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Navigating Bash History with Ctrl+R
14 January 2011
Read moreI 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
Read moreI'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
Read moreRecently 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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Make Blogging Your New Years Resolution
04 January 2011
Read moreDo you have a New Year's Resolution? Is it to blog (or blog more often)? If so, keep reading!
I'm coming up to my 5th anniversary of blogging and looking at my stats, I've written around 150 posts per year for most of that time, although in 2010 I "only" wrote 102 posts, possibly because one or two other things happened in my life. So many people tell me they want to blog, or they have a blog but can't find the time to write, that I thought I'd try to give some pointers for those resolving to blog this New Year.
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Launching Links in Opera from Command Line
27 December 2010
Read moreI'm an Opera user but I use a number of applications from the command line, and often I want to launch links from those applications into my web browser. I've just switched over to reading my feeds using canto (web applications are becoming decreasingly accessible these days, although I'm saving …
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Speaking at DIBI
22 December 2010
Read moreIn June 2011 I'll be speaking at a rather awesome event called DIBI at the Sage in Gateshead (if you're a southerner, then Gateshead is near Newcastle, which is "up north"). DIBI stands for "Design It, Build It" and has two tracks, one focussing on development and one focussing on …
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Preparing for ZCE 5.3
20 December 2010
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Recently I have been getting to grips with the ZCE since it was updated to take account of PHP 5.3. In the last few weeks I've both passed the certificate myself and also taught Zend's certification training course as a classroom course at NTI Leeds. I thought I'd share my top tips for preparing for taking the ZCE - getting to the standard, last-minute preparations, and also some tips for surviving the day itself (disclaimer: everyone sitting the ZCE signs a declaration not to disclose the contents of the exam, so I can't actually tell you the questions, sorry!) -
OAuth Google API for Unregistered Applications
17 December 2010
Read moreIt is pretty common when using OAuth for there to be a relationship between the provider and consumer; as a consumer you usually register with the provider to obtain a consumer key and consumer secret. Google's APIs however do not require this. It is recommended that you register your application …
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ZCE 5.3: Worth Doing?
14 December 2010
Read moreI recently took (and passed!) the ZCE 5.3 certification. I've been a Zend Certified Engineer (5.0) for nearly 3 years, and I know a lot more about PHP today than I did then. Today I speak and write various things related to PHP, and also teach all sorts of topics including PHP certification. I thought I'd share my thoughts on the ZCE, and I'll write a follow-up post on how to prepare for it.
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Declaring Static Methods in PHP
10 December 2010
Read moreI was confused recently to realise that I had accidentally called a static method in PHP dynamically from another part of my code; I expected PHP to output warnings when this is done. On closer inspection I discovered that:
Static functions can be called dynamically
Dynamic functions generate an E_STRICT error if called statically
This made a lot more sense when I thought about it a bit more and wrote some toy code:
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Retrieving Data from Google Analytics API using PHP
09 December 2010
Read moreRecently I started playing with the google analytics API, looking at ways to bring analytics onto dashboards and generate simple reports from the data in there. Very shortly after I started to look at the API, I had working data retrieval, so I thought I'd share my experiences (and code!).
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Skills Analysis for Teams
06 December 2010
Read moreWhen I spoke at PHPNW10 in October, I talked about teams, skills and the importance of benchmarking things in order to illustrate improvements. If you didn't see the talk, the video and slides are linked off the conference site. In particular I talked about the importance of analysing skills in a team, then improving them, then analysing again to see how things had changed. This post is about that process, some techniques that might apply, and what to do with the results when you get them.
