Category: tech

Error Feedback for Web Services
18 May 2009

I have been thinking, writing and speaking a little bit about web services recently, starting with a few thoughts on authorisation mechanisms for services. Today we'll look at another really important aspect of authoring web services, and one feature that will definitely get used - error handling and feedback! Having clear …
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Speaking at FOWA Tour, Leeds, May 28th
14 May 2009

I'm surprised and delighted to announce that I will be one of the speakers at the rather excellent FOWA Tour even in Leeds on 28th May (two weeks today!). The day is like a roadshow version of the famous FOWA conferences, with a morning of (free!) cloud workshops and an …
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Leeds GirlGeek Dinner 27th May 2009
13 May 2009

I'm delighted to hear that the date has been set for the next Leeds GirlGeek Dinner - Wednesday May 27th 2009! I've been really enjoying this series of events and always meet some really interesting ladies when I attend these events. The idea is to get geek girls together for some …
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Presenting Under Linux: xrandr
11 May 2009

This is a mini-primer on using xrandr to configure a second screen under Linux, but first I'll start with some background.

I've been a linux user for a few years now but when I started working for Ibuildings I started giving presentations, either as a speaker or when delivering training …
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Kubuntu Freezing on Splash Screen after Jaunty Upgrade
02 May 2009

Today I upgraded a bunch of machines to the latest Kubuntu offering, version 9.04, or "Jaunty Jackalope". Well, it was all going a bit too well and when I came to upgrade my main work machine, a thinkpad T400, I ran into problems. There are a couple more kinks …
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Auth Mechanisms for Web Services
01 May 2009

Having been involved in quite a few service-related activities in the last year or so, I've been having a few thoughts about what I've learned from this and what decisions I make when designing a service. Hopefully there will be a few of these posts - but to start with, I'm …
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Quiet Diff
21 April 2009
I recently saw a problem that we were having difficulty replicating, despite assurances that both the code base we were replicating on and the one that exhibited the error were identical. They are large codebases and when I got copies of them both I tried to check for differences:
```
diff …
```
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Set Vim Shift Width
30 March 2009

I have had a problem with vim for a while. Although I have my tabstop set to 4, when I use >> or << to indent or undent (technical term) my code, it moves the code by 8 characters. As I'm now working with phpcodesniffer, I'm pretty motivated to get my editor …
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Ada Lovelace Day: Kathy Sierra
24 March 2009

In honour of Ada Lovelace Day, this is a blog post about a woman I admire in technology: Kathy Sierra.

I've been a big fan of Kathy's site for a number of years, hers was the first site I saw where eloquent prose was wrapped around technical and relevant content …
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Open Office Presenter View
17 March 2009

I was delighted to discover recently that Open Office have released a working version of their long-anticipated Presenter View. Both Powerpoint (from Microsoft) and Keynote (on the Mac) have these views which allow someone giving a presentation to see the current slide, the next slide(s), any notes associated with …
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Maker Faire UK
16 March 2009

Yesterday I took the opportunity to pop along to the Maker Faire in Newcastle - its so exciting to see events like these in the UK! The marquee there was pretty small but what it had was great fun. I saw several things there that had me really drooling - one was …
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Simple SVN Merging
10 March 2009

Today I had a big SVN merge to do - i'm at the end of a development cycle and I needed to merge my branch of changes back into trunk. I dug out my crib sheet for merging and tweeted that I had - and a few people asked me to blog …
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