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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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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 :)
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Git Add Interactive
25 November 2013
Read moreIn common with most development projects these days, I'm using git more and more. It's interesting though that the way that I use this tool just keeps on changing and evolving even after about 4 years of regular use. Today I thought I'd share a new habit that I've developed: using git's ability to stage changes interactively.
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Working with R and Vim
20 November 2013
Read moreI'm a long-time vim user, starting to use R for some of the data tasks I do and in a Coursera course I'm taking at the moment. RStudio is the tool for working with R, it runs on Linux and it's really cool ... but it's awkward to work with a …
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Chrome Feature: Copy as cURL
04 November 2013
Read moreI surprised someone with my leet skills the other with this technique, so I thought I'd share it on the blog in case anyone else hadn't seen it - I use it ALL the time :) Chrome has a feature which allows you to copy a web request as a curl request, so you see all the various elements of the request on the command line.
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Ada Lovelace Day 2013: Donna Benjamin
15 October 2013
Read moreHappy Ada Lovelace Day! Today I'd like to take the time to write about a technical woman who has influenced me this year, and someone whom I imagine will be surprised to read this. Her name is Donna Benjamin, but you may know her as @kattekrab.
Donna's been a virtual friend for a few years; I "intermet" her when I was preparing to host the Dutch PHP Conference in Amsterdam, in 2010. I had some great role models from the PHP community to show me how to "ringmaster" at a big conference, but I was unsure how it would look on a woman. Having already done a similar role for PHPNW, I'd had negative feedback about being teacherish (something that I still get complaints about), and I wasn't sure how else to wear that role. Lots of things work well for men but not for women (silly things, swearing on stage (this differs between cultures), asking for a pay rise, falling out of bed into whatever free conference shirt you were given yesterday ....) and I was determined not to turn myself into a decorative but ditsy hostess.
My good friend Kathy Reid talked through my anxieties with me, and sent me a link to a video of Donna introducing an even more major conference: Donna organised Linux Conf AU and the video showed her introducing it with equal helpings of excellence, approachability, and entertainment. Confident that I wasn't alone, I stopped worrying and gave that conference my best shot.
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Simple Video Editing on Ubuntu
12 September 2013
Read moreIn this series of posts about my screencasting toolchain, I've already written about using wmctrl to resize windows accurately and about using Kazam to capture snippets of video from various applications. This post describes my adventures in trying to glue the video snippets together.
Graphical Video Editing
For most people …
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Generating HTML from Markdown with Pandoc
10 September 2013
Read moreI'm writing more and more things that are not code these days, and my content-managing toolchains are becoming more developed all the time. I've written in REstructured Text, Asciidoc, and LaTeX, and today I'm working on an article which eventually wants to be HTML but I'm creating in Markdown because …
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Screencasting in Ubuntu: Kazam
05 September 2013
Read moreIf you've ever seen a live demo, you will know that these things are fraught with danger. Even if the wifi works, the presenter knows what they are doing, and nothing crashes, you'll often end up watching someone explaining something to their laptop in detail, or clearly demonstrating their inability to type. Either way, it doesn't make good, informative content, which is why I never ever demo in a conference talk - I'm there to entertain and time is always of the essence. At this point, you can probably guess why I'm writing a blog post about my screencasting toolchain - I simply pre-record whatever it is that I want to show in the talk.
On an ubuntu platform, I've had a few false starts with video over the years, and mostly avoided it. But now my "Debugging HTTP" talk really does make more sense if you can see the process of something broken, what the tools show, and how to understand that information and fix the problem.