Category Archives: Journal

Quick heads up on a super handy cheat sheet for Drupal

I'm working with Drupal a lot at work now, and in the process of creating my last post, I stumbled across this cheat sheet for developing with Drupal. I had no idea could pull ddebug_backtrace() to get an instant stacktrace, or DARGS() to see the arguments being passing into a function at any point, or [...]
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How to setup Snow Leopard for LAMP development and debugging

Over this weekend, I've been looking at ways to make it easier for me to work with PHP, largely because I've been using it more and more at work, and I've felt spoilt by the tools available when using Ruby, like the [ruby debugger], or when playing with Django or Twisted, python's own interactive pdb [...]
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Switching iPhone contracts

I came across this video when trawling across web, researching which provider I wanted to leave O2's woeful reception for with my iphone contract, and while sadly it's not far from the current experience of using my iPhone now that I've upgraded to the new iPhone OS, it is funny enough to raise a smile [...]
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Why it’s worth volunteering for medical science

Back in 2007, I volunteered to give a blood sample at Guys Hospital, as part of a research project called Indices of Renal Tolerance , which investigated how some kidney transplant patients recovered after operations. Normally after a transplant operation, our bodies' immune systems would attack any new organ placed inside a body because they [...]
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Making sense of Rewritemaps in Apache

Title: Using RewriteMap to ease site migrations Date: 2010-05-21 20:43:11 This post outlines the approach we took when migrating content from one site to another on a recent project, as the documentation available currently this could be much clearer, and this is clearly a problem that others working on the web are likely to have [...]
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Discovering the Walrus

If you haven't heard of the Canadian Magazine The Walrus before, you could do a lot worse than read this article I found via Bruce Sterling's blog, Beyond the Beyond as introduction the quality of its writing - it's been one of the most refreshingly hopeful pieces about what I'm referring to (for want of [...]
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The ForkBomb Tattoo

This doesn't count for much, but I think this is one of the cleverest, geekiest, most elegant tattoos I've ever seen. Carving an Apple, Cisco or Nike Logo onto your body? That's really quite sad. But this is something different: Why do I like it? I think it's about as attractive as a code type [...]
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Enjoying BankSimple’s rhetoric

If ever there was an sector that needs to be disrupted, it would be the banking sector, so I'm quite enthused by both the rhetoric, and the calibre of the team who are amassing around BankSimple. That doesn't happen in banking. The huge barriers to entry mean that the big guys can continue to screw [...]
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The phone tariff that should exist, but doesn’t

I'm coming to the end of an 18 month contract with O2, where I ended up spending £45 per month, to essentially have more minutes and texts than God at my disposal, when really, all I cared about was having a handset designed by people who understand that user experience is more important than features [...]
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Tar is not zip

Today, I had to package up some code that was residing on a remote server that I had ssh access to, to send to someone who was probably on a windows box. This meant I had to use the zip tool, which I can never remember how to use, hence this memory jogging post. Now [...]
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