I was on-site with Vigill one day before Christmas and I mentioned to Oisin an idea I had for an app.
I was sick of having endless tabs open in Chrome, hogging memory, each one some seeming important enough at the time that I read it but now just a contextless enigma.
If I at least knew [...]
Quite often I feel the need to learn something new for the sake of learning something new. Covey aficionados would know this as sharpening the saw.
I usually struggle deciding upon something however as there are so many areas to choose from in the software world and it isn’t everyday I feel drawn enough to something [...]
After last week’s great Xcake meet I felt a fresh surge to take on new challenges and bend some less-familiar pieces of technology to my will.
Motivation
The first product of this enthusiasm was a prototype web app built to get a bit more experience with Python and Google App Engine. A few days later it got [...]
Background
For a long time now whenever I’m on the search for something interesting to work on that could potentially be of value to myself and others my attention is brought to topics like machine learning, data mining and natural language processing.
These are all areas within computer science which are not particularly easy and have a [...]
I think I first heard the term “Rack-app” when I started using Heroku to host a couple of projects. I didn’t know an awful lot about Rack but I did know that it helped a great deal when it came to getting my Rails and Sinatra apps off my workstation and onto the web.
Tonight I [...]
Last year I started researching how CouchDB could be used for the BodyGuard web-app QA platform. Unfortunately I had to put my tinkerings to one side when some extra freelance work came in; contracting during the day and freelancing in the evenings quickly put an end to any spare time and my fitness efforts took [...]
Background
A few months ago I was tasked with migrating and maintaining a bunch of legacy Rails apps and a couple of them were misbehaving. Requests were hanging which was tying-up the front-end Apache child processes and resulting in all the web-apps on the server becoming unresponsive
At the time I didn’t know what was causing the [...]
Last year I created a nano-app which attempted to answer the question, is it raining in Belfast?
I was never completely pleased with it but the objective was to get something done and get it done fast, which was achieved.
This weekend I’ve been tinkering with another project and hit a bit of a stumbling block getting [...]
Some time ago DW and myself had an enthusiastic conversation about logging various aspects of our electronic lives: emails sent and received, RSS feeds read, incoming and outgoing phone calls, the list goes on.
At that time I’d already started tinkering with apps to track my efforts in the gym and changes in my bodyweight, I’ve [...]
The past while I’ve been busy providing technical consultancy to BT and haven’t had much drive to work on anything on my own time. The itch has returned the past couple of weeks though so I thought I’d see what I’ve been missing in the Rails world and in what better way than getting a [...]