Blog


  1. Speaking at PHPWM: April 6th


    Next week I will be making the trip to my original home town of Birmingham to speak at the PHP West Midlands User Group, on 6th April. They are an active user group and although I haven't managed to organise myself to attend their meetings before, I do keep meeting …

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  2. Ada Lovelace Day 2010: Mrs Maginnis


    This is a post in celebration of Ada Lovelace Day, recognising women in science and technology. Last year I wrote about Kathy Sierra for Ada Lovelace Day; this year my subject is someone much closer to my own life.

    I'd like to write about someone who influenced me greatly - in …

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  3. GETting RESTful collections - may I filter?


    At work at Ibuildings recently, I've been teaching some classes on web services, and its a topic that I've spoken about once or twice at conferences. But something has always bothered me, so I find myself in the unusual position of blogging a question.

    RESTful collections

    So, when you are …

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  4. Big Bed Cushions


    This 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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  5. PHP London Conference: In Review


    I'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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  6. Simple Database Patching Strategy


    One 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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  7. Supermondays: Recap


    Last 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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  8. Open Office Presenter Console


    I'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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  9. An iPhone App for Joind.in


    Recently 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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  10. PHP and JSON


    This 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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  11. Word Count


    There'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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  12. PHPBenelux: Recap


    Last 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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