Stuff tagged tech
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2012 Bradford Hacktionlab Gathering Drupal Session
This year’s winter hacktionlab happened at Bradford’s lovely 1 in 12 Club. Here is my notes/writeup of the Saturday morning Drupal session.
Saturday Morning Drupal Clinic Read More …- 2012-01-21T15:45:50Z
- Published: 15:45:50 on Saturday, 21 January
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Scala - Day Three
Day three and I'm now sort of getting the hang of Scala. Either that or the excercise is easier! I think that in learning about the neat text processing tricks that Scala allows, it helped me to click with it a bit more than in previous days. I've also started to get more used to the type system. At least I didn't spend as many hours figuring that bit out today as in the last two days. Read More …
- 2011-12-11T17:05:23Z
- Published: 17:05:23 on Sunday, 11 December
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Scala - Day Two
It all seemed so straightforward at first. And it was. Until I needed to split an array into key value pairs for the second excercise. I spent about two hours trying to find a nice way f doing that. I'm not entirely happy with the way I came up with, but it works at least. Read More …
- 2011-12-10T17:29:49Z
- Published: 17:29:49 on Saturday, 10 December
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Scala - Day One
Tate compares Scala to Edward Scissorhands in his metaphorical introduction to the chapter. What I've seen of the language so far certainly made me feel it was a little on the odd side. Its just near enough to Java that it feels wrong when it works more Rubyishly or more Lispishly. The first day very much focussed on the very basics of the language, especially the more Java-like side of the language. In working my way through the homework and searching the internets for syntax examples, I've come across a fair bit of quite cool looking code. Mine isn't! Read More …
- 2011-12-08T22:08:58Z
- Published: 22:08:58 on Thursday, 8 December
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Prolog - Day Three
My fears of a mega hardcore third day of prolog were not realised, and I actually had some proper fun this time round. Mr. Tate is absolutely right that making a sudoku solver the prolog way is "almost magical". I've written sudoke solvers in perl before. And believe me it ain't pretty. With prolog you just plug in the rules, type it up and go home.
9sudoku.pl Read More …- 2011-12-04T16:25:53Z
- Published: 16:25:53 on Sunday, 4 December
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Prolog - Day Two
Day Two was challenging. Like really hard. My imperative mindset is finding the declarative approach to coding frankly odd. When things do work it feels almost magical. And in at least one of the solutions I just chanced upon the implementation by fiddling round pretyy randomly rather than having a clear mental model of a solution beforehand. I'm not sure if I could explain the logic at all.
reverse_list.pl Read More …- 2011-12-03T10:32:28Z
- Published: 10:32:28 on Saturday, 3 December
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Prolog - Day One
Its been a long time since I finished the Io section of my Seven Languages in Seven Weeks Journey. I realize that. Probably six months. That is doubleplus ungood. In my defence I must remind readers that I said at the outset that I might not do these on seven consecutive weeks. I'm just stretching the nonconsecutiveness as far as I can! Read More …
- 2011-12-01T22:22:14Z
- Published: 22:22:14 on Thursday, 1 December
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Seven Languages In Seven Weeks
There is an idea, popularized in the Pragmatic Programmer book that its good to learn a new programming language every year. Seven Languages In Seven Weeks takes the concept one stage further, although clearly only for certain values of "learning". One is never going to be proficient at any language in a week, despite what Sams books may tell you! Read More …
- 2011-10-15T14:37:59Z
- Published: 14:37:59 on Saturday, 15 October
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Tip: Upgrade Magento 1.5 from the commandline
One of the roles that I have at work is maintaining the Magento software that runs our ethical gift shop. I recently upgraded one of our Magento installs from 1.5.0.1 to 1.5.1 using the newly introduced mage commandline tool. As regular readers will know I am a bit of a CLI freak, and was happily impressed with mage. I wrote this as it took me some googling about to find how to make mage work.
Assumptions and prerequsites I've assumed that you've got ssh access to your server and that its a linux or unix server. I am assuming that you are upgrading Magento 1.5 or greater. If you are upgrading 1.4, you want to use the pear tool. There is a good Magento 1.4 upgrade tutorial at hostknox if that is what you are trying to accomplish. Please, please back up your database and codebase. You'll be glad of it when you set prefered_state to beta and find you've upgraded to 1.6 by accident. I know I did. If you are in a production environment, you'll want to take down your server or put a holding message up so that customers can't access Magento whilst you work. Let's Go! Read More …- 2011-09-01T13:11:18Z
- Published: 13:11:18 on Thursday, 1 September
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Samba: IP Alias Servers On Debian
Note: This post was written in 2008. It might or might not still work. I've not had time to test. YMMV!
