Month: January 2025

Ash Framework Book – Part 1

~ chriseyre2000 ~ Leave a comment

I am now studying the Ask Framework using the beta pragprog book

My hope is that this will be another great addition to the Elixir toolbox in the same way Oban, Absinthe and Commanded have been.

It’s a clever idea providing a bootstrap git repo with the starting point for the project. This allows problems to be fixed early and does not waste pages of the book on spurious setup.

So far I have found my asdf setup did not include nodejs so needed this:
asdf plugin-add nodejs

Asdf setup of erlang can be slow, especially if you don’t have an asdf managed version of the build.
You may need to leave the machine to update for a while.

I prefer to dockerise my db: Here is the docker-compose.yml

version: "3"
services:
  db:
    image: "postgres:11"
    environment:
      - POSTGRES_PASSWORD=postgres
    container_name: "my_postgres"
    ports:
      - "54320:5432"
    volumes:
      - my_dbdata:/var/lib/postgresql/data
volumes:
  my_dbdata: {}

This does require adding port: 54320, to the dev config

Credit Rating Agencies

~ chriseyre2000 ~ Leave a comment

Late last year I was the victim of identity theft (again).
Apparently this is not actually a crime!

Someone had attempted to take out two credit cards in my name.
One of the cards arrived at my house which is what triggered the investigation.

Contacting the credit card companies is not always as simple as it should be.
One of them had a fraud department that works outside of office hours.
The other had better fraud detection (they did not send me a card) but required me to spend half and hour on their phone system before I was able to talk to someone. You need to include a fraud path in your call centre messages.
Not all people calling have a customer number.

I have been using https://www.checkmyfile.com/ to perform cross agency checks.
Each of the credit card companies had made 2 hard searches against my account.

Hard searches are recorded as attempts to get credit.
Soft searches are simply other companies keeping an eye on your data.

These make it onto your credit file almost immediately.
Getting them removed is much slower.

To start with the credit agencies will only deal with the people who notified them.
It can take a company 2 weeks to make this call. It can take a credit agency 6 weeks to remove it from your file.
This does mean that any incident can require 3 months of fees to the checking service.

I am now 6 weeks from the event and I still have one credit search to remove.

HMRC Self Assessment A Review

~ chriseyre2000 ~ Leave a comment

This is something you need to use every year in the UK if your salary/income exceeds a certain level (or if the tax man tells you to).

Its a fairly clunky system. There has been minimal UX work. You only find out that amounts of zero can’t be submitted on amount fields after a page is saved.

Company names are limited to about 20 characters. I was transferred between legal entities (same company) during this tax period. The problem is I can’t enter either legal entity name in full, and the difference between them is at the end.

It is worth perservering with as you may get a tax refund.

The use of google authenticator is better than a previous security system that required having a code sent by snail mail in a tamperproof printed format.