Backing up Delicious bookmarks to CouchDB
Last year I started researching how CouchDB could be used for the BodyGuard web-app QA platform. Unfortunately I had to put my tinkerings to one side when some extra freelance work came in; contracting during the day and freelancing in the evenings quickly put an end to any spare time and my fitness efforts took a hit but I was only self-employed for a short while and it seemed the thing to do.
Installing RMagick on Debian Lenny
Just a quick reminder to myself on how I installed RMagick on a Debian 5.0.4 “lenny” VPS. All commands to be run as root. Build ImageMagick from source curl -O ftp://ftp.imagemagick.org/pub/ImageMagick/ImageMagick.tar.gz tar xvzf ImageMagick.tar.gz -C /usr/src/ cd /usr/src/ImageMagick-6.6.6-6/ ./configure make make install Install the RMagick Gem gem install rmagick Bingo! As an interesting aside, ImageMagick handles a lot of image formats via delegate libraries. I previously installed RMagick on a CentOS box and had to separately install TrueType fonts which were necessary for the project in question.
Minder - a simple web-app monitoring tool written in Ruby
Background A few months ago I was tasked with migrating and maintaining a bunch of legacy Rails apps and a couple of them were misbehaving. Requests were hanging which was tying-up the front-end Apache child processes and resulting in all the web-apps on the server becoming unresponsive At the time I didn’t know what was causing the hanging requests, it wasn’t happening in a predictable manner and on the surface I had all the apps dependencies in place.
Is it raining in Belfast? Redux
Last year I created a nano-app which attempted to answer the question, is it raining in Belfast? I was never completely pleased with it but the objective was to get something done and get it done fast, which was achieved. This weekend I’ve been tinkering with another project and hit a bit of a stumbling block getting various pieces of software to co-exist. I decided a break from the problem would be beneficial but I still wanted to have some sense of achievement from the weekend and redeveloping this app seemed a good idea.
An experimental lifestream app
Some time ago DW and myself had an enthusiastic conversation about logging various aspects of our electronic lives: emails sent and received, RSS feeds read, incoming and outgoing phone calls, the list goes on. At that time I’d already started tinkering with apps to track my efforts in the gym and changes in my bodyweight, I’ve used notebooks for this for years and thought it’d be interesting to have this information in electronic form.
Rails 3 Hello World
The past while I’ve been busy providing technical consultancy to BT and haven’t had much drive to work on anything on my own time. The itch has returned the past couple of weeks though so I thought I’d see what I’ve been missing in the Rails world and in what better way than getting a basic Rails 3 app up and running. My environment was already setup for Rails 2.3.* and Yehuda Katz’ post served as a guide to get me up to speed with the beta loveliness.
Home time revisited - redeveloping a CakePHP application with Sinatra
I’ve just released the latest iteration of hometi.me, a little nano-app I’ve mentioned before. Deliberate Practice It’s only a trivial app but I’ve a bit of free time before the start of a contract so I thought it would be good practice to redevelop it, a task I’d been ignoring for a long time. Goodbye CakePHP, Hello Sinatra The original app was put together quickly with CakePHP, a PHP-based framework I’ve used since my first paid programming gig.
node-shoutbox - a simple node.js demo
Last month, at the inaugural Super Happy Dev Castle, my buddy Dave Rice told me about a project he was working on involving node.js, an event-based I/O system for Javascript. Javascript outside of the browser? This concept seemed almost ridiculous to me at that time but I thought it was worth a look and cobbled together a quick “Hello World.” I was greatly amused by creating a command-line app with Javascript but did nothing more about it until last week.
A dummy datasource for CakePHP
I was recently developing a project at work which at the beginning didn’t need a database. However, Cake was still testing the database connection and issuing a warning as a result when it couldn’t connect. My solution was to create a dummy datasource which silenced the warnings and allowed me to get on with the rest of development in relative peace. The scope of the project changed and a database was required.
Migrating a WordPress database between domains
Occassionally I find myself developing a WordPress theme which will then require moving from development into production or otherwise having to move a blog between domains. Apart from the transfer of the files, including plugins, theme and core WordPress installation, there is only 1 slightly gotcha: the database. I’ve never been quite sure why but WordPress stores the URL of the blog in it’s database, not once, but twice. For the blog to be migrated the database needs a slight tweak.