Intro Read More …- 2011-08-25T12:34:28Z
- Published: 12:34:28 on Thursday, 25 August
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Lessons from Community Webhosting in Oxford: ox4.org
Back in 2008 me and my pal Penguin decided that it would be fun to have a webserver to play with. Nowadays, it doesn't cost much to have a virtual server with awesome hosts like Bytemark. But it still costs. Plus we wanted to provide a bit of a community activist resource. So, we figured that the best thing to do would be to share our server and use it as a resource for activism in Oxford. Well, we did that and now we're running a small scale activist orientated webhost, ox4.org — it's our postcode. We've learned some lessons along the way, and we carry on learning as we go. Read More …
- 2011-07-15T07:56:18Z
- Published: 07:56:18 on Friday, 15 July
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Cidered up techs in a field? Must be BarnCamp 2011!
This post is a slightly edited version of the BarnCamp 2011 blog post, which appeared on New Internationalist's tech blog. Read More …
- 2011-06-03T12:35:21Z
- Published: 12:35:21 on Friday, 3 June
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Io - Day Three
It all looked so easy, especially after the monster list of assignments on Io, day two. Well, appearances can be deceptive it seems. The place where I got stuck was on question three. Try as I might I couldn't override the colon operator as I wanted to do. It worked fine on the commandline. No problem at all. But once the code was in a file, no dice. I just saw variations of:
Exception: Sequence does not respond to ':'Eventually, after a stentorian swearing session, I came across a post from Ola Bini on yahoo groups in a vaguely-titled thread called Question from "7 languages in 7 weeks". It seems that you can't override the operator table if it has already been used to read the current file. But, you can read your data from another file or using doString to get round this. Once I changed that everything suddenly became a bit more Ferris Bueller-like once more.
0. builder2.io Read More …- 2011-05-30T18:48:43Z
- Published: 18:48:43 on Monday, 30 May
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Video: FeedMash - A Perl/Catalyst RSS Masher-Upper and Twitter-izer
Update 2011-01-31: Well, life got in the way of getting this out in January, let's see if it will come out in Feb!Read More …
- 2011-05-19T11:23:20Z
- Published: 11:23:20 on Thursday, 19 May
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Video: Quick HTML Editing With Vim
This is the minimalistest of minimalist web casts, just to show off the awesomeness of a couple of vim modules for quick html h4x0ring. Specifically Surround and snipMate. w00t!Read More …
- 2011-05-19T11:22:02Z
- Published: 11:22:02 on Thursday, 19 May
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Tool: Twitter RSS Feed Getter
User:
What's this? Read More …- 2011-05-19T11:17:06Z
- Published: 11:17:06 on Thursday, 19 May
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Backtrack5, on an encrypted USB filesystem and nouveau driver
Backtrack Linux has become increasingly useful to me over the last few months. The latest release Backtrack 5 came out on 10 May, so I, of course wanted to have a play. Just a little background on Backtrack. Its specifically aimed at security professionals and hackers and has everything that you might need to do information security work, digital forensics, pen testing and so on. The new release brings a GNOME desktop – the previous version was a KDE-only distro – which is a big deal for me. Its got the shinyness of Ubuntu with the focus of a proper infosec distro. Very, very good. Read More …
- 2011-05-18T21:45:02Z
- Published: 21:45:02 on Wednesday, 18 May
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Io - Day Two
Wow. Day two messed with my head. I woke up a bit tired this morning to have a crack at it and got really baffled by how to make a fibonacci sequence. Just drew a total blank. So, I dug out some old c code I had and copied that into io. Which is sort of cheating, but got me going and also helped me feel a bit more comfortable with the language. Like Tate says, feeling comfortable with a new language is often about typing some code. Well, my homework excercises with some commentary looked like this.
