November 2011
1 post
Tracking WordPress with Git
I use Git and want to track upstream WordPress.
[UPDATE] I was using a utility here called svn2git. That was crazy. Now I’m just using git-svn and it rocks.
Here’s what I do to track Wordpress SVN. It couldn’t be easier.
git svn clone -s http://core.svn.wordpress.org wordpress_svn
The -s flag tells it you’ve got a normal-looking SVN repo. I clone it into a git repo...
October 2011
2 posts
4 tags
Using Chef to build cloud servers for WordPress...
So I decided this afternoon that with a wife 39.5 weeks’ pregnant I’d get into devops fun experimenting with Chef.
My goals are simple:
give me a clear, unambiguous, repeatable way of deploying servers of various types
help me deploy a bunch of PHP stuff I need right now:
WordPress with Network stuff
Drupal Commons
I toyed with the idea of getting someone to do it, but...
“Talk is cheap. Show me the code.”
– Linus Torvalds on the Linux Kernel Mailing List
https://lkml.org/lkml/2000/8/25/132
May 2011
1 post
2 tags
Genuine insight from Pixar on managing effective...
Ryan Singer from 37signals mentioned this vid from Stanford GSB
Pixar founder Ed Catmull addresses the question: “Why do ‘successful’ companies fail?”
What’s more important? Great people or great ideas?
Ed goes through some important things that have made Pixar awesome, like:
Undergo constant review - review it all every day - push through the embarrassment;...
March 2011
1 post
4 tags
Yes, lecture capture sucks... now what?
Fellow contrarian Mark Smithers writes on the phenomenon of widespread, automated lecture capture in education›:
the large scale implementation of lecture capture is probably one of the costliest and strategically misguided educational technologies that an institution can adopt
At UNE we’re currently in the throes of deciding our plan of attack for all things rich media. Naturally...
February 2011
6 posts
“Most of the things you read on the internet are just plain wrong. Always...”
– Thomas Fuchs (@thomasfuchs)
“Forgive me my nonsense, as I also forgive the nonsense of those that think they...”
– Robert Frost
(I’ve been thinking about putting this on the presentations I seem to give each day)
2 tags
“If everyone is thinking alike, then somebody isn’t thinking.”
– George S Patton
2 tags
3 tags
Unzipping massive files on OSX
OSX Snow Leopard has a command line zip/unzip utility…
Today I needed to unzip a MASSIVE (10GB) zip file (for Adobe LiveCycle - but that’s another story)… and got this response:
unzip LiveCycleES2.5-0.0.5.zip
Archive: LiveCycleES2.5-0.0.5.zip
skipping: LiveCycleES2.5-0.0.5/LiveCycleES2.5.x86_64-0.0.5.vmdk need PK compat. v4.5 (can do v2.1)
creating:...
January 2011
3 posts
“Enterprise? A colossal spaceship from the 80’s flown by people with bad taste:...”
– Mads Buus Westmark
(Capgemini Ruby on Rails pioneer)
Lessons from Facebook on Engineering Management →
Yishan Wong spent several years as a technical manager at Facebook. These posts from him are a real revelation, particularly the need to focus on tools for efficiency and for all members of the team to be technically proficient. Great stuff.
3 tags
Rails3, Compass and the Heroku read-only...
I use Compass with Blueprint for all projects these days.
When deploying on Heroku, the read-only filesystem has trouble with the conditional around the IE stylesheet - leading to something like this;
Errno::EROFS (Read-only file system - /disk1/home/slugs/.../mnt/public/stylesheets/compiled/ie.css - Heroku has a read-only filesystem. See...
December 2010
2 posts
2 tags
Turning off "Upload a single file" Assignment type...
Among the various things we’re doing for UNE’s move to Moodle, one thing we thought would be cool would be to remove the ancient option Assignment type that allows only one student file per submission (and no teacher “response” files).
This gives us a stack of simple benefits:
we only have to hook up online marking to one type
we can hook our funky new print and...
Getting serious about managing assessment in... →
Moving to Moodle in 2011 brings with it a number of challenges for how we manage assessment. It also introduces a stack of exciting opportunities.
Today marks the start of a focused attempt to draw…
November 2010
1 post
3 tags
PHP5 with Freetype support on Snow Leopard →
Rolling your own PHP (or any othr *nix tool) is not insanely hard… but when someone puts together a nice set of binaries, it certainly makes life easier.
Wanting to do some quick development in Mahara, I found that Snow Leopard’s own PHP had no Freetype support baked into its GD libraries :( I turned up Taracque’s great set of binaries built with the Entropy toolkit…
...
