Blog

Speaking at PHPNW February
25 January 2010

If anyone is able to make it to the PHPNW User Group meet in Manchester next Tuesday 2nd February - I'm the speaker there! I'll be giving a talk entitled "Best Practices for Web Service Design", which covers lots of information about web services and how to write one that your …
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Charlie Bag from Burdastyle
21 January 2010

About a year ago I discovered the BurdaStyle site - where they have open source patterns. And then over the summer I saw an event organised in NYC where they were making these Charlie Bags - foldable fabric bags for putting shopping in. The pattern is free, and came as a PDF …
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Three Ways to Make a POST Request from PHP
18 January 2010

EDIT: A more modern take on this topic is here http://www.lornajane.net/posts/2018/make-a-post-request-from-php-with-guzzle

I've been doing a lot of work with services and working with them in various ways from PHP. There are a few different ways to do this, PHP has a curl extension which …
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Screen in Ubuntu Karmic
15 January 2010

I have written about screen quite often, mostly including my .screenrc file and showing how to have named tabs for the various screen tabs you have open. When Ubuntu Jaunty came out, I found it had some quite cool enhancements that made the customisations for screen really easy by default …
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Dutch PHP Conference: Call for Papers Now Open
12 January 2010

There is an announcement over on the DPC (Dutch PHP Conference) website - their Call for Papers is now open (so go submit!). What's remarkable about this announcement is that I wrote it, and its signed with my name and the words "Your host this year" ... yes, I'm hosting DPC.

I'm …
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Speaking at TEK·X
07 January 2010

I'm always pleased to be accepted as a speaker but I'm especially delighted to hear that I'm speaking at TEK·X in Chicago this May. They had a crazy number of submissions for the number of slots available, and I really wanted to go since I spoke there last year …
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New Office
04 January 2010

I haven't posted about the house for ages, mostly because I haven't been around enough to do much with this project at all! Some months ago (July to be precise) I moved out of the bedroom I use as an office here and into an attic, so we could redecorate …
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Looking Back at 2009
31 December 2009

2009 was a funny year. I started it with a trip to South America, returning to a job I'd held for a year and was starting to feel settled with. I had grand plans for the year, for myself, my home, and my career. And at the end of the …
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Silencing Curl's Progress Output
29 December 2009

I seem to have been writing a lot of shell scripts to do things with curl lately, and the main difference with piping curl's output to somewhere rather than just looking at it on the screen is that curl will then start outputting a whole bunch of progress information that …
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Cookies and Curl
21 December 2009

curl is the C URL library - its a command-line tool for making web requests, with libraries available in many languages. Personally I prefer to use it from the command line and recently I have been using it with cookies for a web services which set a cookie at login and …
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New Camera: Fuji Finepix F70
17 December 2009

Recently I've had a new gadget in my life - a Fuji Finepix F72, which is really an F70 but exclusive to Jessop's in a different colour (I have no idea why retailers do this but hey, it means mine is shiny black).

The camera is a birthday/christmas gift from …
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Sound Issues with Kubuntu Karmic Koala
15 December 2009

Since upgrading my work machine to karmic koala, I've noticed that my sound had stopped working. There were some broken packages in aptitude and Skype knew there was a problem as it notified me when I tried to make a call. I saw some issues reported with karmic, notably this …
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