1. fib.io Read More …- 2011-05-15T14:20:09Z
- Published: 14:20:09 on Sunday, 15 May
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Muffet: A Perl Web Spider
Muffet is a web spider written in Perl and Moose that I've put up on github, under GPL. Read More …- 2011-05-12T15:56:51Z
- Published: 15:56:51 on Thursday, 12 May
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Io - Day One
After getting Io installed, I am feeling a little smug with myself. I don't know if its just because the language is so different, or because I've had a beer or what but the Io introductory material seems more complex than that for Ruby. However, looking back at what was covered I suspect that there was actually less material. Io is an extremely minimalist language with a tiny and beautifully consistent syntax. In day one we look at the basics of the syntax -- messages, inheritence, prototypes, slots, methods and the basic collections, lists and maps (read arrays and hashes, roughly). We also get a quick interview with Steve Dekorte, the language's creator. Read More …
- 2011-05-08T15:34:58Z
- Published: 15:34:58 on Sunday, 8 May
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Io - Day 0, setting it up on Debian
Well, it has been a while since Ruby, so I thought it was time to have a crack at the next of the my Seven Languages In Seven Weeks challenges, its time to play with Io. As it turns out Io was a bit of a faff to install on Debian Squeeze. So I've written up a day 0 tute on how to do just that. I've found a combination of the advice from Tim Hardy and from Eric Hogue on the Seven Languages Forums, advice from the install guide, this post, installing the io language from Brian Racer and installing stuff from the aptitude curses interface got me there in the end.
Install the dependencies Read More …- 2011-05-08T13:39:37Z
- Published: 13:39:37 on Sunday, 8 May
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One liner: Find all javascript files used by a website
Just thought I'd document this as its likely to be the sort of thing that others might need. I was doing a bit of a tidyup of our javascript files on the global justice site New Internationalist and I needed to know which javascript files were still in use. Its a recursive grep for .js files right. Well almost. I used the little-known -o parameter for grep, along with -h to make sure I only got a list of .js files enclosed in quotes -- I didn't care which files referenced them. I then removed the quotes, which had to be there for greppage with tr. Next I piped the output through sort -u to get me unique occurences. I might have used -c if I'd needed to know how often files were referenced. Finally I dumped the whole lot into a file. Job done.
$ grep -rhoE "[A-Za-z\.-_]+.js" /var/www/mysite/ | tr -s '"' '\0' | sort -u > 2011-04-05-mysite-all-js-files.txtRead More …- 2011-04-27T15:35:50Z
- Published: 15:35:50 on Wednesday, 27 April
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Ruby - Day Three
The last day is definitely the most fun. We get to play with metaprogramming with one bigger question, of which more shortly. My reflections on Ruby were it was cool to catch up with the language. I'd sort of forgotten quite how nifty it was to play with. For my money its more Perlish than the other popular OO scripting language Python, which is a very good thing in my book. Perhaps, I'll make something with Ruby rather than Perl next time I'm hacking a project, who knows? Read More …
- 2011-04-12T21:59:02Z
- Published: 21:59:02 on Tuesday, 12 April
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Gmail de-ad greasemonkey script
NOTE Google changed the gmail API some time ago. I haven't been able to suss out how and they haven't documented it. So I'm no longer able to support this project. My apologies. Read More …
- 2011-04-11T20:15:15Z
- Published: 20:15:15 on Monday, 11 April
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Ruby - Day Two
The second day of Ruby picks up the pace a bit, mostly focussing on the nice bits of sugar that Ruby provides and the excercises give you a chance to play with them a bit.
fileio.rb Read More …- 2011-04-11T20:10:46Z
- Published: 20:10:46 on Monday, 11 April
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Ruby - Day One
As I said, Ruby is a language I know pretty well already, so this is a gentle introduction for me. Tate compares Ruby to Mary Poppins — magical and fun. I hated that film. But I take the point. The excercises are pretty trivial, but here are my answers.
