Archive: page 4

• Installing pgmodeler on Ubuntu October 18, 2016

  Pgmodeler is a handy tool for designing databases with an ERD style interface specifically aimed at the PostgreSQL community. It can come in a couple of different ways, but I am going to covering the self build process here. So if you want to learn how to build and install pgmodeler read on! To be able to build anything you’ll need to install the tools from Ubuntu’s repositories. sudo apt-get install gcc libxml2-dev postgresql The first dependency you will need to install is the from QT5 UI toolkit. Read more ⇒

• Tamiya Manta Ray September 13, 2016

  I’ve finally found some time to look at my old remote control car again - I was so happy when I bought it as a kid nearly twenty years ago. I’ve still got the original nickel cadmium battery (all 1300mAh!) and charger so I charged it up expecting that there’d be little to no response from the car. Amazingly the kids and I got about 5 minutes of full throttle action out of it before it slowed to a halt. Read more ⇒

• Brisbane September 2, 2016

  Way back in 2007 I arrived in London, England ready to start a new chapter of my life working in the big city. I’d left a good job at a web agency in Melbourne - one of the world’s most livable cities - to experience the financial capital of Europe. It was a fantastic time and so much happened I could write a novel, but here are a few highlights. Read more ⇒

• Intelligent Vagrant and Ansible files February 8, 2016

  I use both Vagrant and Ansible to run and provision development virtual machines for testing work locally. This provides an easy to build environment as close to production as possible that all developers can easily create from the source code repository. A simple vagrant up and the associated Ansible scripts will handle all of the configuration and package installation for the VM. This is unbelievably handy and it really helps to reduce the kind of bugs that are difficult to track down - “it works on my machine! Read more ⇒

• Scraping websites with wget and httrack September 5, 2015

  Scrapes can be useful to take static backups of websites or to catalogue a site before a rebuild. If you do online courses then it can also be useful to have as much of the course material as possible locally. Another use is to download HTML only ebooks for offline reading. There are two ways that I generally do this - one on the command line with wget and another through the GUI with httrack. Read more ⇒

• Crop and resize images with bash and ImageMagick August 24, 2015

  Not wanting to repeat myself I have written a small bash script to handle the parallel processing of the post images for this site. This involves resizing, cropping and then compressing the images ready for the web. Currently the script supports both JPEG and PNG images for all these operations. On top of this I wanted to ensure that only recently added or modified images would be processed rather than processing the entire folder again. Read more ⇒

• Namespace PHP functions August 10, 2015

  With the release of PHP 5.3 namespaces became a reality in PHP and they’ve made so much possible including better autoloading. The majority of the time you’ll be used to seeing them at the top of each class file. They can also be used to namespace functions however. A standard PHP namespace declaration would look similar to the following at the top of a class file. namespace Treffynnon\Html; class Tag { // . Read more ⇒

• SQL style guide July 24, 2015

  When you’re working in a team you need ways to easily share and denote good style and taste. This is true of your primary programming language with PEP8 for Python and PSRs 1 & 2 for PHP being well known. There is probably even a style guide for HTML and CSS set out at your company. So why should SQL miss out on the party? I have written a style guide for SQL to promote a consistent code style ensuring legible and maintainable projects - sqlstyle. Read more ⇒

• International PHP dates with intl July 21, 2015

  I wrote about localising dates (and other data) in a recent blog post, but unfortunately there were some shortcomings where time zones were concerned. As I alluded to in that post there is a way around this via the Intl extension that exposes a simple API to format DateTime instances. Thankfully this follow up post will be quite short as the setup is very simple for those of you on Ubuntu/Debian you can use the repositories. Read more ⇒

• PHP date localisation with setlocale July 20, 2015

  Localising sites can be a chore, but PHP has the venerable setlocale() to use system locales. These are like templates or profiles that describe how various types of data should be displayed. Should a price have a comma or point to indicate the decimals? When printing a date should PHP output Monday or Montag? All of these considerations are locale specific and they map to a geographical area. Various cultures have their own standards for displaying this kind of information not to mention different languages to accommodate. Read more ⇒