Blog

A nice list of all my previous blog posts with, where I've been bothered, a little summary to entice you in.

  1. Fri, 26 Mar 10 - Libxml2 Problems When Installing Nokogiri

    My solution to the problem of Nokogiri checking for a universal (ppc, i386) version of libxml2 and failing to install.

  2. Tue, 17 Nov 09 - Converting Egg Statements and Transactions to Ofx

    I've refreshed the little utility that converts egg html statements to ofx.

  3. Sat, 07 Nov 09 - A Letter to Adrian Gillan at Euroferries

    An email to Adrian Gillan at Euroferries, in response to his request that Adem remove one of his posts.

  4. Thu, 17 Sep 09 - Things I Learnt at Interesting 2009

    Things I learnt from the talks at Interesting 2009

  5. Mon, 14 Sep 09 - Pouring Factlets Into Your Brain Holder via Your Ear Sieves

    An idea for a dynamic audio guidebook on your gps enabled mobile device.

  6. Tue, 21 Jul 09 - Creating a Greasemonkey Script That Applies to the Firefox 'Problem Loading Page' Error Page

    Some notes about applying a greasemonkey script to the Firefox 'Problem Loading Page' error page.

  7. Wed, 24 Jun 09 - Down for Everyone or Just Me Greasemonkey Script

    A greasemonkey script that inserts a link to downforeveryoneorjustme.com into the firefox page not found error page

  8. Tue, 23 Jun 09 - Apacherb Is Now Hostess

    The utility for serving local directories as virtual hosts in a local apache installation has been gemificated and moved to github

  9. Tue, 23 Jun 09 - Introducing Deliciolytics

    Introducing a proof of concept service that lets you view an aggregated feed of all delicious bookmarks for your domain.

  10. Fri, 24 Apr 09 - A Greasemonkey Script that inserts a Google Site Search form into every page

    A greasemonkey script that makes it really easy to use google to search within the current site. Press ctrl-9 to visit the search form.

  11. Sun, 19 Apr 09 - Rails 2.3 and the ability to update created_at, created_on, updated_at and updated_on timestamps

    There was a Rails 2.3 security note that suggested we could now set the AR timestamps. It turns out we've always been able to set the created_at/on timestamps and that updated_at/on are also now assignable.

  12. Tue, 14 Apr 09 - Generating and Inserting a Rel=Canonical Link Into Pages With Firefox and Greasemonkey

    A greasemonkey script that allows me to generate permalinks for various web pages and insert those permalinks into the page as links with rel=canonical.

  13. Tue, 31 Mar 09 - CruiseControlrb With Passenger and Launchd on a Mac

    Getting CruiseControl.rb running under Passenger (mod_rails) with the builders being started automatically via launchd (on a Mac).

  14. Mon, 30 Mar 09 - Installing Passenger 2.1.2 on CentOS 5.2

    I had to re-install apr-util-devel in order to get Passenger (mod_rails) 2.1.2 to install on CentOS 5.2.

  15. Mon, 09 Mar 09 - Hack the Government Day (Rewired State)

    An overview of what "team activeplaces" achieved at rewiredstate.

  16. Wed, 04 Mar 09 - Posting Bookmarks to Delicious From My Android G1

    By hooking together Email, a simple Ruby/Rack server and the delicious API I'm able to post bookmarks from my G1 to delicious

  17. Tue, 24 Feb 09 - Gracefully Degrade the Google Custom Search Form So That It Works Without Javascript

    I default to searching the google index of my site but enhance that functionality with the Google Custom Search when Javascript is available

  18. Sat, 21 Feb 09 - Keyboard Shortcuts for the Link Widgets Firefox Extension

    Shortcut keys for the Link Widgets firefox extension

  19. Thu, 19 Feb 09 - Please Publish Full Content in Your RSS and Atom Feeds

    I explain why I prefer feeds that contain full content over feeds that contain partial content.

