Getting Ubuntu's Server edition running directly on a Mac Mini proved to be a bit of a pain, with lots of partial instructions, but with lots of important bits missed out or glossed over. And lots of stuff about the Desktop edition, which has a completely different installer.
There's just over a week to go until NoSQL Europe, our conference about NoSQL technologies, and how you use them. We've got a fantastic line up, including keynotes from Amazon's Werner Vogels, The Guardian's Matt Wall; speakers from Twitter, The BBC, Rackspace, Basho, 10gen, Neo Technology and many others over 2 days. We have some fantastic workshops lined up on Riak, MongoDB, Redis, and Neo4J, from members of their development teams or core contributors.
For a long time I've thought that it would be a good idea to have a Continuous Integration server that could run all the tests for a project on checkin to source control. Until I started making use of Cucumber I didn't really have a full test run that took long enough to make buying a separate CI server feel more like an investment than an indulgence.
I guess there were two things I was hoping for when I sat down to play [Mirror's Edge] [1], one being [Jet Set Radio Future] [2], and the other being the original [Prince of Persia reboot Sands of Time] [3]. In both titles moving was a joy: fluid, and well directed. Even if you didn't know exactly where to go when you started moving, if you could read the architecture of the levels, and had the basic control competencies down, you could string move after move together and flow through the environment. The grace and agility of the Prince, in an environment with the scale and affordances of JSRF? In first-person? That's a tantalising prospect.
I've been using [Selenium] [1] and [Cucumber] [2] together for a few months now, and I've really enjoyed being able to actually test the Ajaxy parts of my apps. The initial setup was a bit of a pain, and most of the tutorials I found advocated completely separate and parallel Selenium and non-Selenium Cucumber feature directories. I didn't want this, worked out a more integrated way, which changes to Cucumber have since allowed me to make even more straightforward. I'm going to assume you want to set up Selenium with Cucumber, or want to improve your setup, rather than introduce either thing.
I've got a longer post about setting up your Cucumber/Selenium environment coming, but since this is a hot issue I'd thought I'd address it. In short: There's a problem running the firefox.sh script on Mac OS X 10.6, which is the definitive way for things to invoke Firefox. [Selenium RC] [1] runs firefox.sh to run tests, and Cucumber in turn uses Selenium RC. The result is that if you use Cucumber with Selenium and upgrade to 10.6, all your Selenium tests fail. The problem is detailed in Firefox's [Bugzilla bug #513747] [2] and Selenium's [bug SRC-743] [2a]. After a bit of poking about, I found a workaround. It's not great but it does get you going again...
The flickraw Rubygem is the most wonderful Ruby Flickr API client library IN THE WORLD. It is also dumb, in one important way. And, in another important way, so am I. Yesterday the combination was rather embarassing...
All of a sudden people have kept coming up and asking me what I'm up to, and whether I'm still involved with Pitch Space. I thought it was worth a quick post to bring things up to date. In short: No, I'm not involved with Pitch Space anymore, and haven't been since December last year, and what I'm up to is doing web application development and consultancy through my company, Constituent Parts.
Having just about survived making the newspaper, enjoyed the last day of Greenbelt enormously, and spent the last couple of days recovering, I'm sat in the Brighton Dome waiting for the dConstruct fun to start, I thought it would be good to reflect on the newspaper experience. [Actually, it took me another week to get around to finishing this, but most of it was written over the dConstruct weekend.]
A couple of months back, James and Jenny thought it would be a good idea to nick Russell & Ben's Things Our Friends Have Written On The Internet for Greenbelt. There's loads of people there, and some of them write things while they're there, went the thinking. So far so good.
Getting your statement data out of the Co-operative Bank's online banking system in a usable form was pretty hard. You could save the HTML of a statement page, but that's about it. I use Xero for my company, Constituent Parts. It will import OFX formatted files which some banks will export for you. To get Co-operative Bank data into Xero you either need to enter the data by hand, or somehow convert it to OFX. Luke Redpath (who's great, by the way) wrote a Greasemonkey script to scrape Smile/Co-op HTML and generate OFX. It works for Current Accounts, but doesn't work with Credit Card statements, which have a slightly (but significantly) different format. So, I've written a Ruby-based screen scraper which will work with Current Accounts and Credit Cards. You can find it over on GitHub: It's called Co-op to OFX.
I have this Rails app which has a set of shared templates which are used by two actions in different controllers. Each action renders one of three shared templates, dependent on the context. This is all fine, except that I rely on the magic of url_for to generate URLs based on the current controller; and I rely on RSpec's view specs to keep things working and tidy.
If, like me, you run a server somewhere pretending to be lots of servers thanks to Xen, and your guest domains keep logging problems with ttyS0 (like this, perhaps:)
This post is my contribution to Ada Lovelace day
Well, it's been a couple more weeks than I promised (that Christmas, it gets everywhere), but here's the first follow-up from my dpkg-tools from December.
Something I found myself wrestling with a lot towards the end of my time at the BBC, and something I've been thinking a lot about since, is the deployment of entire servers, not just the deployment of software onto servers. I've spent nearly ten years working with Linux distributions and their OS package management systems, primarily Red Hat and Debian-based systems (Ubuntu, lately). I've also spent a lot of time working with Python and Ruby's OS-independent packaging systems (Distutils, a tiny bit of Setuptools, and Rubygems).
While writing Rails apps, I've written several variants on the 'give me an ActiveRecord instance that can't talk to the DB' theme over the last couple of years while writing tests or specs for an app. The basic pattern is a pretty good one - it guarantees you a certain degree of test isolation for your unit tests or specs, when you need it. And, because you're make specific instances isolated, you can get to the DB if you need to.
I was lucky enough to be at Reboot 10, back at the end of June. I gave a prototype talk working through some ideas I've been thinking about for a while (stuff that I started to work at with my Everything I know about Programming I learnt from Typography talk at the first BarCamp London). The talk was called Craft & Process, and was essentially a braindump and not a real talk - I had a bunch of sketchy notes for an overall structure and talked my way from the start of the notes tothe end...
There's lots of stuff happening round here, and of the big ones is that I've become the Technical Director (think CTO) for a startup called PitchSpace. You can hear our MD, the lovely James Cox, on today's Guardian Tech Weekly Podcast. The Guardian's Jemima Kiss also has an article about us up on the PDA blog about us. I'll be talking about what we're up to here and on the PitchSpace blog. It's going to be an interesting ride.
For those of you who subscribe to the feeds...
It looks like a lot of feed readers don't follow permanent redirects sent by servers, and I changed the location of my feeds and used permanent redirects to tell your feed readers about the change, which I thought would make the transition seamless, and I would be able to bask in the glory of having done something right for a change...
Alas, this doesn't seem to be the case. Please update your feed readers. They should be able to automatically find the correct address if you visit http://reprocessed.org/. If not, then the new feed is at http://feeds.feedburner.com/reprocessed.
Thanks, and sorry for the hassle.