On The Job

Android Will Make You Miss Your Flight I like Android, but it can't tell time. I'm in London, booking my return flight from Trondheim. Takeoff is at 5:45pm Trondheim time. That's what's on the boarding p...

Git and the Octopus Merge Of Doom We now develop in two branches, for bugfixing and features. Merging the two, if we haven't done it for a while (and we now do it every day), is a bit scary. The best t...

Testing block helpers Not as easy as you'd think. This bug is re...

Tracing through Rails partials Looking at HTML source, it can be hard to figure out which partial is generating bad code, and why. This code outputs HTML comments at the start and end of partial ren...

Tethering a Nokia to OSX via Bluetooth on Leopard I love my Nokia 6120c. Now I have a new trick - internet access on my Macbook, u...

Breach It's eleven o'clock at night. I'm in a tent ten miles out of Malmesbury. I should _not_ be thinking about this. Work can wait until Monday; wedding planning can wai...

Loyalty Refactored I will never have a Tesco's Club Card. But every _single_ time, they ask me. The Apostrophe cafe near New Inn Yard is much smarter. Blank loyalty cards are visible ...

Live Scrum Scrum can manage any project, not just software projects. But can it run my life? I'm going to find out. I have a staggering number of projects - 'features' - in...

Calendaring Solved: Goosync syncs gCal and your phone Short version: Goosync.com solves all your problems for £23/year. The Problem ======== I have two gCals - one for work, one for home. My work calendar is shared w...

Tenlet: reverse telnet Tenlet is a backwards telnet client. It waits for a connection from the outside, and from then on it behaves like telnet. It's useful for simple protocol debugging - A...

Webrat in Merb I've just forked Webrat to add Merb support. You can get it here. Webrat lets you write integration tests t...

RSpec Stories In Merb RSpec stories are a way of doing integration and acceptance testing using plaintext executable tests. You can use them in Merb as well...

Five Scottish Beauties Here are five of the many things I learnt at Scotland On Rails: 1. *"Is your program written in invisible ink?"*
The point of being terse is that terse code i...

Facebook Developer Garage, 2 April Many successful facebook applications offer "low-pressure social interaction". I would, largely, refer to this as "low-content social interaction". Either way, there's...

Git, Github, and Rubygems quickstart Here's how to go from a rubygem's source code in a git repository to an installed gem on your machine: 1. Make sure you have git installed. Install MacPorts, then d...

Mailtrap and Mailshovel: Simple Rails mailer testing Mailtrap is a minimal SMTP server that runs on your development machine. Actionmailer can talk to it. I've just added Mailshovel, a minimal POP3 server, that will talk...

Database Optimization for Rails Apps First published on the New Bamboo Blog.

The reporting application I'm working on does a date-range select against a...

Getting Things Done at New Bamboo First published on the New Bamboo Blog.

Getting Things Done (GTD) is a way of choosing what to do next. It is more...