Mercurial has been my version and source control system of choice for some time. I migrated from using Subversion after using it for a project a long time ago with a couple of collaborators, and working with a distributed source made development a lot easier when we were all working on it at the same [...]
You’d think as a professional (in some capacity) web developer, I’d be one of these people who kept up with the trends and all the new tools out there that try and make my life that little bit easier. Well you’d be wrong. I still don’t use Google Reader, despite the fact I think it’s [...]
Well, this week I did something I wasn’t entirely expecting… I attended the .net Magazine awards 2010 at the Ministry of Sound. I didn’t win anything of course. but that’s a moan for another day… Richard Keys offered to take me as his “+1”, and with me being such an easy date, I accepted without [...]
Last weekend, I was lucky enough to attend my first conference as a delegate with Andrew Taylor at the PHPNW conference in Manchester, and had a fantastic time! I met some great new people, learned a great many new things, and even had time for a couple of beers and a curry while I was [...]
Upgrading to a new system is something I’ve only really had to get to grips with in the last few months. I normally spend my day-today working life either making minor website changes, developing completely new ideas that don’t tie into anything else, or maintaining our current systems, but never building new ones. This is [...]
Three years ago, if someone had asked me what version control was, I would’ve genuinely had no idea, and I’m quite ashamed of that. To be quite honest, I would never wish that feeling of simple stupidity on anyone, and so this post will be a quick introduction to the idea behind version control, and [...]
Every web developer, and designer, knows the problems when trying to make one of their creations compatible with IE6. If it’s not the box model anomalies, it’s something to do with the aged JavaScript engine or the lack of modern CSS support. Trying to make something compatible, and often just workable, in IE6 is a [...]
Rather than do what I normally do, which is make a large post on a specific topic, I thought just to break the mould a bit and try something different I would make a post that would go through all the recent things I’ve been doing, and what I think I’ll be coming up against [...]
Some of you may know I recently had to put my iMac in for repair again, because the Western Digital Caviar Black hard drive it contained decided to spontaneously combust under normal use. Fantastic. The moment everyone dreads: hard drive failure. Normally, this shouldn’t even be a problem. I just send the iMac off to [...]
This is a problem I seemed to come up against a lot when running my simple little servers: where does all the bandwidth go, and what slows the whole network down? Well rather than continuing to whinge, I looked around, and found this tool: iftop (a very clever hybrid name of top and ifconfig), which [...]
