Confessions of a Guru....

Orcon bumps their prices up

2008-07-22T21:11:00.004+12:00

Winking away in my inbox today was an email from Orcon - this is generally a good sign as they like to announce new plans, good deals etc. This announcement in particular was not welcome: Putting our prices up is something we try really hard to avoid. But sometimes it's beyond our control. So unfortunately we've been forced to pass on an increase for the monthly rental of your Orcon homeline.

Things that I hate about PHP

2008-06-20T09:59:00.003+12:00

Ok so I've been back in the swing of development for a while now and I've reminded myself about the things that I hate about PHP. Overall I like it a lot but these are the things I hate. magic_quotesSo the deal here is that when enabled, any posted information will have any quotes magically escaped, so if you were to post the text "Fish 'n' Chips" then your script would receive the text "Fish \'

Simple Content Manager Launches

2008-06-11T15:16:00.008+12:00

If you care you may know that I've been working with Turboweb for a couple of months now. I've been mostly working on a system for creating websites. The gist is that if someone wants a website to complement their business or group or whatever but they don't know how to get started then we provide EVERYTHING that they need (hosting, email addresses, domain names, ecommerce, image gallery, news,

Tweeting in Linux

2008-06-08T22:15:00.003+12:00

Quickly tweet from your Linux environment with this script - all you need is the ability to launch a shell script, e.g. from a terminal, shortcut on your desktop or Gnome panel Requires: curl, zenity. Change the TWITTER_USERNAME and TWITTER_PASSWORD accordingly. Remember to make the script executable and since it contains your twitter username and password you most probably want u+rwx, go-rwx

Getting help anonymously

2008-05-19T21:42:00.004+12:00

I've often wondered how to go about getting technical assistance for work related issues without revealing sensitive information to your competitors, or even worse, making yourself look like you don't know what you're talking about to your current and potential customers. The number of times I've seen ridiculously simple questions asked by people whose business it is to know is astounding, and

A New Career

2008-05-10T12:17:00.008+12:00

In the last six weeks I've changed jobs. My previous job was with SmartMedia Solutions as the Development Manager - a role that I effectively inherited due to staff churn and a bit of restructuring. While interesting and certainly a challenge, I couldn't see myself enjoying it long term because it didn't scratch my itch to develop software. Directing development is interesting but not hands on

Beryl - hidden secrets

2008-04-03T08:34:00.003+13:00

I surprised myself last night by accidentally holding down the super key (also know as the *ahem* Windows key) and scrolling my mouse. It took me ages to work out how I'd zoomed in on the screen, just like I've seen happen on recent flavours of MacOS. I figured it was a Ubuntu Hardy feature, as I had just upgraded to that but it looks like it's something that's been in Beryl for some time now (

Quotable Quote

2008-03-25T11:08:00.002+13:00

I found this quote in the margin of Code Complete 2, attributed to Pablo Picasso. When art critics get together they talk about Form and Meaning. When artists get together they talk about where you can buy cheap turpentine. :)

Scooter Stig

2008-03-18T22:29:00.001+13:00

Scooter Stig Originally uploaded by gurubobnz. "Makes Commuting Fun" - and cheap! Works out to about 6c per km.

Out with the old, in with the .... ?

2008-03-18T21:09:00.002+13:00

I sent my motherboard away to get the chip fan replaced under warranty. Some time later it turned out that it had been replaced, and returned, but to the wrong address, then it finally arrived, but didn't work because they hadn't tested it, so I sent it away, and it got lost again for a bit. I had a call from the tech today after chasing for an update and it turns out that my whole machine is

LOL, Visible Bike

2008-03-10T22:28:00.004+13:00

Thanks to the magic of plastic trikes, ginger cats and digital photography, we created this masterpiece over the weekend :) VISIBLE BIKE

Scootin'

2008-03-06T20:56:00.002+13:00

So I got a scooter the other day. It's fun, real fun! Oh, and practical, and cost saving, yes, that's right :) Not to mention it's fun :) I realised that in town I didn't know what the parking rules were for scooters so I popped into the DCC customer service centre to find out. It turns out that: Dunedin City Council provides Motorcycle parking spaces at various locations within the city.