  20. Mon, 09 Feb 09 - Idea - Web Services Could Publish Stats About the Clients That Connect to Them

    I wonder if it'd help us determine whether or not a library is still active/compatible.

  21. Tue, 03 Feb 09 - Free Technical Books for Anyone That's Interested

    I attempt to give away some books that I've been unable to sell on Amazon marketplace.

  22. Sun, 01 Feb 09 - Test Data for Version 2 of the Amazon Web Services Signing Protocol

    I'm hoping this data might be useful for someone else trying to develop code to sign requests to Amazon Web Services

  23. Sat, 31 Jan 09 - Implementing Version 2 of the Amazon AWS HTTP Request Signature in Ruby

    A fairly simple example of how to sign AWS requests, with Ruby, using version 2 of the signature spec.

  24. Sat, 31 Jan 09 - Turning Off My National Rail Twitter Bot

    I've turned the twitter bot off after being asked/told to do so by a chap at ATOC

  25. Sat, 31 Jan 09 - Lloyds TSB Stole My Money (Kinda)

    A little rant about Lloyds TSB

  26. Sat, 24 Jan 09 - Backing Up Jobs in a Print Queue on Windows XP (and Printing .prn files)

    I explain how I managed to print some documents that were stuck in the Windows XP print queue.

  27. Thu, 22 Jan 09 - Idea - Firefox Extension to Clearly Indicate the Age of a Page

    I find myself getting annoyed when reading webpages, blog posts in particular, that contain out of date information.

  28. Tue, 13 Jan 09 - 24 Hours of Ramsgate Outer Harbour

    I stitched together webcam images from a 24 hour period to create a little video of Ramsgate harbour.

  29. Tue, 06 Jan 09 - A Simple Utility to Generate and Preview Html on the Web

    I found, what I believed to be, a strange problem with images that had explicit width and heights set. I created a little utility that allowed me to dig into the problem.

  30. Tue, 06 Jan 09 - Using SSI to Expose Http Request Headers Sent by Your Browser

    I explain why I reinvented the wheel and created another page on the web that will display the http request headers sent by your browser.

  31. Sun, 04 Jan 09 - Initial Thoughts About the T-Mobile G1 (the Google Android Phone)

    Some thoughts about the T-Mobile G1 now that I've had it in my possession for a couple of days.

  32. Wed, 17 Dec 08 - Please Sir Can I Have a Job

    I'm begging for work. That's it.

  33. Mon, 15 Dec 08 - A Utility to Manage Apache Virtual Hosts on a Mac (Like the Passenger Pref Pane but for Simple Static Sites)

    A neat (if I may say so myself) little utility that simplifies the process of setting up an apache virtual host and associated domain.

  34. Fri, 05 Dec 08 - A Javascript QueryString Printer

    A little utility that extracts and displays querystring parameters in an html page.

  35. Tue, 02 Dec 08 - OCR on the Mac with Tesseract

    A comparison of the output from tesseract given different quality inputs.

  36. Wed, 03 Sep 08 - Listening to iTunes on my Intempo GX-01

    I use EyeConnect in order to share my iTunes library on my Mac with my Intempo GX-01.

