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What Does URI Stand For?
05 March 2014
Read moreI get a lot of complaints about an API that I maintain (http://api.joind.in) which is "missing" the ID field. This ID field is the database's primary key; if the user doesn't have access to the database (they don't), then it seems to me that the primary key …
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Getting Started with Beanstalkd
27 February 2014
Read moreI had a good experience implementing beanstalkd for the first time last week, so I thought I'd write down how that went and what I learned.
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Git Log All Branches
03 February 2014
Read moreI can't be the only person who always seems to be switching between multiple development branches. Sometimes I get distracted for a few days (I'm also part time, which doesn't help!) and then I can't even remember what I was doing or what the branch was called.
The remedy for this situation? The --all switch to git log.
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Ubuntu and the X220T Touch Screen
30 January 2014
Read moreI have a thinkpad laptop with a touchscreen and a swivel so it can fold up and pretend to be an oversized tablet. I like it a lot, but the touch screen interface hasn't been all that useful since I normally use this machine docked and then it maps the …
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Splitting And Combining Odd/Even Pages With Pdftk
20 January 2014
Read moreI'm working on a fun printable project at the moment, but part way through I realised I would need to process odd and even pages of the document separately. So separately, that I split the doc into two separate ones, with odd pages in one and event pages in another - and then had to recombine them. Here's the commands that I used, with an excellent tool called pdftk.
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Upcoming Git Courses
06 January 2014
Read moreThree git courses are coming up in the next few weeks, and a few people have asked me which courses I'm running, so here's a quick roundup (feel free to drop me a line if you need any more detail):
- Dublin, 30th January: Git and GitHub Foundations
- Dublin, 31st January …
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Git, Vimdiff, and Merge-Base
31 December 2013
Read moregit merge-base is this week's favourite git command. I use it to show me in a vimdiff everything that has changed on a particular branch since it was created. This took a little bit of looking around to find how to combine the tools, so I thought I'd write it all down in one place.
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Hiding Sections With Rst2pdf
19 December 2013
Read moreI've been using rst2pdf for slides for a year or so, but recently I've been converted to using it for everything from documents to emailed reports to handouts. Along the way there were a couple of cases where I wanted to create two similar documents, but one needed to omit some details. A great example is my ZCE questions pack, which when updated to PHP 5.5 I converted to restructuredText. By showing/hiding different sections of the document when I generate the PDF, I can maintain the questions and their answers side-by-side, then create the documents containing questions and answers separately. You could do the same with adding a notes field to slides that are hidden when presenting, but available for handouts.
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Printing Many PDFs Per Page
16 December 2013
Read moreMuch of my work revolves around documents or slides, and I use PDF format for pretty much everything I do. In the last year or so I've developed a love affair with rst2pdf which means I'm doing more PDF now than ever.
This weekend I was working on a project …
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DimpleJs Bubble/Scatterplots and Joind.in Data
10 December 2013
Read moreDimpleJs is a wrapper for d3, the javascript charting library, which makes beautiful charts but is way more complicated than I want to cope with, so I was looking for a helper toolkit. I've been using dimplejs lately and wanted to write down what I did while I can remember, but I didn't think my clients would thank me for publishing their data! Instead, I made some graphs using Joind.in's data, just pulling what I needed over the API.
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Open a GitHub Pull Request with Hub
09 December 2013
Read moreBoth in my professional life and in my personal life as an open source project lead, I spend a lot of time working with git in general, and GitHub in particular. GitHub publishes a command line tool called hub, which is a more convenient way than the website for doing a few specific tasks and in particular I've been using it more and more for opening pull requests.
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Doing Google Custom Search via API
02 December 2013
Read moreI'm working on a project that uses a search engine to show images on a particular topic ... but I need my search to be localised since I'm in the UK and so "football" doesn't mean what a generic search engine thinks it means. Getting this working was MUCH harder than I expected, so here's a quick post on what I did so that I can remember for next time - and if this helps you as well, then great :)