One of the roles that I have at work is maintaining the Magento software that runs our ethical gift shop. I recently upgraded one of our Magento installs from 1.5.0.1 to 1.5.1 using the newly introduced mage commandline tool. As regular readers will know I am a bit of a CLI freak, and was happily …

Back in 2008 me and my pal Penguin decided that it would be fun to have a webserver to play with. Nowadays, it doesn't cost much to have a virtual server with awesome hosts like Bytemark. But it still costs. Plus we wanted to provide a bit of a community activist resou …

The slider requires javascript. Trying to load it now... $('#slider').flickrshow({ autoplay:true, interval:5000, set:'72157626958402918' }); A few weeks back I was browsing round Perlmonks as is my wont, when I came across planetscape's post How can I …

This post is a slightly edited version of the BarnCamp 2011 blog post, which appeared on New Internationalist's tech blog. I am a big fan of the BarnCamp.I first went along to what was then called the Hacktionlabin 2009, and found a unique combination of stunningly gorgeouscountryside, …

It all looked so easy, especially after the monster list of assignments on Io, day two. Well, appearances can be deceptive it seems. The place where I got stuck was on question three. Try as I might I couldn't override the colon operator as I wanted to do. It worked fine on the commandline. No pr …

Backtrack Linux has become increasingly useful to me over the last few months. The latest release Backtrack 5 came out on 10 May, so I, of course wanted to have a play. Just a little background on Backtrack. Its specifically aimed at security professionals and hackers and has everything that you …

Update: Now this uses my new TwitRSS.me tool. Please donate and keep TwitRSS.me online.User: With replies?:   Love it or loathe it, it looks like Twitter is likely to remain an important part of the infrastructure of the interwebs for some time. Bac …

Wow. Day two messed with my head. I woke up a bit tired this morning to have a crack at it and got really baffled by how to make a fibonacci sequence. Just drew a total blank. So, I dug out some old c code I had and copied that into io. Which is sort of cheating, but got me going and also helped …

After getting Io installed, I am feeling a little smug with myself. I don't know if its just because the language is so different, or because I’ve had a beer or what but the Io introductory material seems more complex than that for Ruby. However, looking back at what was covered I suspect tha …

Well, it has been a while since Ruby, so I thought it was time to have a crack at the next of the my Seven Languages In Seven Weeks challenges, its time to play with Io. As it turns out Io was a bit of a faff to install on Debian Squeeze. So I’ve written up a day 0 tute on how to do just th …