  37. Fri, 01 Aug 08 - Changing the repository of code being managed by Piston (an alternative to piston switch)

  38. Wed, 30 Jul 08 - Converting Google Code Wiki Content to Html

  39. Wed, 30 Jul 08 - Plans for the my blog

  40. Mon, 21 Jul 08 - Asking South Eastern about the high speed trains

  41. Mon, 21 Jul 08 - Asking South Eastern about their crappy seats

  42. Mon, 21 Jul 08 - Open Source Optical Character Recognition (OCR) on the Mac

  43. Mon, 19 May 08 - Pwdhash Widget

  44. Mon, 19 May 08 - A trip to the tip

  45. Tue, 29 Apr 08 - Redesigning my blog

  46. Thu, 10 Apr 08 - Exporting query results to a remote machine with MySql (an alternative to SELECT INTO OUTFILE)

  47. Mon, 31 Mar 08 - Another project - Public Swimming Pools in the UK

  48. Sat, 29 Mar 08 - Reference Trackback Server implementation

  49. Sat, 29 Mar 08 - Files hosted on Google Groups cannot be opened in Safari (or Internet Explorer)

  50. Fri, 28 Mar 08 - Version Control Commit Note Best Practice (or not, you decide)

  51. Tue, 04 Mar 08 - Version 0.2 of the del.icio.us trackback extension

  52. Thu, 28 Feb 08 - National Rail Train Times by SMS (again)

  53. Tue, 26 Feb 08 - Tagging my del.icio.us bookmarks with the domain of the URL that I'm bookmarking

  54. Mon, 18 Feb 08 - What I've been up to - Projects and Ideas

  55. Mon, 18 Feb 08 - Atom (like RSS) feeds for thisiskent.co.uk news stories

  56. Mon, 04 Feb 08 - Sending trackbacks to the sites that you bookmark in del.icio.us

  57. Wed, 23 Jan 08 - Migration from Typo to a static site is complete

  58. Wed, 23 Jan 08 - Migrating this blog from Typo to a static site

  59. Thu, 17 Jan 08 - Emailing photos to flickr from my Skypephone

  60. Wed, 16 Jan 08 - Testing my mod_rewrite configuration with ruby

  61. Wed, 16 Jan 08 - Chris 1, mod_rewrite 0 (muhahahaha)

  62. Mon, 14 Jan 08 - Fun with mod_rewrite (and its special variables REQUEST_URI, IS_SUBREQ and THE_REQUEST)

  63. Mon, 14 Jan 08 - Searching subversion history

  64. Tue, 18 Dec 07 - Extracting my del.icio.us permalinks functionality into its own firefox extension

  65. Fri, 14 Dec 07 - Cross browser (well, IE 6, Firefox 2 and Safari 3) bookmarklet script

  66. Fri, 14 Dec 07 - Web pages should specify their canonical URL (permalink)

  67. Fri, 14 Dec 07 - Bookmarklet (Favelet) limits in Internet Explorer 6 (and 7?)

  68. Fri, 07 Dec 07 - Testing ActionMailer::Base.server_settings

  69. Fri, 07 Dec 07 - More on those friendly URLs

  70. Thu, 06 Dec 07 - Ruby Rake - Invoke vs Execute

  71. Tue, 27 Nov 07 - Fun with Selenium

  72. Tue, 27 Nov 07 - Short, Human Friendly, Permalinks

  73. Mon, 26 Nov 07 - VRM vs Affiliate Marketing

