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Accurate Ubuntu Window Sizing with Wmctrl
28 August 2013
Read moreI'm working on a bunch of screencasts at the moment (more posts to come) and one of the things that tripped me up the most was getting all the windows the same size, so that the resulting videos are the same size and can easily be put back together. Enter …
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Ttytter: Command Line Twitter Tweaks
04 July 2013
Read moreI've been using ttytter for quite a while, it's a superbly inoffensive twitter client - and it's console-based. This makes it easy to use from the keyboard, fast, and also makes it look a bit less like twitter if that's not something people should be seeing over your shoulder!
I have customised a few settings which I find superhelpful, so I thought I'd share my config file and say a bit about some of the entries in there. The config for ttytter is held in a file called .ttytterrc in my home directory. Mine looks like this:
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DC4D 6: Not-Programming for Programmers
25 June 2013
Read moreIn case you haven't seen the news, the next episode of Day Camp 4 Developers is coming up on Friday 26th July. This edition is about getting beyond being awesome at the code, which we know that you are, and picking up some other skills to complete you as a profesional. Whether you work in a large international corporation, a smaller company, or alone, we've got content that will make a difference.
Day Camp 4 Developers is a virtual conference, and it's $40 (about 25 quid for UK people). If you can't make it on the day, just get the video ticket and download the recorded sessions later. What I'm trying to say in this paragraph is that there are quite literally no excuses for missing out on this :)
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Are Subqueries RESTful?
13 June 2013
Read moreTwitter is great for one-liners, but it's very difficult to carry on any kind of advanced conversation there. Therefore when I saw this tweet yesterday, I knew I'd be picking a different medium to reply:
@lornajane sory for getting on your nervs with #rest,but are subquerys (like couchDB does) restfull to? is there a rule? like .../?type=bla
— Maximilian 'Berghoff (@ElectricMaxxx) June 12, 2013
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What Goes in Source Control?
29 April 2013
Read moreShort answer: everything! However we need some good directory structures and source control configuration to make that a really practical answer, so this article is a quick outline of my usual advice for a good source control structure for a standard web project. The examples are for a PHP project but I'm sure you could apply this to your own language of choice, also.
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Pretty-Printing JSON with Python's JSON Tool
15 April 2013
Read moreToday's quick tip is something that was widely retweeted after my "Debugging HTTP" talk at the ever-fabulous WhiskyWeb conference last weekend. When working with JSON on the commandline, here's a quick tip for showing the JSON in a nicer format:
curl http://api.joind.in | python -mjson.tool
You need …
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Installing XHGui
07 March 2013
Read moreThere's a new version of XHGui (well, a few months old) and it's fabulous! It's got a few new dependencies though so I thought I'd write down how I set up my version, in case it's helpful to anyone else (and so I feel like a pro next time I have to do this!). If you're not familiar with XHGui it's a fabulously easy and friendly way to profile your application; to understand which method calls in a page take the time and how many times they are made, so you can improve the performance of your application. All these instructions are for my 32-bit Ubuntu 12.10 system, hopefully they will work for you or you'll be able to adapt them as appropriate.
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Endpoints for HTTP Testing
07 February 2013
Read moreWhile working on a book ("PHP Web Services" from O'Reilly, not out yet but soon!) recently, I was looking for some place I could make HTTP requests to, to show off how to make different kinds of requests with different tools. On my own machine, I have a couple of scripts that chatter back giving debug information about the requests that were made, but I wanted to get the tools examples going without any additional dependencies at all. I hadn't used anything like these tools before, but I found quite a few alternatives, so I thought I'd share what I came up with.
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Printing PDF Bookmarks List
30 January 2013
Read moreI work with PDF a lot, and it bothers me that I can see an outline view when I open the document, but I don't seem to be able to grab just that view. My presentations are mostly PDF and the titles and section headings show up nicely. Today I …
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Five Clues That Your API isn't RESTful
23 January 2013
Read moreI get a lot of emails asking me to get involved with API projects, and that means I see a lot of both implemented and planned "RESTful" APIs. Now, I absolutely love REST and for a data-driven application, it would be my first choice. A service of some other description may work better for other scenarios or skill sets, and non-RESTful services can be very, very useful. If you tell me that your service is RESTful, then I expect it to be. If you're not sure, look out for these clues:
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Random Colours with the Blink(1)
08 January 2013
Read moreRecently, there was a great project on kickstarter to make a USB RGB LED. I missed it completely but thankfully my husband didn't, and recently a small package arrived containing _two_ of these lovely little blink(1) devices (very smart man, as clearly this was something I couldn't live without as soon as I saw it!).
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You're Not Using Source Control? Read This!
07 January 2013
Read moreLast week I wrote an email to a client who hasn't yet implemented source control, but who is thinking about it. It turned into rather a long email as I attempted to convey WAY too much information in one long email. After some twitter banter, I repackaged my thoughts into a whitepaper on Source Control entitled You're not using source control? Read This! (PDF, no registration needed).
The document goes on to talk about the available tools (git, Hg, SVN) and give a sales pitch for _why_ source control has benefits for an organisation. There are also some action points to follow to implement source control if you haven't already taken the leap, which I hope will help anyone looking to take that step - it's kind of awkward in this day and age to admit that your organisation doesn't have source control, but however this situation arose, hopefully this document wraps up my thoughts on how to find a good way out!