helloworld.rb Read More …- 2011-04-09T11:54:30Z
- Published: 11:54:30 on Saturday, 9 April
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TwitterHaiku -- A Thing for making haiku from Twitter searches
TwitterHaiku lets you find a haiku-like tweet. That is to say that it finds 17 syllable tweets from the Twitter search API and formats them so they look like a haiku. I wrote it as an amusing way to respond to a dinner invitation written in verse form which I received from from a certain Penguin. I'm very grateful to Greg Fast for making Lingua::EN::Syllable available on CPAN. It helped me to count syllables relatively reliably. I was also helped by a perlmonks post on approtioning an array almost equally by davido which put me on the right lines for apportioning words between lines.Read More …
- 2011-04-02T13:15:00Z
- Published: 13:15:00 on Saturday, 2 April
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Geekery
Some useful snippets of technobabble, code and such for the discerning geeks and programmers amongst you. Read More …
- 2011-03-13T10:27:22Z
- Published: 10:27:22 on Sunday, 13 March
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Tip: Hassle Free Passwordless Remote SSH Login
There is plenty of other documentation of how to set up remote passwordless ssh logins elsewhere on the web. But it often takes some faffing to make it work as you'd like. Now, I often do this, so I thought I'd write up the easiest way that I've found to do so. It only has two steps. However, the caveat emptor is that you really, really need to secure the machine from which you're doing this. If someone were to get hold of your key because you lunched out your unencrypted laptop, they'd be able to log in just the same as you. You have been warned!
1. Generate your key Read More …- 2011-03-01T20:25:24Z
- Published: 20:25:24 on Tuesday, 1 March
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Tech Tools For Activists Booklet
Note: This article originally appeared on the New Internationalist Tech Blog and is reused under a Creative Commons Licence Read More …
- 2011-02-16T15:56:15Z
- Published: 15:56:15 on Wednesday, 16 February
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Vimperator Tip: Cut and paste with ctrl-c/ctrl-v
I'm a huge fan of the Vimperator Firefox plugin. It works just like you'd want it to and doesn't break much. Well, it breaks one useful thing, which is the almost universal ctrl-c/ctrl-v cut and paste shortcuts. So, I was well chuffed to find a Vimperator cut and paste tip on superuser. I've extended the tip so that it works in all of the Vim modes.Read More …
- 2011-02-15T21:51:59Z
- Published: 21:51:59 on Tuesday, 15 February
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BarnCamp 2010
BarnCamp 2010 was two days of workshops on topics ranging from renewable energy to foraging for food to citizen journalism to using free software for activism, three nights of camping, open space sessions, evening entertainment, great food at Highbury Farm, a beautiful farm co-op high in the Wye Valley.
Personal highlights Sunshine Meeting the other ciderpunk Learning how to be a citizen journalist Learning that Cornish folks come North in the Summertime for direct action and riots Drinking ace cider Nicest train conductor ever The nerd block -- for people going off on a geek rant that no-one else can understand The Linux Lord's Prayer Read More …- 2010-05-01T22:23:18Z
- Published: 22:23:18 on Saturday, 1 May
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Dual Head on Debian Squeeze with nouveau and xrandr
I recently got myself a 24-inch monitor. I wanted to keep using my trusty 17 inch as well - to use as a secondary monitor for system monitoring, playing music and other background tasks. There is a closed-source nvidia driver. But I'll be using the open source nouveau driver (after trying with no success the nv open source driver). This is a writeup of what worked for me.
Two monitors is better than one! The setup Read More …- 2010-02-11T12:19:08Z
- Published: 12:19:08 on Thursday, 11 February
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ALF: Apache log filter
ALF is a filter for people using Apache logging to plain text logs, who still want the flexibility of being able to search their logs like a database. It relies heavily on Jeff Zucker's DBD::AnyData to do the clever stuff, and overlays that with a simple Gtk2 interface. Read More …
- 2007-03-31T18:45:21Z
- Published: 18:45:21 on Saturday, 31 March
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Windows Vista - Time to Jump
Windows Vista will profoundly downgrade your ability to use your computer as you see fit, rather than as Microsoft and the corporate media see fit. It will operate inefficiently, forcing users to upgrade to expensive and power hungry new hardware which will be bad for the environment, especially hard hit will be poor countries. It will work badly for gamers and it will lock you in to Microsoft's troubling vision of the future. So, I am supporting the BadVista campaign to oppose the adoption of Vista, and to encourage software freedom not software feudalism.
I urge you not to let Microsoft take away your freedom. Resist Vista and jump now!Read More …- 2006-10-13T10:00:00Z
- Published: 10:00:00 on Friday, 13 October
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Space Invaders
Following on from Pong, I had a crack at the arcade classic Space Invaders. This is a work in progress, so it may be volatile.
You can download the source, classes and resources(tar.bzip2) under the terms of the GNU General Public Licence.Read More …- 2006-03-27T15:06:35Z
- Published: 15:06:35 on Monday, 27 March
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