  74. Tue, 20 Nov 07 - Wow. Google must really love Chris.

  75. Tue, 20 Nov 07 - Can anyone recommend a good simple web hosting solution?

  76. Sun, 18 Nov 07 - The Skypephone so far

  77. Fri, 16 Nov 07 - NewNet and BT Broadband problems

  78. Thu, 15 Nov 07 - HSBC Conclusion

  79. Wed, 31 Oct 07 - Naughty spammy Tesco Entertainment

  80. Fri, 19 Oct 07 - A common pattern in retailers' receipt pages (and a microformat solution)

  81. Mon, 15 Oct 07 - More Hsbc Shenanigans

  82. Fri, 05 Oct 07 - Trying to speak to someone in development at Hsbc - can anyone help?

  83. Wed, 03 Oct 07 - A microformat for my contact details (instant messaging, twitter et al)

  84. Wed, 03 Oct 07 - Finding similar sites by mining the del.icio.us data

  85. Sat, 29 Sep 07 - Commenting on my del.icio.us bookmarks

  86. Sat, 29 Sep 07 - Monitoring the Mac OSX Filesystem with ruby

  87. Thu, 27 Sep 07 - Why should it do that?

  88. Fri, 21 Sep 07 - Companies. You must make it simple for me to unsubscribe from your marketing shite.

  89. Wed, 05 Sep 07 - Patching the del.icio.us firefox extension to add permalinks

  90. Tue, 04 Sep 07 - Permalinks for del.icio.us bookmarks (posts)

  91. Fri, 31 Aug 07 - Blue card user stories coming out of the reevoo.com feedback

  92. Thu, 23 Aug 07 - Responses to reevoo.com feedback

  93. Tue, 14 Aug 07 - Holiday in Newqay

  94. Wed, 01 Aug 07 - A new reevoo.com

  95. Tue, 24 Jul 07 - Train times by SMS (or, improving national rail enquiries)

  96. Tue, 17 Jul 07 - Free google website optimizer isn't actually free

  97. Fri, 13 Jul 07 - Web service to convert UK Postcodes (outcode) to Latitude and Longitude

  98. Thu, 12 Jul 07 - Wesabe open up their API and ask me to help write their press release...

  99. Tue, 26 Jun 07 - A great day at work and reevoovision (twittervision for reviews)

  100. Sat, 23 Jun 07 - Automatically downloading my Ing Direct transactions

  101. Sat, 23 Jun 07 - This makes me happy

  102. Sat, 23 Jun 07 - Automatically download egg credit card transactions

  103. Wed, 13 Jun 07 - I really don't know whether this is spam or not...

  104. Thu, 07 Jun 07 - Steel mounted photographic wall prints (or, cool pictures printed on metal) in Thanet

  105. Thu, 07 Jun 07 - Reevoo.com and Seo

  106. Wed, 06 Jun 07 - A little further investigation into those pesky scammers

  107. Tue, 05 Jun 07 - Ranting about Sky

  108. Fri, 01 Jun 07 - An open letter to my local newspapers

  109. Fri, 01 Jun 07 - I wanna be cool too

  110. Thu, 17 May 07 - Pesky Scammers

  111. Mon, 14 May 07 - Automatically downloading my recent transactions from Lloyds Tsb

  112. Fri, 04 May 07 - Automatically downloading my most recent Hsbc transactions

