James' Pad

TLDR; Velocity is a great conference for web and operations people, and why didn't you go already? IS TLS FAST YET? This was a talk by Ilya Grigorik full of practical, actionable things that...

http://eternusuk.blogspot.com/2014/11/velocityconf-eu-2014-day-1.html

Working at the Government Digital Service (GDS) changes a person. It’s not a thing we highlight; just acknowledge internally in furtive conversations. This post should expose a few truths abou...

http://eternusuk.blogspot.com/2014/04/things-gds-doesnt-tell-you.html

Sadly, I've not found a nice CLI way of doing this, but I recently had to validate that a 3rd party was transferring files to us in an approved way (AES 256-bit) and this is what I did: Open the...

http://eternusuk.blogspot.com/2012/09/how-to-check-encryption-used-in-zip-file.html

One of the things that I've come across has been legacy applications which use Oracle; where we don't have access to the database, but do get provided with Oracle .dmp files. These aren't very he...

http://eternusuk.blogspot.com/2012/09/how-to-convert-oracle-dmp-into-more.html

Basically echoing what others have said. I've held off working in London forever, not wanting to spend a large portion of my day on a train. But then something like this comes along, with an o...

http://eternusuk.blogspot.com/2012/05/joining-gds.html

You should buy this book . I know (all?) the content is available online already and if you've been reading raganwald's output over the years , you might have already read the articles collated ...

http://eternusuk.blogspot.com/2012/03/my-reaction-to-raganwalds-how-to-do.html

TLDR meh. I'd inherited a 4 month old branch which needed to be merged back into trunk at some point. As a first step, I wanted to merge the (hopefully smaller) changeset from trunk back into th...

http://eternusuk.blogspot.com/2012/02/merging-subversion-trunk-into-branch.html

I don't always use svn as a version control system with which I'll need to merge branches, but when I do, I use fmdiff . $ brew install fmdiff One minor annoyance - fmmerge (used for interactiv...

http://eternusuk.blogspot.com/2011/12/svn-merging-on-osx.html

Steve Souders pointed at this today; I've done something similar in the past, but I struggled somewhat with the documentation. Hopefully this might be useful to others. As part of a product t...

http://eternusuk.blogspot.com/2011/10/minifying-javascript-at-runtime.html

This wasn't entirely straightforward, so in the hope that it's useful for others: python on Snow Leopard doesn't seem to come with the development headers, so we need to address that, since pyca...

http://eternusuk.blogspot.com/2011/09/installing-graphite-on-osx-snow-leopard.html

This is kind of a follow up to my previous post on using Amazon CloudFront . This post is to cover conneg, or Content Negotiation . TL;DR - use HTTP as designed and follow the rules . Alice tr...

http://eternusuk.blogspot.com/2011/03/content-negotiation-on-mobile.html

Disclaimer - I've not shipped Java Swing / SWT apps. I'm a server guy where markup is the UI. Consequently, I don't have in-depth knowledge of Java to compare against. I'm aware of SwingUtilities...

http://eternusuk.blogspot.com/2011/02/objective-c-concurrency-issues.html

Java development tools are top of the pile out of anything I've used. The IDEs are massively powerful (they have to be, with the warts on the language). I'm also an emacs user day to day, and pra...

http://eternusuk.blogspot.com/2011/02/objective-c-tooling.html

At the time of writing, tool support is limited to the REST API ? The intention with this piece of work was to take content being served by our origin server; e.g. http://example.com/images/foo.p...

http://eternusuk.blogspot.com/2011/01/creating-custom-origin-server-for.html

This morning the AppStore on my iPod Touch pointed out that the Twitter app had an update. I installed it and launched the app to see what was new. Crash! After 5 crashes in a row without a succe...

http://eternusuk.blogspot.com/2010/08/apple-appstore-feedback.html

Recently had to audit an app to ensure that it wasn't leaking any unwanted details over the network. This was an iPhone app, but the same process can be used for Android, etc. Ensure Macbook Pro...

http://eternusuk.blogspot.com/2010/07/capturing-mobile-network-traffic-on-os.html

Recently had to install mod_python to test something for a customer. It needed some nudging, so including it here. Snow Leopard, Homebrew and default httpd. All content Copyright 2005, 2006 Jame...

http://eternusuk.blogspot.com/2010/05/modpython-in-apache-on-os-x-with.html

First off, I read the Objective-C Primer and Objective-C Programming Language guides. I collect languages, so there was some underlying familiarity there. Ruby, Smalltalk and C obviously shone ...

http://eternusuk.blogspot.com/2010/01/objective-c-language.html

This will be a place-holder page containing links to the other entries that I create in this series. I've got a lot of commercial experience with Java, some Python and Ruby. This has all been ser...

http://eternusuk.blogspot.com/2010/01/java-developers-guide-to-objective-c-on.html

I'm coming from an Eclipse on Ubuntu background, but this is equally applicable for IDEA on Windows. What are the equivalents for iPhone development? JAVA IPHONE NOTES JUnit (unit te...

http://eternusuk.blogspot.com/2009/12/objective-c-for-java-developers.html

From some reason I went to this thinking PubSubHubbub, but it was more a refresher about making an app asynchronous, why you'd want to do that and how implementation complexity goes up as you go ...

http://eternusuk.blogspot.com/2009/12/scalecamp-queue-pubsub.html

Popular session this - standing room only, so no notes from me. The short answer is Redis, courtesy of Simon Willison . Since the consensus was that Redis would do the trick, we then touched on...

http://eternusuk.blogspot.com/2009/12/scalecamp-how-do-you-scale-activity.html

Guardian.co.uk Graham and various other people from the development and operations team pitching in. 3 years ago - published static files with apache SSI to fill-in gaps. Moved to a fully dynam...

http://eternusuk.blogspot.com/2009/12/scalecamp-scaling-java-and-oracle-for.html

Thoughtworks guys again . Basic Servlet overview - in-memory sessions don't scale, duh! Preferred options - state goes into cookies and serialized. Security, legal aspects? Pretty well common t...

http://eternusuk.blogspot.com/2009/12/scalecamp-scaling-java-with-shared.html

Alex and James from mediamolecule.com. Fascinating perspective of embedded developers coming to server-programming and refusing to accept commonly held views on best practices for doing so. This ...

http://eternusuk.blogspot.com/2009/12/scalecamp-littlebigplanet.html