As I said, Ruby is a language I know pretty well already, so this is a gentle introduction for me. Tate compares Ruby to Mary Poppins — magical and fun. I hated that film. But I take the point. The excercises are pretty trivial, but here are my answers.Print the str …

Just thought I’d document this as its likely to be the sort of thing that others might need. I was doing a bit of a tidyup of our javascript files on the global justice site New Internationalist and I needed to know which javascript files were still in use. Its a recursive grep for .js file …

There is plenty of other documentation of how to set up remote passwordless ssh logins elsewhere on the web. But it often takes some faffing to make it work as you'd like. Now, I often do this, so I thought I’d write up the easiest way that I’ve found to do so. It only has two steps. How …

Note: This article originally appeared on the New Internationalist Tech Blog and is reused under a Creative Commons Licence Given recent revelations of police spying on activists, the takedown of the fitwatch blog and the increasing use by police of social networking tools like facebook …

I’m a huge fan of the Vimperator Firefox plugin. It works just like you'd want it to and doesn't break much. Well, it breaks one useful thing, which is the almost universal ctrl-c/ctrl-v cut and paste shortcuts. So, I was well chuffed to find a Vimperator cut and paste tip on superuser. I̵ …

Update 2011-01-31: Well, life got in the way of getting this out in January, let’s see if it will come out in Feb! I’m currently coding a project using the Catalyst Framework. The project is called feedmash and is partly inspired by paper.li along with the UK Indymedia agg …

This is the minimalistest of minimalist web casts, just to show off the awesomeness of a couple of vim modules for quick html h4x0ring. Specifically Surround and snipMate. w00t! …

BarnCamp 2010 was two days of workshops on topics ranging from renewable energy to foraging for food to citizen journalism to using free software for activism, three nights of camping, open space sessions, evening entertainment, great food at Highbury Farm, a beautiful farm co-op high in the Wye Va …

I recently got myself a 24-inch monitor. I wanted to keep using my trusty 17 inch as well - to use as a secondary monitor for system monitoring, playing music and other background tasks. There is a closed-source nvidia driver. But I’ll be using the open source nouveau driver (after trying with …

Note: This post was written in 2008. It might or might not still work. I’ve not had time to test. YMMV!This is a mini-howto which shows one way to get round an annoying bug in mount.cifs that doesn't look like getting fixed any time soon.When using smbmount you can have …