September 2010
4 posts
Macquarie Uni joins the stampede to Moodle →
Macquarie Uni announced last week that they’ll be joining UNE and others in shifting from Blackboard CE (formerly WebCT) to head to Moodle 2. It’s great to see other unversities “seeing the light”…
3 tags
Getting back into Drupal at UNE Flexible and... →
Last month we set up a quick Drupal 6/Acquia site. It’s my first foray back into Drupal since some projects two years ago with Fairfax and Austereo. The strategy to go online with communications for our program of twenty-something projects at UNE Flexible and Online was to fourfold:
to visually convey our four key messages: choice and flexibility, a seamless student experience, driving...
Only one more Moodle “Blocker” →
Moodle’s bug, issue and feature “tracker” (http://tracker.moodle.org) helps the project track new feature requests, issues and bugs. All bugs are rated on a scale: blocker, critical, major and…
35 Years of FOSS
Logged into Slideshare this afternoon and was stoked to see the promoted presentation was by a former colleague of mine - Francois Marier from Catalyst IT (NZ). It’s a ripper:
35 Years of Open Source SoftwareView more presentations from Francois Marier.
May 2010
8 posts
Seriously excited about the learning design and development model we’re soon to put out for feedback. It’s Scrum applied to ed dev. Love it!
I thought that @KissGoodbyetoMS was something from the Linux / Mac communities. Actually, it looks like it’s much more worthwhile.
Actually managed to fit 9 hours of meetings in today. Looking fwd to actually doing something tomorrow.
RT @danbenjamin: Trippy HTML5 - http://9elements.com/io/projects/html5/canvas/
Think I might be developing RSI - can’t push down on mouse with index finger. Time to stop and grab a glass of port, methinks.
3 tags
Keeping my .dotfiles in check →
If you work on OSX or something else unixy/linuxy… then you know the score with keeping your dotfiles under control. I’ve had mine in version control for a bit, but now am using homesick to make that process simpler.
3 days since I deactivated my Facebook account.
3 tags
A style guide for internal apps →
These guys make software for churches. I really like this styleguide / pattern book for their apps. Might see if I can get something like that happening here.
April 2010
14 posts
So it seems I’m now going to be back full time in the #moodle & elearning world. Nice.
Loving that friends of ours have named their new daughter Claudia Jean #WestWing
I really wish we’d hurry up and remove the ridiculous State government tier in Australia
Spent 9 hours driving yesterday - trying to work out how I feel so energised today. Answer must be #railscamp. Oh, and coffee.
#railscamp day. Yep.
Awesome hacking with @weatherhead for the past two days and nights; can’t believe that this is just the start - bring on #railscamp!
It’s #rorosyd time, and I’m 500km away… but heading down to @weatherhead’s at 4am tomoz, then on to #railscamp Friday! What a week!
So many levels of great http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qASf5DEN_c4 / via @lachiecox
How on earth is an update from Skype 2.8.0.722 to 2.8.0.851 > 43MB? Those must be _some_ patches!
Very impressed with @wycats’ massive new post on Rails 3: http://railsdispatch.com/posts/rails-3-makes-life-better
I don’t use Windows or Office, but Microsoft’s new Office > Moodle plugin is really rather slick http://bit.ly/d5o2QR
1 tag
Back from a great morning at church; currently whipping up some potato & leek soup; friends from Syd due in moments; loving Easter.
March 2010
16 posts
3 tags
"Pure RSpec" presentation →
Jon “Lark” Larkowski @L4rk has posted his notes from Scotland on Rails… with insight into some amazing new ways to use RSpec. I think I’m going to need to check out using the Shoulda matchers with my RSpec.
Coincidentally, the presso uses http://github.com/schacon/showoff. Very cool.
ooh… upcoming sigur rós album ‘Go’ is streaming live with NPR http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=125217376
Simply _loving_ the new Mailer API in Rails 3. Massive thanks to @raasdnil for making my life better.
Nice to get an extra long wknd in NSW: http://www.lawlink.nsw.gov.au/lawlink/cru/ll_cru.nsf/pages/cru_daylightsaving
Been hacking the past 2 weeks on a new app with Rails3 (beta)… and really loving it. Far fewer issues than I expected, and lovely new APIs
Spent the morning chatting about Moodle - seems like ages since I’ve done that!
Sitting in the car in a backstreet of Armidale while Jen makes a house call… brought the laptop in case it’s a long one…
Great article about employee retention in programming. http://bit.ly/xUqjq via @gakman Applicable elsewhere too, methinks.