-
Word Count
08 February 2010
Read moreThere's a little command line utility on *nix which I use a lot - it's wc or "word count". This is especially useful to because I live in a world where everything is plain text right up until I have to send it to someone else (and sometimes not even then …
-
Contributing to Projects on GitHub
26 January 2010
Read moreRecently I've been contributing to the code project behind joind.in, the event information and feedback site. I rely on joind.in a lot and after putting up with a frankly astonishing volume of feature requests from me, its owner Chris Cornutt very politely suggested that I might like to …
-
Screen in Ubuntu Karmic
15 January 2010
Read moreI have written about screen quite often, mostly including my .screenrc file and showing how to have named tabs for the various screen tabs you have open. When Ubuntu Jaunty came out, I found it had some quite cool enhancements that made the customisations for screen really easy by default …
-
Silencing Curl's Progress Output
29 December 2009
Read moreI seem to have been writing a lot of shell scripts to do things with curl lately, and the main difference with piping curl's output to somewhere rather than just looking at it on the screen is that curl will then start outputting a whole bunch of progress information that …
-
Cookies and Curl
21 December 2009
Read morecurl is the C URL library - its a command-line tool for making web requests, with libraries available in many languages. Personally I prefer to use it from the command line and recently I have been using it with cookies for a web services which set a cookie at login and …
-
New Camera: Fuji Finepix F70
17 December 2009
Read moreRecently I've had a new gadget in my life - a Fuji Finepix F72, which is really an F70 but exclusive to Jessop's in a different colour (I have no idea why retailers do this but hey, it means mine is shiny black).
The camera is a birthday/christmas gift from …
-
Sound Issues with Kubuntu Karmic Koala
15 December 2009
Read moreSince upgrading my work machine to karmic koala, I've noticed that my sound had stopped working. There were some broken packages in aptitude and Skype knew there was a problem as it notified me when I tried to make a call. I saw some issues reported with karmic, notably this …
-
Email As a Means of Social Communication
16 November 2009
Read moreRecently I've been spending a lot of time away from home, and busy with clients within office hours, which means I'm not available via my usual real-time communication mechanisms. This has given me the opportunity to enjoy email as a means of staying in touch with people that I would …
-
Burndown Charts
10 November 2009
Read moreDisclaimer: I am not an expert on this topic and have never studied it formally. This is purely an explanation of how I've seen these charts used within Ibuildings and included in my talk Passing the Joel Test in the PHP World which triggered lots of questions and tweeting.
Burndown …
-
Speaking at Bradford LUG
23 October 2009
Read moreNext week I'm taking the plunge and attending a LUG (Linux User Group) meeting for the first time when I attend the Bradford LUG meeting on Wednesday as a speaker. I'll be giving my talk "Working With Web Services" which I'll give at PHP Barcelona a mere 36 hours later …
-
Portugal and The Internet Cafe
05 October 2009
Read moreThings may have seemed a bit quiet around here lately - that's because I spent last week in the Algarve in southern Portugal. My sister is working in a hotel there as head nanny, I think she's spent 8 days of 2009 in the UK so this is about the only …
-
Working at The Hub, Bristol
28 September 2009
Read moreA couple of weeks ago I had some friends coming to the UK for a little while, but they were staying in Bristol and I live in Leeds. My weekends were pretty full so I wasn't sure if I would get to see them - but since I telecommute I can …