From the yearly archives:

2009

Shwartzian Transform

December 24, 2009

I was trying to merge sort a list of files based on their last modified date when someone said to me “do a schwartzian”. Now, I had no idea what they were talking about so off to google I went.
It’s basically this (shamelessly ripped from the excellent Wikipedia article):

Read the full article →

Finding which package a file belongs to on Debian

December 14, 2009

With Debian there is a handy utility called apt-file which allows you to see which package owns a file even if it is not currently installed.
I used it earlier to find where “mysql_config” lived so I could upgrade DBD::mysql.
aptitude install apt-file && apt-file update then apt-file search filename

Read the full article →

Running a unix command as a background process

December 14, 2009

If you run a command and it takes a long time on unix it blocks the current terminal, however, if you hit CTRL – Z it pauses the job, then if you type bg it resumes the job in the background freeing up the current terminal.
Also, if you prepend a & before executing the command [...]

Read the full article →

Tweetfactor – An experiment using Ruby, Sinatra, Twitter and Redis

December 8, 2009

I stumbled across a blog post by digitalhobbit about building a little Sinatra App on top of the Twitter Streaming API.
I followed that guide and made the core of Tweetfactor a couple of weeks ago. Actually getting the thing deployed, however, was pretty involved for me, having never used Rack/Passenger/God etc. etc.

Read the full article →

Kill A Process Using It’s PID File

December 7, 2009

Quick Tip: kill $(cat /var/run/redis.pid)
I needed to do that earlier and didn’t know how.
EDIT: Turns out you can just do this as well: kill `cat /var/run/redis.pid`

Read the full article →

An Analysis of Amazon against Neilson’s Usability Principles

November 4, 2009

Using Nielson’s Usability Principles devise an evaluation plan to assess the ‘quality’ of the site. Your answer should clearly identify where improvements can be made.
Neilson’s Usability Principles provide a set of guidelines or principles that should be kept in mind when developing user interfaces. The following analysis will look at each of the [...]

Read the full article →

Usability and Human Computer Interaction (HCI) Analysis of Amazon

November 4, 2009

One of my Advanced Software Engineering sub-modules at university is HCI and we’ve been given a practice assignment to assess the HCI aspects and usability of a publicly available website.
I shall be taking a look at Amazon – specifically the homepage, a product page and a purchasing page.
The questions are as follows and shall be [...]

Read the full article →

Using TheSchwartz (Job Queue) with Catalyst

November 2, 2009

TheSchwartz is a job queue module written by the guy(s) behind LiveJournal. It simply allows you to add jobs to a queue, in this case a database, and then have scripts watching the queue (database) and running work tasks when jobs arrive that they know how to deal with.
I wrote down how I used [...]

Read the full article →

StackOverflow #devdays Recap

October 29, 2009

Yesterday Malachi (my flat mate) No wait, actually: On Tuesday evening, Malachi and myself headed to Newcastle at about 11pm to catch a night bus to London. Why would we put ourselves through this torture?! (It really was that bad – we figured the coach would be empty and we could spread out, unfortunately [...]

Read the full article →

Open Melody, Homebrew, Catalyst/Mojo and Sinatra.

September 25, 2009

I just wanted to quickly highlight some interesting projects I’ve come across lately…
Open Melody

Open Melody is a fork of the popular blogging [/social media] platform Moveable Type. Its aim is to be completely backward compatible with Moveable Type but to have a more democratic development style.

Read the full article →

← Previous Entries