Author Archives: admin
Cheffin ain’t EZ for beginners
When I first set out to learn Chef I found that most of the blog posts, tutorials and even the Opscode Help pages themselves were a bit difficult to understand, to say the least. The ontology surrounding Chef is pretty … Continue reading
Music piracy geocaching wins prize at Music Hack Day!
I had a fun time at Music Hack Day London 2010, despite only being there physically for the Saturday. The team, made up of Yves, Chris and myself, with camerawork provided by Patrick, created an Android app to discover musical … Continue reading
Purchasing an RDS reserved instance in eu-west-1
After Amazon’s announcement that they’d released reserved instances for Amazon RDS, I decided to purchase a small instance to save the $300-odd per year by buying a one-year reservation.
CruiseControl.rb rake task for running rspec and cucumber with a single test database
I wrote this rake task for running the rspec and cucumber tests for a Rails app whilst ensuring that only one database is used. It took a bit of Googling and lots of trial and error so thought I’d share … Continue reading
Implications of the Amazon CloudFront default root object
Amazon recently announced that their CloudFront service now supports serving of an arbitrary object at the root URL of a CloudFront domain. This means that Amazon S3 users can now host entire static sites using only S3 and CloudFront.
Optimising specs for ActiveRecord scopes and other database-dependent functionality
After recently switching to a lower-performance laptop for my regular development tasks, I decided to spend a bit of time cleaning up some long-running rspec examples. I found that some misunderstanding of rspec’s features had led me to write highly … Continue reading
Getting mobile and mobile internet whilst travelling in India
A word of warning to those wishing to travel to India and use a local SIM card, or stay connected to the net whilst on the move: getting a prepay mobile or GPRS / 3G SIM isn’t as easy as … Continue reading
Using Alt Gr to switch windows in Ubuntu
Now that I’m on the move for a couple of months, I’m using a Dell Inspiron Mini to do all my work. As soon as I switched away from my Macbook I missed using the right-hand ⌘ with Tab to … Continue reading
Geek anger management 101
I recently moved out of my office space in Hove, as I’m spending two months in Kerala, India, for a change of scenery. I’m so hard done by.
Brighton web development and design meetups
This past week, having finished a project and having a bit of free time to spare, I decided to do some digging and see what was going on in Brighton in terms of web development meetups. It turns out there’s … Continue reading