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Random Colours with the Blink(1)
08 January 2013
Read moreRecently, there was a great project on kickstarter to make a USB RGB LED. I missed it completely but thankfully my husband didn't, and recently a small package arrived containing _two_ of these lovely little blink(1) devices (very smart man, as clearly this was something I couldn't live without as soon as I saw it!).
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You're Not Using Source Control? Read This!
07 January 2013
Read moreLast week I wrote an email to a client who hasn't yet implemented source control, but who is thinking about it. It turned into rather a long email as I attempted to convey WAY too much information in one long email. After some twitter banter, I repackaged my thoughts into a whitepaper on Source Control entitled You're not using source control? Read This! (PDF, no registration needed).
The document goes on to talk about the available tools (git, Hg, SVN) and give a sales pitch for _why_ source control has benefits for an organisation. There are also some action points to follow to implement source control if you haven't already taken the leap, which I hope will help anyone looking to take that step - it's kind of awkward in this day and age to admit that your organisation doesn't have source control, but however this situation arose, hopefully this document wraps up my thoughts on how to find a good way out!
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Become a ZCE in 2013
01 January 2013
Read moreA few people have told me it's their New Year's resolution to become a ZCE this year, and I'm sure they're not the only ones. I regularly help developers and teams prepare for ZCE, so I thought I'd make up a mini package of tips, tricks and a full set sample questions with solutions and explanations, for anyone who won't be taking a whole preparation course, link below:
Edit: Pack now available from https://leanpub.com/zce
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Christmas Kitchen
25 December 2012
Read moreIt's Christmas and we're at home this year, which means I've been spending a lot of time in the kitchen! This post combines Christmas planning thoughts, a craft project, and some recipes we enjoyed this year - and delivers a surprise to anyone subscribed to the main blog feed expecting only technical content.
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Building on Datapoint: Weather With Icons
19 December 2012
Read moreI wrote the other day about the new datapoint API from the MetOffice (there were some great links to other weather APIs in the comments, if you like weather). I've been using it to create a detailed forecast of the weather over the next few days, mixing in some lovely weather icons by Adam Whitcroft, from The Noun Project (the same site that the icons on my own site came from) - so I have something like this for each kind of weather:
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9 Magic Methods in PHP
11 December 2012
Read moreThis post forms part of a series of articles about using PHP to do objected oriented programming, or OOP. They were originally published elsewhere but are no longer available at that location, so I'm reposting them here. Previously in the series was an introduction to OOP in PHP, in two parts
The title is a bit of a red herring as PHP has more than 9 magic methods, but these will get you off to a good start using PHP's magic methods. It might be magic, but no wands are required!
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Ubuntu Icons Directory Routing
06 December 2012
Read moreI had the weirdest problem the other day so I thought I'd write it down! I uploaded a toy script for someone, but it had images in it and they wouldn't load. The image files existed, and I could request everything around them, files in other subdirectories were okay; the …
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Datapoint: Weather API from the MetOffice
03 December 2012
Read moreI'm working on a little hobby project which needs to know what the weather is going to be. I had a look around and noticed that the MetOffice had released a new API called DataPoint. They have a selection of APIs, including some map overlays and some actual weather data (more on that another day) but I was especially charmed by their text APIs - this is basically the basis of weather forecasts used everywhere :)
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Managing PHP 5.4 Extensions on Ubuntu
29 November 2012
Read moreMy shiny new VPS* runs Ubuntu 12.10 (official subtitle: Quantal Queztal. Local nickname: Quirky Kestrel) and therefore has PHP 5.4 installed. It's very new so every command I type is missing, and today I realised that included a PECL module (pecl_http, of course). So I aptitude install php5-pear and then get tangled in dev packages (clue: look which libcurl you have already installed to figure out which of a long list of -dev packages to choose), managing finally to emerge with a pecl install http that completes successfully with the words:configuration option "php_ini" is not set to php.ini locationYou should add "extension=http.so" to php.iniI've been using Ubuntu for some time however, and we don't put settings straight into php.ini, there's a directory called /etc/php5/conf.d/ where all the various module configurations live, or you can enable things just for when PHP is called by apache or from the CLI. However today I hopped into /etc/php5/ and saw this:.├── apache2├── cli├── conf.d└── mods-availableHmmm ... mods-available ?
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Unpacking and Editing a Chrome Extension
26 November 2012
Read moreI've been having an issue with one of my chrome extensions recently - the keyboard navigation extension that I blogged about previously. This is a huge problem for me because without this extension, I can't "click" on anything on the internet! It was working on some pages, but on others it was drawing elements but not styling them correctly. The extension doesn't seem to be actively maintained, so I realised I was going to have to dive into the extension itself to understand the problems and have any chance of fixing it. Hurrah for open source software (not that I really write any js but I figured if I could understand the problem, maybe I could ask more intelligent questions)
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From MySQL to MailChimp via CSV
13 November 2012
Read moreDon't you hate disclaimers? I do, but before I do anything else, I must ask that you don't use the techniques below unless you are emailing responsibly.
Today I needed to pull email addresses for people who had signed up to a thing out of MySQL and into MailChimp so that I could actually email them about the thing. MySQL actually has a very cute feature for exporting the results of an SQL query as a CSV file, which I had to look up to remember how to do it. It goes something like this:
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Teaching Those Beginning The Journey
09 November 2012
Read moreBecoming a master developer is like becoming a master craftsman; you just can't rush the process. You learn the basics, apply those skills, and over time master them and adapt them to be your own. As time goes on, you take on bigger and more complicated tasks, and apply appropriate skills to those, and so on. Our journey as developers is really much the same and yet sometimes I feel that we don't help those at the very start of the journey as much as we could.