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Big Bed Cushions
13 March 2010
Read moreThis week I finally got around to making the big cushions for our bed. We do have some but they were cheap and are now old - and I reallocated Kevin's onto my office chair about a year ago. Since we do often read or use the laptops in bed, cushions …
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PHP London Conference: In Review
05 March 2010
Read moreI'm really late with this post, but I wanted to write about the PHP London Conference which was held in London last Friday. The event was in a great venue and had hoards of people - this was my fourth year in attendance!! They do, however, have the longest twitter tag …
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Simple Database Patching Strategy
01 March 2010
Read moreOne problem that seems to need solving too often is how to keep databases in sync across different platforms, different developers working on a project, and deploying database changes along with code changes. There are lots of ways of approaching this, none of them are really excellent however and personally …
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Supermondays: Recap
23 February 2010
Read moreLast night I travelled to the northeast of England to speak to a thriving technical community up there called Supermondays. They contacted me some time ago asking if I could get there to speak one Monday, and last night was the night! It was a very civilised gathering, with sandwiches …
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Open Office Presenter Console
19 February 2010
Read moreI've been having issues with the presenter console on both my ubuntu machines since upgrading to Karmic (9.10). One is a Thinkpad T400 running kubuntu and the other is an aspireone netbook running ubuntu netbook remix. Neither wanted had a working installation after upgrade and I couldn't get the …
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An iPhone App for Joind.in
15 February 2010
Read moreRecently I've been doing some bits and pieces with the open sourced event feedback site joind.in, including some work on its API to facilitate development of an iphone app. As a conference attendee, speaker and organiser, I use this site a lot for the various events that I am …
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PHP and JSON
10 February 2010
Read moreThis is a quick outline on working with JSON from PHP, which is actually pretty simple to do. This post has some examples on how to do it and what the results should look like. JSON stands for JavaScript Object Notation, and is widely used in many languages (not just …
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Word Count
08 February 2010
Read moreThere's a little command line utility on *nix which I use a lot - it's wc or "word count". This is especially useful to because I live in a world where everything is plain text right up until I have to send it to someone else (and sometimes not even then …
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PHPBenelux: Recap
03 February 2010
Read moreLast weekend I was privileged to speak at the inaugural PHPBenelux conference in Antwerp, Belgium. Since Ibuildings is partly a dutch company I combined this with one of my regular trips to meet with the people there, visiting both our offices in the Netherlands and catching up with a bunch …
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Speaking at SuperMondays
03 February 2010
Read moreI'm delighted to announce that the people at SuperMondays in Newcastle have invited me to speak at their event on 22nd February. For this I'll be writing a new talk entitled "PHP and Web Services: Perfect Partners" - looking at how PHP is a good fit for web services and how …
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Stopping CodeIgniter from Escaping SQL
28 January 2010
Read moreI'm adding some small features to the API for joind.in when I have a moment and this is my first experience of working with CodeIgniter. I've been getting increasingly impatient with its tendency to try to escape my SQL code for me - this is a really useful default feature …
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Contributing to Projects on GitHub
26 January 2010
Read moreRecently I've been contributing to the code project behind joind.in, the event information and feedback site. I rely on joind.in a lot and after putting up with a frankly astonishing volume of feature requests from me, its owner Chris Cornutt very politely suggested that I might like to …