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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.
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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.