2 thumbs

Ascii Table

Mojo — Sun, 15 Mar 2009 13:30:43 +0000

Rails – speaking to rest as a mock webservice

Mojo — Fri, 27 Feb 2009 11:03:44 +0000

Finally understood the distinctions between webservices and rest. Now I don’t mean the theory aspects Roy Fieldings paper adequately explains the concepts and frankly helps a great deal to try to introduce technology which is along the lines of ‘less is more’.

What I mean is being able to create a service mock up a test script and talk to the server using XML.

Here is an example of creating a new Person:
require 'net/http'


s = <<-XML
        Sarah

        Jhummun
    XML
Net::HTTP.start('localhost', 3000) do |http|

  response = http.post('/people.xml', "#{s}", 'Content-Type' => 'text/xml')
  #Do something with the response.

puts "Code: #{response.code}" puts "Message: #{response.message}" puts "Body:\n #{response.body}" end

and here is an example of retrieving a list of people:
require 'net/http'


Net::HTTP.start('localhost', 3000) do |http|

  response = http.get('/people/', 'Accept' => 'text/xml')
  #Do something with the response.

puts "Code: #{response.code}" puts "Message: #{response.message}" puts "Body:\n #{response.body}" end

Blog posting from Google Docs

Mojo — Fri, 20 Feb 2009 19:13:39 +0000

Blog posting from Google Docs

First attempt

HTML meta data – MSThemeCompatible

Mojo — Sat, 07 Feb 2009 13:17:58 +0000

Be aware this which is there to disable the Windows XP teletubby theme causes Safari and Firefox to completely remove scrollbars.

The issue is tracked in a Firefox bug report.

Localising a rails app – in 20 mins

Mojo — Sat, 07 Feb 2009 09:36:45 +0000

I had an existing rails app which has nearly completed and during its development its been upgraded from 1.2 all the way up to 2.2.2. Anyway I sat down with the latest updates and figured that acts_as_paranoid and will_paginate needed to be altered but beyond that it seems it just worked.
Suffice to say I’d managed to configure the locales and make heavy use of google translate to begin adding an alternative language.
It is impressive how easily this has come together.

3 days to complete the showcase

Mojo — Mon, 22 Dec 2008 07:09:35 +0000

So xmas break is coming and I’ve a long list of things I’d like to investigate concerning rails.

Having written a few apps now and kept up with rails.latest I’m ready for a serious test of my skills: a squash ladder in 3 days!

Should be fine its basicly a leader board with the added option of challenging users to games on a date and tracking the score to position each in the ladder.

I’ll keep u posted of progress!

Westminster Annual Motorcycle Parking

Mojo — Wed, 10 Dec 2008 10:02:47 +0000

If like me you comute into work on a motorcycle and would like to purchase an annual motorcycle parking ticket then this guide may help:

Navigate to: http://www.westminster.gov.uk/cashlessparking/

Click on Manage My Account

Click on My Account and login using your mobile phone number and pin.

Along the orange toolbar click on ‘buy permit’, you can now select to buy an annual parking ticket

Evaluation of wordpress as an induction site?

Mojo — Mon, 29 Sep 2008 17:48:15 +0000

Great idea presented to me today – the idea that a company induction site could all quite easily be sat within an instance of wordpress. WordPress being the blogging tool used by thousands on a daily basis to provide a strong and capable back bone to maintain and publish content. Plus throw in the facility that it provides plugins and static pages and we have a small induction site which can be maintained without an IT person – perfect.

So where’s the downside – well it aint custom so it will look like your actually in a blog, this could if not maintained mean that content doesn’t get ‘posted’ for sometime. Could this mean that the content looks old, and the site looks poor. Possibly but on the flipside the ease of adding content might suggest that any editor responsible for the induction site could add stuff. Of course if there is no sub-editor either process or person then we could end up with a shambles but I’m prepared to guess that this wont be the case.

From a costing point of view its extremely encouraging – wordpress is free and we have the skills to hack the code into various shapes. Add to that that all the really juicy content is stored elsewhere – videos, articles etc and it we have a compelling opportunity to bring something into being without excessive cost of bespoke development.

I’ll update again shortly with pitfalls and successes.

IPhone blogging

Mojo — Fri, 26 Sep 2008 05:29:08 +0000

At last something useful for the IPhone – the ability to publish to the blog while at the coffee shop. Fab

What is your throw away value?

Mojo — Wed, 07 Nov 2007 06:46:10 +0000

Concept:

Since childhood and the days I started receiving a reasonable amount of money each week (e.g. I’d got a job in the local cinema) I’ve had this concept of a throw-away-threshold. This is the amount of money that in a particular period, usually a day I’m prepared to twitter away to a hunch or meaningless indulgence.

At the age of 15 it was set at the amount of £1. Over the years I’ve watched it change and whilst watching a DIY home renovation program yesterday evening where it was clear their threshold had reached £200 I realised that at the grand age of 28 my threshold had reached £10.

I sighed and realised this had made my day, it feels grounding to still have a relatively low value before reasoning must take over from passion to take out my wallet.