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Including Code Samples With rst2pdf
15 September 2014
Read moreEvery document I create these days is written in rst (ReStructuredText) and transformed into something useful using rst2pdf. This includes worksheets, reports, handouts and slide decks. Along the way I've learned a few tricks, and I try to write them down so I can look up how to do something. If this helps you too, then great :)
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Adding Npm to a PHP Travis Project
14 August 2014
Read moreLike most PHP developers, I'm polyglot. My PHP project builds with phing, but uses a bunch of npm tools along the way to minify assets and those types of things. When I introduced TravisCI into my project, I was instantly confused by the requirement to specify the technology I was using ... all of them, surely?
In need of wisdom and advice, I turned to the best source I know:
How do people use @travisci with multiple languages? Project uses PHP and nodejs tools but I can't seem to configure both. Any links/advice?
—Lorna Mitchell (@lornajane) May 7, 2014
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My ffmpeg Cookbook
22 July 2014
Read moreI have been doing more screencasting lately, so I thought I'd share some recipes here, for my own future use and in case anyone else wants to use them. I capture my videos using Kazam on Ubuntu, usually by resizing my second monitor to 800x600 and then capturing that. Kinda eye-bleeding to record but looks good in playback and also works well either in tiny web view or on a big screen. I also screencapture my android device and for that I use Screen Recorder.
Edit: I mostly used OBS for video from around 2019.
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View Only Headers with Curl
08 July 2014
Read moreWhen working with curl, it can give lots of excellent and detailed information, but sometimes it is too much! Today I'm fiddling with the caching headers on a client's application, so I'm only interested in seeing the headers and not the body of the response. Making a HEAD request changes …
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Video: Git Remotes and Tracking Branches
03 July 2014
Read moreHere's a little demo video that I put together to explain pushing/pulling with multiple remotes and how tracking branches make this easier. It's one of the chapters from my "Git Adventures" talk, but it didn't make it in to the talk in Amsterdam last week since we chose a …
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Understanding Tracking Branches in Git
03 July 2014
Read moreHere's a topic that took me a while to understand in git, and now (I think!) I do, I thought I'd write it all down while I can remember!
Some branches in git (such as your origin/master branch) will usually track the remote branch that they are related to. But what if you want to create a relationship between local and remote branches? Or stop them from tracking? Here's some pointers
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Running Pull Request Builds with Jenkins
01 July 2014
Read moreThe joind.in projects are set up so that the build process runs on pull requests when they are opened, which is great! It means that contributors don't have to wait for one of the maintainers to look at it, only to reject the contribution on something that could be picked up automatically. I've had a few questions about the setup so I thought I'd share how it works.
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What Got You Involved in Open Source?
12 June 2014
Read moreI did a very unscientific twtpoll recently regarding what brought each of us into open source. Plenty of people took the time to vote or retweet, so I thought I'd loop back around and let you know how it looked overall when the poll closed.
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Colourless Git Output
02 June 2014
Read moreI teach git and often have issues with bad projectors where you can't see the colours. Recently I had a setup where even white on black was more or less invisible, but using black text on a white background worked okay. There's lots of documentation on how to turn on …
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Copy/Pasting and Vim
02 April 2014
Read moreI'm a vim user and I somehow completely missed this excellent feature until much more recently than I care to admit! Usually vim has its own clipboard, but it doesn't share with the operating system. You will need a vim-gtk install, this isn't available in really basic vim (I'm a …
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Quick Switch Between Git Branches
31 March 2014
Read moreToday's little-known git feature (or maybe everyone knows but me? I only found this a few months ago) is for quickly switching between branches. Usually I would switch branches with:
git checkout [branchname]
However if you switch from one branch to another and want to switch back again (this happens …
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Wireshark Capture on Remote Server
25 March 2014
Read moreThe joind.in project uses a really nice vagrant setup for its dev platform - which is much needed these days as we move away from a single LAMP stack install to a website plus another website, which talks to an API and caches in redis and deploys with .... you get the picture :) This is great but having everything on the VM can make it a bit trickier to debug what's going on - and with a website that talks to an API that talks to MySQL, that all lives on a VM with port forwards, you can see the problem :)
To get an insight into the traffic going around the place, I've been using Wireshark and it's ability to capture remotely, it's really simple so I thought I'd write down my "recipe" on how to do this in case it's useful.