  113. Mon, 30 Apr 07 - A fun (and crappy) Monday morning quiz

  114. Fri, 20 Apr 07 - Tonic Systems TonicPoint free Powerpoint viewer

  115. Sat, 14 Apr 07 - ebay feedback

  116. Sat, 14 Apr 07 - Small, specific mongrel web servers

  117. Wed, 11 Apr 07 - Getting to grips with pwdhash

  118. Wed, 04 Apr 07 - I want fast trains

  119. Tue, 03 Apr 07 - Obtaining latitude/longitude for UK postcodes

  120. Sun, 01 Apr 07 - Converting Egg Credit Card Statements to Ofx (for upload to wesabe)

  121. Mon, 19 Mar 07 - Monkey patching rails routing

  122. Sun, 18 Mar 07 - Repairing an Hp Pavilion N5241 laptop

  123. Fri, 16 Mar 07 - Orange, orange, orange

  124. Mon, 12 Mar 07 - Frustrating user experience with Hsbc online banking

  125. Fri, 09 Mar 07 - The worst word in the world... ever

  126. Mon, 05 Mar 07 - It'll grow back, right?

  127. Sun, 04 Mar 07 - Digital Photo Prints from PhotoBox

  128. Thu, 15 Feb 07 - Crashing IE 6 with style(sheets)

  129. Mon, 29 Jan 07 - Visualising the changing responsibilities of objects

  130. Fri, 12 Jan 07 - Combining distributed small tools as an alternative to Backpack et al

  131. Fri, 12 Jan 07 - Encapsulation in Active Record objects

  132. Fri, 12 Jan 07 - Move over seetickets.com - you've got nothing on orange.co.uk

  133. Fri, 05 Jan 07 - Bad seetickets.com

  134. Thu, 04 Jan 07 - Homegrown gooogie

  135. Sun, 24 Dec 06 - cURL is fast becoming my favourite toy

  136. Sun, 24 Dec 06 - The worst captcha... ever.

  137. Fri, 15 Dec 06 - Might as well aim high...

  138. Thu, 14 Dec 06 - Addicted to twitter.com

  139. Wed, 13 Dec 06 - Reevoo.com dips its toes into the opensearch water

  140. Sun, 10 Dec 06 - Crappy ruby script to download photos from a flickr photoset

  141. Wed, 29 Nov 06 - del.icio.us as a simple to do list

  142. Tue, 28 Nov 06 - Amazing non-customer service

  143. Mon, 27 Nov 06 - Maybe I need some more REST

  144. Tue, 07 Nov 06 - Telephone numbers for form submissions

  145. Wed, 01 Nov 06 - Google AdWords Api Internal Error using the Sandbox

  146. Tue, 24 Oct 06 - Connecting to gmail with Ruby (or Connecting to POP3 servers over SSL with Ruby)

  147. Fri, 20 Oct 06 - Boolean method in Ruby (sibling of Array, Float, Integer and String)

  148. Wed, 18 Oct 06 - Inactive keywords (too high minCpc) when using Google Adwords Api

  149. Sat, 14 Oct 06 - Some useful assertions, maybe

  150. Fri, 06 Oct 06 - Recording daily spending with a Ruby Dsl

  151. Sat, 30 Sep 06 - Bye bye feedshow...

  152. Fri, 22 Sep 06 - The best property search website

  153. Fri, 22 Sep 06 - Testing against the (Garbage Collection) Clock, or, Don't create your Test Cases as anonymous classes

