar, ElementUI and more. I wrote a post some time ago (which may get recovered at some point!) about some of these, and indicated I’d be diving in to one or more at some point, and… I…

I took a look at blueprint last year-ish, and… held off. It was a bit too new for my comfort level, but still looked quite useful. A couple months ago, I took a fresh look, and planned to use it for a new project. I got things set up, generated models and tests and whatnot…

Many moons ago my earlier version of my blog had this list I use when spelling things for people over the phone. I managed to find it at archive.org and thought I’d repost… a as in aisle (or aye) b as in bdellium  c as in czar d as in djibouti e as in eight…

So… I wrote a previous post about how to prevent duplicates, but this post is about a different type of duplication problem. I encountered this issue about 18 months ago, and asked around, and few people seemed to know what I was talking about, and I don’t specifically see it mentioned in the docs. So…..

Well… here we are.  10 years later, and … no backups.  Or… none of the data that’s important. Recently had a drive crash in my main server where this blog is hosted.  Had it happen 2 years ago, but the data was recovered, and I put everything on automatic backups.  Using virtualmin, a great control…