Blog

Generating HTML from Markdown with Pandoc
10 September 2013

I'm writing more and more things that are not code these days, and my content-managing toolchains are becoming more developed all the time. I've written in REstructured Text, Asciidoc, and LaTeX, and today I'm working on an article which eventually wants to be HTML but I'm creating in Markdown because …
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Screencasting in Ubuntu: Kazam
05 September 2013

If you've ever seen a live demo, you will know that these things are fraught with danger. Even if the wifi works, the presenter knows what they are doing, and nothing crashes, you'll often end up watching someone explaining something to their laptop in detail, or clearly demonstrating their inability to type. Either way, it doesn't make good, informative content, which is why I never ever demo in a conference talk - I'm there to entertain and time is always of the essence. At this point, you can probably guess why I'm writing a blog post about my screencasting toolchain - I simply pre-record whatever it is that I want to show in the talk.

On an ubuntu platform, I've had a few false starts with video over the years, and mostly avoided it. But now my "Debugging HTTP" talk really does make more sense if you can see the process of something broken, what the tools show, and how to understand that information and fix the problem.

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Homemade Kitchen Shelves
03 September 2013

For the last ... really long time ... I've been working on a place to put the cookery books in the "new" kitchen. Since the kitchen was finished early in 2011, that's been quite a long-running project! It's finally finished though and I thought I'd share a bit about how I made it (not least because I get nagged about the lack of non-geeky posts on this site - you know who you are!)

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Accurate Ubuntu Window Sizing with Wmctrl
28 August 2013

I'm working on a bunch of screencasts at the moment (more posts to come) and one of the things that tripped me up the most was getting all the windows the same size, so that the resulting videos are the same size and can easily be put back together. Enter …
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Using Composer in an Existing Project
19 August 2013

I've got an application (okay, scratty PHP script) which glues together some API things and shows them onto a dashboard for me. Recently, I updated it to use Guzzle as the consuming client, since twitter now needs me to authenticate (I wrote about that if you're interested), and I used Composer to bring the new library in. It was very simple so I thought I'd share it as it's quite minimal example, and those are my favourite kind.

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Tips for Addressing a Virtual Audience
08 August 2013

As a conference speaker, I've read the books on how to be a good conference speaker, and coached quite a few people to raise their skills in this area too. However recently I've been meeting more virtual audiences, both delivering virtual training and doing virtual events such as DayCamp4Developers, and I thought I'd share my take on what works well in a setting where people can see your slides, and hear your voice ... and nothing more.

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Using Charles To Debug PHP SOAP
22 July 2013

I used this trick to solve a particularly sticky problem last week, so I thought I'd share. I had a 3rd party SOAP service (except it was actually a .NET WCF service, which is almost SOAP but not quite) which didn't behave in accordance with the way its documentation said it would. PHP's SoapClient has the ability to enable tracing and give information about the request/response headers/body, which is useful, but I needed to store the outputs and also rewrite a particular request header during the course of debugging this. Enter: Charles Proxy.

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PSR-What?
16 July 2013

There's been some cool things happening in the PHP world over the last few years, but with the least helpful names ever ... yes, those PSR-somethings which all do totally different things (apart from two of them which are the same). They're actually all superb things, and done for a good reason, so I thought I'd try to translate them into normal speak.

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Twitter Search API Using PHP and Guzzle
11 July 2013

In case you missed it, Twitter updated their APIs recently, so that you have to authenticate to use even their search APIs to return publicly-available results. This is an increasing trend for API providers, to provide either very limited or nonexistent access for unauthenticated users, I think so they can rate limit consumers that swamp them. To cut a long story short, that meant I needed to update my dashboards that keep an eye on twitter searches to do more than just call file_get_contents in the general direction of the right URL.

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Ttytter: Command Line Twitter Tweaks
04 July 2013

I've been using ttytter for quite a while, it's a superbly inoffensive twitter client - and it's console-based. This makes it easy to use from the keyboard, fast, and also makes it look a bit less like twitter if that's not something people should be seeing over your shoulder!

I have customised a few settings which I find superhelpful, so I thought I'd share my config file and say a bit about some of the entries in there. The config for ttytter is held in a file called .ttytterrc in my home directory. Mine looks like this:

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DC4D 6: Not-Programming for Programmers
25 June 2013

In case you haven't seen the news, the next episode of Day Camp 4 Developers is coming up on Friday 26th July. This edition is about getting beyond being awesome at the code, which we know that you are, and picking up some other skills to complete you as a profesional. Whether you work in a large international corporation, a smaller company, or alone, we've got content that will make a difference.

Day Camp 4 Developers is a virtual conference, and it's $40 (about 25 quid for UK people). If you can't make it on the day, just get the video ticket and download the recorded sessions later. What I'm trying to say in this paragraph is that there are quite literally no excuses for missing out on this :)

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Are Subqueries RESTful?
13 June 2013

Twitter is great for one-liners, but it's very difficult to carry on any kind of advanced conversation there. Therefore when I saw this tweet yesterday, I knew I'd be picking a different medium to reply:

@lornajane sory for getting on your nervs with #rest,but are subquerys (like couchDB does) restfull to? is there a rule? like .../?type=bla

— Maximilian 'Berghoff (@ElectricMaxxx) June 12, 2013

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