  154. Mon, 18 Sep 06 - Unified method_exists method for ruby

  155. Mon, 18 Sep 06 - gDisk - very cheap (free) online storage

  156. Mon, 11 Sep 06 - What's the time google?

  157. Sat, 09 Sep 06 - Changing Irb context

  158. Sat, 09 Sep 06 - In memory AR object for testing

  159. Sat, 09 Sep 06 - Recommended web host

  160. Tue, 22 Aug 06 - Textmate environment and ruby (again)

  161. Tue, 22 Aug 06 - Rails leaking some strings in development

  162. Tue, 22 Aug 06 - Feed reading feature requests

  163. Mon, 21 Aug 06 - I hope I didn't break rubyforge...

  164. Thu, 17 Aug 06 - I guess that's one way to do it...

  165. Mon, 14 Aug 06 - Tickling link_to into submission

  166. Mon, 14 Aug 06 - Create rails projects using a specific rails gem version

  167. Sat, 05 Aug 06 - New rails weblob

  168. Wed, 02 Aug 06 - Helpful error messages when active record objects fail validation (in tests)

  169. Fri, 28 Jul 06 - TextMate and "env: ruby: No such file or directory"

  170. Mon, 17 Jul 06 - Test::Unit abstract test case

  171. Mon, 17 Jul 06 - Some realisations about testing

  172. Fri, 14 Jul 06 - Textmate command to display Active Record column attributes

  173. Wed, 12 Jul 06 - Using in memory Active Record objects with associations for testing

  174. Wed, 12 Jul 06 - Ruby hashes with default values

  175. Wed, 12 Jul 06 - Trying to learn

  176. Wed, 05 Jul 06 - Very simple Micro Id Verifier

  177. Fri, 30 Jun 06 - Very very lightweight mocking(ish)

  178. Sun, 25 Jun 06 - Generating a MicroId with Ruby

  179. Wed, 21 Jun 06 - More helpful messages for Active Record validation errors in Rails testing

  180. Fri, 02 Jun 06 - Rails plugin to utilise Sqlite for testing

  181. Sat, 13 May 06 - Improving search results

  182. Fri, 12 May 06 - Using active record models in rails migrations

  183. Sat, 06 May 06 - Storing passwords online

  184. Wed, 08 Mar 06 - My first reevoo!

  185. Wed, 08 Mar 06 - Rails table pluralization

  186. Mon, 06 Mar 06 - Cool google map of the tube network...

  187. Sun, 05 Mar 06 - Installing Collaboa

  188. Wed, 01 Mar 06 - ClaimId for managing online identity

  189. Wed, 01 Mar 06 - Ruby Quiz number 67 (metakoans)

  190. Mon, 27 Feb 06 - Claiming my blog on technorati

  191. Fri, 24 Feb 06 - Some Freebsd housekeeping

  192. Thu, 23 Feb 06 - Rails rake testing without database

  193. Thu, 23 Feb 06 - Rails testing without database

  194. Sat, 18 Feb 06 - Alternative to Putty Ssh on Windows

  195. Thu, 09 Feb 06 - Reviews Reevoos Reviews

  196. Wed, 08 Feb 06 - In memory sqlite database for rails testing

  197. Thu, 19 Jan 06 - Idea - Typo sidebar for allconsuming

  198. Tue, 17 Jan 06 - (One of the reasons) Why I really really don't like uk2

  199. Mon, 16 Jan 06 - douban as alternative to allconsuming?

  200. Thu, 12 Jan 06 - Idea - Track daily spending...

  201. Thu, 12 Jan 06 - Aggregaation is the way forward...

  202. Mon, 09 Jan 06 - Inland Revenue as bad as Ticket Master

  203. Fri, 23 Dec 05 - Print to Pdf in Windows without Acrobat Writer

  204. Tue, 13 Dec 05 - Patching the rails

  205. Mon, 12 Dec 05 - voo2do vs tadalist

  206. Sat, 10 Dec 05 - Backpack sms reminders to orange uk

  207. Wed, 30 Nov 05 - Maximum password length is bad

  208. Tue, 29 Nov 05 - Test post from dashblog

  209. Sun, 27 Nov 05 - Operating systems should be managed by version control

  210. Sat, 26 Nov 05 - Transparency in business

  211. Sat, 26 Nov 05 - It should be easy to cancel online accounts

  212. Sat, 26 Nov 05 - Firefox close tabs like Safari

  213. Sat, 26 Nov 05 - Tadalist bookmarklet

  214. Sat, 26 Nov 05 - Rojo replaces bloglines (for me at least)

  215. Fri, 18 Nov 05 - I don't know how to use the debugger

  216. Fri, 18 Nov 05 - PwdHash

  217. Fri, 18 Nov 05 - dabble db initial thoughts

  218. Sun, 13 Nov 05 - 'We will never ask for your security details...'

  219. Sun, 13 Nov 05 - Windows Adobe Acrobat Reader alternative

  220. Wed, 09 Nov 05 - Best signup form... ever.

  221. Sun, 06 Nov 05 - Typo admin broke!

  222. Sun, 30 Oct 05 - Run one ruby test/unit test from command line

  223. Fri, 07 Oct 05 - Setting up Typo from SVN Trunk

  224. Sun, 02 Oct 05 - Cyrus Imap

  225. Sun, 02 Oct 05 - Typo pings

  226. Sun, 02 Oct 05 - Online news reader

  227. Sat, 01 Oct 05 - Instiki-AR with sqlite3 on Windows XP

  228. Sun, 18 Sep 05 - Zen ADSL/Dial-up account can't be used at the same time

  229. Fri, 09 Sep 05 - Set background transparency in GIMP

  230. Thu, 08 Sep 05 - Netgear WPN824 disappointment

  231. Tue, 06 Sep 05 - Remote Control Software

  232. Tue, 06 Sep 05 - Typo flickr problems

  233. Tue, 06 Sep 05 - Linspire

Creative Commons License deferred until inspiration hits by Chris Roos is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 UK: England & Wales License