Blog

  • Caching with Varnish on Heroku (Rails)

    I had some trouble with a personal Rails project – trying to get it to use Varnish caching. I’ve collected my learnings on my personal blog.

  • Permanent fix for Rails’ wretched deprecation warning

    Developing rails apps under Ubuntu means that we get a lot of these warnings: DEPRECATION WARNING: require “activerecord” is deprecated and will be removed in Rails 3. Use require “active_record” instead. (called from at /usr/lib/ruby/vendor_ruby/activerecord.rb:2) Recently, we added a cron job to an app which meant that we were getting emailed this error every hour,…

  • Disable your caps lock in Ubuntu

    I hate the caps lock: it seems to exist just to give me strings of shouty text and to confuse vim. Normally, I just pop it off my keyboard. But I just got a nice new Das Keyboard professional, and I didn’t want to mutilate it. I had a quick Google and found lots of…

  • Barclays Bikes gem

    Harry Marr (GoCardless) has made barclays_bikes: a cool little gem that scrapes the Barclays Cycle Hire website and gives you a command line interface to get the number of bikes and free spaces available at each docking station. For example, $ bbikes Gives the full list of London’s docking stations and $ bbikes Borough Gives you…

  • How Alphagov might change UK government for the better

    Alphagov. It’s here, it’s great, and if it’s taken forward, it will herald a great deal of positive change. Not just on the web, but in the way that government does things – and that will bring harder challenges. There’s lots in Alphagov to be pleased about. It’s not perfect, but as an attempt to…

  • Indian Hack Day

    The Hack Day that we participated in in India was great. A real experience. I wasn’t quite sure what to expect of it. In the end, there wasn’t a lot of time for much hacking, but we had fantastic conversations about India’s problems and projects. Chief among the Indian projects was some amazing mapping and…