February 2012
2 posts
5 tags
So you wanna use Windows...
Those who know me are aware of the fondness I have for working with Windows in particular in the context of development. Whatever I think, however, many people choose, or are obliged, to develop on the platform. Depending on your chosen development tools, this can be more or less straight forward.
Consider this scenario: you’re a LAMP-stack developer (in this case, P is for Python)....
4 tags
Testing Paypal with sandbox
I’ve been testing out django-paypal with a view to using it on a new site. I was always quite against using Paypal - the ‘image’ doesn’t seem right and there are horror stories about non-existent customer service when they decide to stop accepting payments for you at seemingly arbitrary moments.
However, convenience wins sometimes, and the user experience (especially with...
October 2011
1 post
6 tags
we like: uShare + Bravia
New telly is fun. It can play any content from DLNA server and uShare is an apt-get install away from an Ubuntu prompt… and it all just works! I shouldn’t be amazed, but I am.
September 2011
1 post
6 tags
Realtek 8191SE WiFi on Thinkpad Edge13... again
Once again WiFi on the Edge flakes out. This time it’s a new broadband router furnished by O2. We’ve been upgraded from the O2WirelessBox II to the O2WirelessBox IV. The excitement is almost… non-existant.
Key to this story is the addition of wireless 802.11N which the Realtek card can handle. Except that it can’t with the Linux drivers (and it seems it flakes out on some...
August 2011
1 post
2 tags
My SSH config
Just in case you’re interested here’s my config. A great resource for some tricks with SSH (an amazing tool) is SSH Can do that?
# Enable connection sharing
ControlMaster auto
ControlPath /tmp/ssh_mux_%h_%p_%r
# Sometimes speeds up initial handshake
GSSAPIAuthentication no
Host *
ForwardAgent yes
ForwardX11 yes
Note that connection sharing is not always appropriate. The...
June 2011
1 post
2 tags
More strings for the Puppet
Automating system configuration is something every sysadmin should want to achieve. Even if you don’t have physical boxes to configure and manage on a regular basis, increasingly we use virtualisation to spin up machines everywhere from a developer box to the cloud (e.g. EC2) and these machines all need to go from zero to hero, preferably without human intervention.
Tools to automate the job of...
May 2011
1 post
3 tags
http://ifconfig.me/host →
You want your external hostname when stuck inside an AWS EC2 instance? Handy.
March 2011
2 posts
4 tags
Ubuntu 10.04 on EC2
Not the most thrilling of titles, to be sure, but if you’re looking to dive into the world of Amazon Web Services by starting up some EC2 instances from the Canonical AMIs then my working notes may be of interest. I encountered a couple of problems on the way, but little that did more than expose my ignorance!
The scenario: I want to spool up servers which will run Ubuntu 10.04 LTS...
1 tag
“My enthusiastic little pointy friend is Toothy, and he’s impaling a...”
– Amy Hoy, unicorn free: http://bit.ly/eyWbxn
February 2011
1 post
5 tags
Toys of the week: pika and redis
Always interested in loose coupling and distributed processing I’ve finally got around to playing with Redis, the key-value store that has typed values and also provides pub/sub messaging. One value type is a list from which one can pop and to which one can push and I’ve been playing with this using the Python redis-py library.
Redis is intriguing as it is an alternative, for some...
November 2010
1 post
Happiness is a capacitor replaced
In his book “The Case for Working with Your Hands: or Why Office Work is Bad for Us and Fixing Things Feels Good”, Matthew B. Crawford explores the reasons why manual labour such as repairing a motorbike, building a wall or repairing an item of furniture, is both pleasurable and beneficial. It is a manifesto for the restoration of what, in my day, was called CDT (Craft, Design and...
August 2010
2 posts
2 tags
Bartech #3
Another great Bartech CTO meetup last night in Noho. Some really interesting discussion on the matters that are top of our minds - hiring and making tech work within an organisation using what ever means available - SCRUM/kanban/agile/lean/kanbean/scrumban… Looking forward to Bartech #4 already!
1 tag
Is that site down for everyone, or just me? →
How useful is this!? Does what it says on the tin - great for filtering out false positives from another alerting system maybe.
June 2010
1 post
2 tags
Wordle tag clouds →
Still a great fun site - try a word cloud of your emails, your blog, Twelfth Night…
May 2010
1 post
2 tags
Alternativeto.net →
Find software that is like something else, e.g. what can I use instead of Photoshop? Of course it’s excellent for finding open alternatives to commercial applications so might help people transition between operating systems more easily.
April 2010
4 posts
2 tags
FlightRadar24 →
Unbelievably neat map overlaid with flight data acquired from ADS-B transponders fitted in many aircraft. At the time of writing it makes clear where volcanic ash has closed airspace.
2 tags
Ubuntu 10.04 on LVM
I never get partition sizes right; too much root, too little root etc. So I’m going to re-build my notebook with LVM partitioning, just for kicks. Ubuntu Server CDs support LVM install from the “Expert” mode, but it doesn’t look like the desktop variants do. Given that they save me a fair bit of work subsequently, I’ll therefore work around that.
My starting point...
4 tags
ThinkPad Edge: Skype...
Hot on the heals of the WiFi issue solved yesterday, we have a Skype problem. Here are the observations:
Gnome sound recorder works fine, records from mic
Playback is fine
Run Skype, make test call. Nothing.
Now Gnome sound recorder fails to record anything: it immediately stops when you hit record.
Now you’re stuck. Reboot. Still recording is broken throughout. So how do we get around...
4 tags
Lenovo ThinkPad Edge WiFi with Ubuntu 10.04
The Lenovo Thinkpad Edge is a rather nice notebook from the budget end of the Lenovo range. It makes savings in the right places (screen not quite as high res as the expensive models; no carbon fibre; fewer things that blink) whilst retaining a solid, well built feel. Just one problem: under Ubuntu (Lucid - 10.04) the wifi doesn’t really work…
NB: As of the update providing kernel...
March 2010
4 posts
1 tag
http://gephi.org/ →
Data junky porn just itching for a dataset to play with!
1 tag
StickyBits: another "why didn't I do that?" moment →
2 tags
Android scripting environment →
Alpha project to provide scripting support in many languages including Ruby and Python on the Android platform, my latest toy. Look forward to playing with this.
1 tag
Bartech #2
Another great night with a few of London’s dot.com technology leaders. It’s always great to get together with passionate, motivated people in the industry and the result, once again, is new relationships forged, possible new projects and collaboration across organisations and disciplines.
Amongst those at the table we had representatives of ecommerce, visual effects, social web and...