Blog

Why I Love Unconferences
04 February 2011

I'm seeing increasing numbers of unconferences popping up and I must say I'm quite enjoying them. Last year I went to OggCamp, we included an unconference at DPC, and now there's a PHP-specific event coming up in Manchester: PHP Unconference Europe or phpuceu. I really like unconferences but I think sometimes people don't know what to expect, so here's an outline.

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Using gnome-keybinding-properties
03 February 2011

Last week I reinstalled my aspireone, which I've had for quite a while but which is really excellent for events. I put the latest Ubuntu Netbook Remix onto it and it installed like a dream, with peripherals and powersaving all working correctly. It says something about the positive experiences I've had with *buntu installs lately that I even did this over the wifi!

The weird thing was that I don't really use Gnome on other machines as I prefer KDE, and I hadn't seen the Unity desktop before (as I understand it, this is a lightweight gnome replacement - it still looks and smells like gnome to me), so there were a few things that were "missing" as far as I was concerned. Easily the most annoying is the Alt+F2 shortcut, I don't really care what GUI I'm using, I mostly just run things from that! I also realised that I now had workspaces, but that there was no keyboard shortcut to switch between them (I don't use a mouse, so it's keyboard or nothing for me).

Enter a wonderful utility called gnome-keybinding-properties.

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27 Ways To Be A Better PHP Developer
02 February 2011

Last weekend I was at the PHPBenelux 2011 conference in Antwerp. As conferences go it was pretty awesome, completely surpassing my expectations in many ways! The schedule was published in advance but I somehow forgot how many friends I have in that part of the world and what a wonderful …
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Number System Primer
27 January 2011

I regularly teach the Zend Certification course and one thing that really splits those with a Computer Science background from those without is handling number systems other than decimal. Personally I don't see it as a major omission, I certainly don't work with those systems very often in web development! However, ZCE includes decimal, binary, octal and hexadecimal numbers in its syllabus, so I always make sure to stop and teach it. Here's a quick round-up of how they work:

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Using s3cmd To Manage Files on Amazon S3
26 January 2011

Recently I moved some podcasts on to Amazon Simple Storage Service, or S3, which I know is great and easy to use, and I've used it with some wrappers, but never directly until now. It turns out, unsurprisingly, that S3 is great and easy to use :) I used s3cmd from s3tools - a collection of python scripts that made this really really easy. Even better, I'm an Ubuntu user so s3cmd is already packaged for me and I simply installed with:

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Blanket for Reuben
24 January 2011

Some very good friends of ours recently had their first child, a son named Reuben, and this is the blanket I made for him:

It's a very traditional granny square crochet blanket, I love these because I can take a ball of wool and a hook with me to anywhere …
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Time Tracking with Harvest
20 January 2011

Since I started working for myself almost 6 months ago, I've had to get to grips with running a company myself, and I must admit that the paperwork was one thing that stopped me from making this move sooner! I've kept everything in order and I'd like to mention one tool which has helped me hugely with that: Harvest.

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5 Years of Blogging
18 January 2011

I've just realised that today marks 5 years since the very first post on this blog. I'm not sure how 5 years came around, the blog began because I was just leaving a job and every time I did that, I lost my directory of useful scripts that I collected. I also didn't know how to use grep 5 years ago (or linux, or vim ...) and so I couldn't find things in the directory anyway. So I started to blog things, in the hope of finding them again when I wanted them.

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Quick-Start Guide for Google Charts API
17 January 2011

Google Charts API is a nice, freely available tool for creating really good-looking graphs very painlessly. Don't be fooled by the "API" bit though, there is no need for advanced understanding of HTTP here - you generate most graphs just by adding parameters to a URL! In this post we'll take a look at a few different ways to generate charts.

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Navigating Bash History with Ctrl+R
14 January 2011

I spend a lot of time at command line, and bash records the history of all the commands I've typed and puts it in .bash_history (there's a limit on how many it stores but for me it goes back a few days). I find it really useful to look back …
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Github API: Issues List
10 January 2011

I'm deeply involved with an open source development project (joind.in, the event feedback site) and we recently made the decision to move our issue tracking away from GitHub (because it's awful and meets none of the requirements for a bug tracker, but that's a post for another day). In order to make this happen more smoothly, we wanted to migrate our open issues from github (to JIRA Studio, since Atlassian generously provides accounts here for worthy open source projects - thanks Atlassian!).

I looked around for some export functionality for github but I got a lot of posts complaining it wasn't there. Since I hate applications that take your data and refuse to let you remove it, I was disappointed by this news but further inspection showed that although there might be no "export from github" button, there's an API that more than has it covered. The API returns JSON which is easy to work with from many programming languages, and is perhaps even more powerful and flexible than the simple export I initially expected, so here are some examples.

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Adding Multiple Axis Labels to a Google Chart
06 January 2011

Recently I've been working on a project using Google Charts API and I absolutely love it. It makes pretty graphs and shows data really nicely - and it's very painless. I did trip over a little trick today though which took me a little while to work out, so I thought …
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