Category Archives: Journal

How to fix a WordPress site when the database corrupts on you.

Phew! ... and as soon as I say this, the database powering this site corrupts on me - charming! For one awful moment I thought I had lost everything (I hadn't set up a regular mysql backup task for this blog), but thankfully, bringing this blog back from the dead was surprisingly straight forward. Here's [...]
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Not quite sure what I’m doing with this site

I'm currently trying to work out what this site is for at the mo, after looking at the sites of a few of my friends and work colleagues', and finding a degree of inspiration to finally get this site sorted out, so it's something I'd be prepared to actively tell people about. Since discovering that [...]
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Setting up a CentOS base box for development and testing with Vagrant

I've been using at Vagrant at work lately to make it easier to switch between environments on projects, and to help out when testing chef recipes. These instructions are here to help me remember how I went about building the base machines. This post will almost change in the next week or so. If you [...]
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Making arrays with ruby, without those pesky commas

The most common way to create an array in Ruby is do this: my_shiny_new_array = ["tom", "dick", "harry", "jonah", "percy", "jermaine"] Thanks to its perly origins though, you also have a more idiomatic way to do this in Ruby, like so: %w(tom dick harry jonah percy jermaine) Because Ruby has such a flexible syntax, it's [...]
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Poking around the Capistrano gem binary,

I've recently been trying to get an understanding of how Rubygems lets us 'require' external code libraries by looking at a typical gem binary, because wasn't too clear to me how everything worked under the hood, and when I've tried to modify existing gems, I've been left scratching my head, generally unable to progress beyond [...]
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On blogging as a way to work out what you’re thinking

I really like how this recent post by Adam Greenfield starts. I'm normally in awe of his writing, and how vivid the picture is that he paints, of a near future of networked urbanism, and well thought through design. Seeing this disclaimer today makes him seem so much more fallible, and well... more like the [...]
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Trying a month of 8hrs sleep a night

For more than the last 12 months, I've got into a habit of rarely getting more than 6 hours sleep a night, except on the occasional weekend. I've done this to try to maximise the amount of waking hours available to me to as get things done as I want, but when I look at [...]
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Virtual servers and false alarms

When you start looking after virtual machines instead of buying shared hosting, you very quickly realise how important RAM is to making a server run properly. I’m using a machine with a fairly heft chunk of free memory, but recently when shelling into the box to check memory usage I’ve have some pretty scary stats [...]
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Money is fertilizer, companies are soil

I spent a fair chunk of yesterday working on a redesign of the new ORG website, with Felix, Chris, Mike, Harry, and after we had finished for the talking with Felix about the recession and worthwhile work. We both have friends who work in the financial sector, we both get nerdily angry about bad design, [...]
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Looking for a green host – concluding the search

I think I can finally stop searching for a good, green virtual private hosting company in the UK.

Posted in Journal | 12 Comments