Link Dump

2008-02-18T17:40:00.001+13:00

For later, when I have time to investigate...http://jquery.com/demo/thickbox/http://docs.jquery.com/Main_Pagehttp://extjs.com/

Blogger to Drupal, some meat

2008-02-11T23:32:00.000+13:00

Ok, so here's some meat. I'm not there yet because this script doesn't import comments, nor have I shared my blog tagger with you (need to find/document that) but this might help those impatient among you. Click to view import_post_to_drupal.php Good luck. Oh, by the way (and this had me stumped for a bit) you need to paste this into Drupal as PHP content. You can't do that until you go into

Planning the migration

2008-02-05T23:42:00.001+13:00

Well, so far with the planned Drupal migration, so good. I'll outline the approach I'm taking: 1. Tag my current blog. Because Blogger doesn't (seem to) have an export function, I've gone for the age old method of content scraping. If you view the source for this page you will see chunks of HTML comment that look like this: (etc). These have been automatically

Installing Drupal

2008-01-23T20:57:00.001+13:00

"RTFM!", they scream. For most people this is the last resort. Therefore, it is almost expected nowadays that a web application will install with as little hassle as possible. If you're capable, I suggest beefing up the fresh install process for your favourite open source web application and feeding it back to the project. It will result in more uptake from your project, as the barrier to

Migrating from Blogger to Drupal

2008-01-21T21:11:00.000+13:00

Ok, so Blogger is easy. Think, type, post, you're done. This makes it great for the masses, but if you want to blog on an intranet, or don't like the idea of relying on an external service, or even want a little more than Blogger's feature set then you'll have to go elsewhere. There are a heap of blogging tools, and a heap of tutorials that will tell you how to make your own blogging tool (a

Software Developers Wanted

2008-01-14T08:56:00.000+13:00

My workplace is advertising for a couple of software developers. I'm blogging it here because it's free! Do you want to work for a successful Dunedin based software development company? We specialise in dynamic content creation for the web and print. We are looking for the right person to joun our enthusiastic team in our new purpose build office in the city. When you're working at

Tracing Bitmaps

2007-12-10T22:10:00.000+13:00

I'm not an artist - I just don't have the knack of being able to start from nothing and pour out goodness. I am, however, good at using artists tools such as The GIMP and Inkscape. I can use these tools to turn out some gems (and a mild amount of crap). One of my favourite tools in Inkscape is the 'Trace Bitmap...' tool (under the Path menu). This tool takes a bitmap for input, and traces it

The Referencizer

2007-12-03T23:46:00.000+13:00

You may have seen posts on newsgroups, in email etc where the poster references links in-line with numbers in square brackets, and then at the end of the post provides a list of URL's referenced above. This serves to keep the links out of the main body of the message the content of the message, making it easier to read. I got bored one night and thus "The Referencizer" was born. All you have to

Quick Installs - a game, and a tool...

2007-11-18T20:46:00.000+13:00

A game ... I've been a fan of Transport Tycoon for a very long time. I was elated when I discovered that an open source alternative to the original game was being developed. It fixes some of the usability things with the game. It does however require you to source the original data files from the original game (openttd don't distribute them because that's piracy...). These data files can be

USB monitors - yawn, hey wait a second!

2007-10-08T21:14:00.000+13:00

I just came across this video on the BBC website that talks about USB monitors. "So what", I thought, "that's not newsworthy", and then I realised it was. You see, normally to run multiple monitors on your PC you need either a dual-head graphics card or a graphics card per screen. With the USB monitor, all you do is plug it into your computer, and the monitor hooks up as a second display. The

Using a XHTTP proxy to access XML content from other sites

2007-10-03T23:51:00.000+13:00

I came across this howto that details how you can Use a Web Proxy for Cross-Domain XMLHttpRequest Calls (read this link for good background info). This sounded intriguing so I had a play around and threw together this demonstration that uses this technique to fetch the latest technology news items from the BBC and display them on your web page. There is one requirement and that is that the web

Earthquake

2007-09-30T22:52:00.000+13:00

Hmm, an earthquake ... 10:49 NZDT felt in Dunedin, went on for about a minute. Slight rolling/shaking, kind of cool :)

Prototype and AJAX

2007-09-28T21:23:00.000+12:00

Lately I've been tinkering with the Ajax features of the Prototype library. I was pleasantly surprised when I saw how easy it was to make an Ajax call and do something as a result, and also how Prototype has an auto-evaluation feature if you return your JSON encoded response in the X-JSON header of the response (although after reading through this I think I'll avoid using it for anything serious