Adam

Perl Ain’t Dead…

by Adam on March 3, 2010

in Code

I just stumbled across this whole other Perl eco-system I wasn’t aware existed, which is very much a mirror of the exciting/interesting things going on in Ruby/Python land.

I tend to hear a lot about Ruby, and less about Perl, from hacker news and other places so I hadn’t seen any of this new Perl stuff.

I absolutely love Sinatra (a micro Ruby web DSL) but it turns out there is a perl port – Dancer! I haven’t had a chance to try it out yet but plan to ASAP.

[continue reading…]

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Adam

Current Geek Reading List

by Adam on February 3, 2010

in Ramblings

I got an Amazon delivery today of some new books to add to my pile I’m working my way through. I am currently reading:

Extreme Programming Explained – I’m project managing a group of 2nd year computer scientists and am using some of the principles from XP in my approach. Mostly just the iterative style of development. Pivitol Tracker is a great help with this – a really simple, light weight agile management tool.

Waltzing with Bears – This came today and is all about risk management, it’s a recommended book for a risk management sub-module I’m taking.

Domain Driven Design – This also came today. I bought it after watching a Windy City Rails video about UI Design where it was highly recommended.

The Web Startup Success Guide – Had this for a little while now but I haven’t read too much of it yet. Hoping it will inspire me to make $$$$$$$ via the internet, we shall see!

I also feel I should try and re-read The Mythical Man Month as it is a collection of classic software engineering essays but I found pretty dry the first time round.

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Nginx 502 Bad Gateway Error

February 1, 2010

If you get the following error thrown from nginx:
“upstream sent too big header while reading response header from upstream”
you might well need to increase your proxy header sizes in the config to:

proxy_connect_timeout 90;
proxy_send_timeout 180;
proxy_read_timeout 180;
proxy_buffer_size 16k;
proxy_buffers 8 16k;
proxy_busy_buffers_size 32k;
proxy_intercept_errors on;

We were stuffing quite a few cookies in the header for session related things and apparently [...]

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Introducing Twitdevs – Gig Finder for Freelancers over Twitter

January 26, 2010

Today I launched Twitdevs. It is an extremely beta release, very much taking the philosophy of “if you’re not embarrassed by your first release you’ve waited too long”.

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User-Interface and Design Evaluation

January 20, 2010

Evaluation is the process of systematically collecting data that informs us about what it is like for a particular user or group of users to use a product for a particular task in a certain type of environment.
Evaluation is important because designers can’t presume that following design guidelines guarantees good usability.

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User-Centered Interaction Design

January 20, 2010

Design is a practical and creative activity where the intent is to develop a product that helps users achieve their goals.
To develop a product we need to know:

What is required of it?
Who the users are?
Will the users know what they need?

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Software Accessibility

January 20, 2010

Accessibility is making computer systems usable by those who have a disability so they are not disadvantaged over other users in any way.
Most accessibility work is based on web-based software, as this is a public representation of a company. However, the general principles are applicable to all software development.
Some issues are now mandated by [...]

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How Interfaces Affect Users

January 20, 2010

The concern of software engineers is to investigate how interactive systems be designed to make people respond in certain ways. One way is to use expressive icons and other graphical elements to convey emotional states.

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The Mechanics of Interaction

January 20, 2010

Cognitive load theory (CLT) is an area of research that provide a solid theoretical foundation for guidelines for constructing e-learning content in a way that enhances learning.
According to the theory, learning will be impaired if the learning content causes a cognitive overload, which is easy because the working memory has a very limited [...]

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What Is Interaction Design?

January 20, 2010

Products need to be usable, meaning:

easy to learn
effective to use
provide an enjoyable experience for users

Designers need to understand what kind of activities people are doing when interacting with the products.

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