I’m not much for “new year resolutions” but I have decided that this year I’m going to pull my finger out and be a bit more pro-active about doing things that I’ve been putting off. 2011 saw me finishing my MSc and being awarded a Distinctions for my efforts. Throughout…
Early Kindles allowed you to use your own images as screen savers, this feature was removed in later models. Thankfully people much smarter than me had written custom firmware giving you this feature back. Unfortunately this firmware hack doesn’t work with the latest 4th generation non-touch (NT) Kindle. There is…
So, I got a Kindle for Xmas. It is awesome. Pretty much the first thing I did with it is start hunting for free web development ebooks. I was quite surprised to find that there wasn’t a free tag reference for HTML5. So I made one. It’s not in the…
Finally I’ve found a decent example of a JS physics simulation. This example by Jorn Zaefferer shows how to model a bouncing ball with vector arithmetic. I’ve tweaked this code to build a simulation of objects orbiting about a point. The only key difference is that the gravity for each…
Here’s a quick tip for keeping track which branch is for what in a git repo. Create a file called BRANCH-README in the repo root, and for each new branch include a summary describing what the the branch is for. Branch: bugfix-123-autherror Author: Craig Russell Date: Fri 18th Nov 2011…
I’ve been learning how to create a plugin in Ruby on Rails 3.1 and test it using RSpec. I haven’t been able to find a tutorial for this anywhere, so I’ll share what I’ve done here. First up, use rails to generate a new plugin.
I’ve been wanting to learn ruby and rails for a while now. But my previous efforts haven’t worked out well. These past few weeks I’ve committed to finally getting a reasonable grasp on this technology. I’ve used a few different resources and picked up a couple of tips en-route, which…
I’ve recently finished an MSc in Intelligent Systems at De Montfort University (I passed with distinction – thanks for asking). One module of the course was devoted to using Data Mining techniques to explore data sets. Data Mining differs from the more common analysis of data. Commonly a data set…
The loveliness that is the Linux shell has buried in it a billion little nuggets of hyper efficiency. I’ve been learning about the bang history commands, which are a great way to save time when running the similar commands over and over (more thorough documentation here). Repeating Commands Repeat last…