Blog

Printing Many PDFs Per Page
16 December 2013

Much of my work revolves around documents or slides, and I use PDF format for pretty much everything I do. In the last year or so I've developed a love affair with rst2pdf which means I'm doing more PDF now than ever.

This weekend I was working on a project …
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DimpleJs Bubble/Scatterplots and Joind.in Data
10 December 2013

DimpleJs is a wrapper for d3, the javascript charting library, which makes beautiful charts but is way more complicated than I want to cope with, so I was looking for a helper toolkit. I've been using dimplejs lately and wanted to write down what I did while I can remember, but I didn't think my clients would thank me for publishing their data! Instead, I made some graphs using Joind.in's data, just pulling what I needed over the API.

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Open a GitHub Pull Request with Hub
09 December 2013

Both in my professional life and in my personal life as an open source project lead, I spend a lot of time working with git in general, and GitHub in particular. GitHub publishes a command line tool called hub, which is a more convenient way than the website for doing a few specific tasks and in particular I've been using it more and more for opening pull requests.

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Doing Google Custom Search via API
02 December 2013

I'm working on a project that uses a search engine to show images on a particular topic ... but I need my search to be localised since I'm in the UK and so "football" doesn't mean what a generic search engine thinks it means. Getting this working was MUCH harder than I expected, so here's a quick post on what I did so that I can remember for next time - and if this helps you as well, then great :)

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Git Add Interactive
25 November 2013

In common with most development projects these days, I'm using git more and more. It's interesting though that the way that I use this tool just keeps on changing and evolving even after about 4 years of regular use. Today I thought I'd share a new habit that I've developed: using git's ability to stage changes interactively.

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Working with R and Vim
20 November 2013

I'm a long-time vim user, starting to use R for some of the data tasks I do and in a Coursera course I'm taking at the moment. RStudio is the tool for working with R, it runs on Linux and it's really cool ... but it's awkward to work with a …
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Chrome Feature: Copy as cURL
04 November 2013

I surprised someone with my leet skills the other with this technique, so I thought I'd share it on the blog in case anyone else hadn't seen it - I use it ALL the time :) Chrome has a feature which allows you to copy a web request as a curl request, so you see all the various elements of the request on the command line.

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Ada Lovelace Day 2013: Donna Benjamin
15 October 2013

Happy Ada Lovelace Day! Today I'd like to take the time to write about a technical woman who has influenced me this year, and someone whom I imagine will be surprised to read this. Her name is Donna Benjamin, but you may know her as @kattekrab.

Donna's been a virtual friend for a few years; I "intermet" her when I was preparing to host the Dutch PHP Conference in Amsterdam, in 2010. I had some great role models from the PHP community to show me how to "ringmaster" at a big conference, but I was unsure how it would look on a woman. Having already done a similar role for PHPNW, I'd had negative feedback about being teacherish (something that I still get complaints about), and I wasn't sure how else to wear that role. Lots of things work well for men but not for women (silly things, swearing on stage (this differs between cultures), asking for a pay rise, falling out of bed into whatever free conference shirt you were given yesterday ....) and I was determined not to turn myself into a decorative but ditsy hostess.

My good friend Kathy Reid talked through my anxieties with me, and sent me a link to a video of Donna introducing an even more major conference: Donna organised Linux Conf AU and the video showed her introducing it with equal helpings of excellence, approachability, and entertainment. Confident that I wasn't alone, I stopped worrying and gave that conference my best shot.

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OAuth Middleware for Slim
09 October 2013

OAuth can be anything you want it to be, the standards are lax and give you plenty of room for getting the right implementation for your system. However you proceed, though, you'll need to check an access token on every request - and in a Slim application, a middeware can help enormously since it hooks in to every request by design. I've recently implemented this and thought I would share.

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Joind.in at the PHPNW Hackathon
23 September 2013

It's that time of year again, the PHP North West conference is almost upon us, and this year they are once again running a hackathon. These events are a great way either to carve out some time to get your head down and hack on an idea that's been in the back of your mind for a while, but they're also a fabulous way to get involved in collaborating on projects. At PHPNW, you'll find there are quite a lot of open source projects at the hackathon, standing by to take on anyone interested in getting involved, either just for the evening or beyond. I'll be there, representing joind.in, a tool which is used by the conference itself. So what kinds of things will there be to do and how can you get involved?

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Changing Content Type with Slim Framework
17 September 2013

Slim framework has recently invaded my life, I picked it up for a hobby project, recommended it to a client who then contracted me to do quite a lot more development, and it's also used for m.joind.in. One thing that has tripped me up a couple of times …
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Simple Video Editing on Ubuntu
12 September 2013

In this series of posts about my screencasting toolchain, I've already written about using wmctrl to resize windows accurately and about using Kazam to capture snippets of video from various applications. This post describes my adventures in trying to glue the video snippets together.

Graphical Video Editing

For most people …
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