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Quick-Start Guide for Google Charts API
17 January 2011
Read moreGoogle Charts API is a nice, freely available tool for creating really good-looking graphs very painlessly. Don't be fooled by the "API" bit though, there is no need for advanced understanding of HTTP here - you generate most graphs just by adding parameters to a URL! In this post we'll take a look at a few different ways to generate charts.
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Navigating Bash History with Ctrl+R
14 January 2011
Read moreI spend a lot of time at command line, and bash records the history of all the commands I've typed and puts it in .bash_history (there's a limit on how many it stores but for me it goes back a few days). I find it really useful to look back …
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Github API: Issues List
10 January 2011
Read moreI'm deeply involved with an open source development project (joind.in, the event feedback site) and we recently made the decision to move our issue tracking away from GitHub (because it's awful and meets none of the requirements for a bug tracker, but that's a post for another day). In order to make this happen more smoothly, we wanted to migrate our open issues from github (to JIRA Studio, since Atlassian generously provides accounts here for worthy open source projects - thanks Atlassian!).
I looked around for some export functionality for github but I got a lot of posts complaining it wasn't there. Since I hate applications that take your data and refuse to let you remove it, I was disappointed by this news but further inspection showed that although there might be no "export from github" button, there's an API that more than has it covered. The API returns JSON which is easy to work with from many programming languages, and is perhaps even more powerful and flexible than the simple export I initially expected, so here are some examples.
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Adding Multiple Axis Labels to a Google Chart
06 January 2011
Read moreRecently I've been working on a project using Google Charts API and I absolutely love it. It makes pretty graphs and shows data really nicely - and it's very painless. I did trip over a little trick today though which took me a little while to work out, so I thought …
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Launching Links in Opera from Command Line
27 December 2010
Read moreI'm an Opera user but I use a number of applications from the command line, and often I want to launch links from those applications into my web browser. I've just switched over to reading my feeds using canto (web applications are becoming decreasingly accessible these days, although I'm saving …
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Speaking at DIBI
22 December 2010
Read moreIn June 2011 I'll be speaking at a rather awesome event called DIBI at the Sage in Gateshead (if you're a southerner, then Gateshead is near Newcastle, which is "up north"). DIBI stands for "Design It, Build It" and has two tracks, one focussing on development and one focussing on …
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OAuth Google API for Unregistered Applications
17 December 2010
Read moreIt is pretty common when using OAuth for there to be a relationship between the provider and consumer; as a consumer you usually register with the provider to obtain a consumer key and consumer secret. Google's APIs however do not require this. It is recommended that you register your application …
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Skills Analysis for Teams
06 December 2010
Read moreWhen I spoke at PHPNW10 in October, I talked about teams, skills and the importance of benchmarking things in order to illustrate improvements. If you didn't see the talk, the video and slides are linked off the conference site. In particular I talked about the importance of analysing skills in a team, then improving them, then analysing again to see how things had changed. This post is about that process, some techniques that might apply, and what to do with the results when you get them.
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256 Colours in Vim
15 November 2010
Read moreRecently I've been looking at different vim colorschemes, after using vimdiff and finding I couldn't see half of the code. I've been using relaxedgreen for ages, and it is excellent but I find the blue really hard to see on my black background so I was in the market for an alternative.
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Curl and Cookies
12 November 2010
Read moreI noticed the other day that the cheat sheet I have on this site for curl doesn't show how to use cookies, so I thought I'd remedy that omission, and quickly! Being able to use the command line to authenticate and then go on and use part of a site …
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Is Enum Evil?
20 October 2010
Read moreWhen I work on database designs, either on my own projects or as advisor to others, I often find people very reluctant to use an enum type for any columns. Now, I'm not about to advocate the gratuitous use of an enum column, they definitely have some pitfalls, but I think it is important to understand these rather than just shouting "enum evil!" if anyone should mention them.
There are cases where an enum is the correct choice for a particular type of data, so let's look at what an enum type actually is and does.
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Return on Investment: Example
12 October 2010
Read moreI gave a talk at the weekend which talked in outline terms about Return on Investment or ROI. It was a keynote so I skated over the details, but I wanted to include a specific example to illustrate what I meant.
Imagine the scenario where, given 3 days to work …