So 2011 is in full swing and we have already seen some awesome conferences and events surrounding the design/dev community, including New Adventures, SASCon and FutureEverything.
I like to think I keep up-to-date with developer topics and events but sometimes, more than likely the day when I didn’t open Twitter, I miss notifications about conferences and usually only find out the day they are happening. I’ve complied a list of some notable conferences and events that I am aware of. If you are attending any others that are not listed let me know (twitter / comment below) and I’ll be sure keep the list up-to-date.
Ok so I know Rackspace Cloud gave me a free t-shirt last week but I promise they are not giving me any other free stuff for writing this blog post…shame.
Since Rackspace announced they were partnering with Akamai back in January they have been promising us “big news” and new features. Well, Rackspace officially announced today that they now support CNAME records on Rackspace Cloud Files – one of the biggest features web developers/system administrators have been requesting for months, if not years.
I was speaking with the lovely Ruth Sellers a while back and she told me how her mum and dad used to take pictures on a Polaroid camera of any visitors that entered into their house. The resulting picture would then be pinned up around a thick wooden mirror above the stove in the dinning room. I thought this was a lovely idea, showing the range of people that had entered into the family home at different times over the years.
I was inspired by Ruth’s story and thought that it would be pretty cool to try and achieve something similar but in the digital world. After my previous blog post about Arduino I thought it was only right to explore the possibilites with this new (to me) technology which will inevitably help me with my end project (creating a surveillance robot). I also took inspiration from Brendan Dawes who has created some pretty awesome products and devices.
This blog post takes a look at my efforts so far and the equipment and technologies needed to create this “face tracking” device. The end goal for the device is for it to be installed in an office/meeting/reception area where lots of people enter/gather. The device would either be attached to the wall under a monitor/tv or as a standalone device on a desk. If no faces are detected, the device will perform a sweep of the room (using pan/tilt) and the resulting live feed will be displayed on the monitor.
Recently I stumbled upon an old’ish blog post from the amazingly talented Rob Hawkes where he (and Redweb) created a “christmas spirit-o-meter” to measure peoples christmas spirit and display the results in the real world using a contraption that Rob built. Said contraption consisted of a christmassy-coloured backboard and a pointer attached to a servo that moved based on the spirit level. This in turn was then streamed live over the internet for all to see – pretty awesome I thought. Naturally, being the kind of person that I am, I wanted to know how it all worked and how he had tackled interacting with the data.
We have an exciting opportunity for any student who is looking for a year-long placement. We are looking for an enthusiastic student to come and join our award winning creative team who will be working alongside our current developer (that’s me) on a wide rang of web projects for our lovely clients.
You will need to have good experience with PHP and MySQL and be able to adapt and learn quickly. You should also take real pride in every line of code that you write and and believe in creating compliant and semantic websites.
This is a simple bash script that I wrote a few months back that remotely shuts down servers via SSH upon being executed. It is intended to be used as a shutdown script that should be called when a UPS sends a signal to a server to indicate that is should be shut down.
We have a pretty large APC UPS running 24×7 in work which powers a bunch of servers running Mac and Linux. By default, the UPS only has the option for one signal cable which is currently attached to our main server. You can purchase additional expansion cards and connect more signal cables to other servers however we didn’t really want to pay hundreds of pounds just for this privileged. Especially when it can be achieved so easily via bash scripting.
Admittedly I’ve used off-the-shelf jQuery plugins when it comes to image slideshows/scrolling images. Although they work fine and you can do loads of crazy shit I can’t help but feel they are too heavy and over-the-top for 99% of the stuff I do. Really all I want is a nice slide or fade effect on a bunch of images. Perhaps even a few controls so users can scroll through them or play/pause the slideshow.
I finally found a spare hour in my day and created a simple (4kb) jQuery plugin that does just that. Perhaps I will find another spare hour to fully optimise it and add a few more small features.
I was asked the other day by a fellow Google Chrome user about an alternative to Firefox’s “about:config”. You know the one… that little command that you type into the URL bar to access a wealth of “hidden” options. The one your dad would play with, change a whole load of settings and then phone up “family tech support” where you will forever helping him because he’s screwed it up. Yeah, that one…
Well I knew a few “about” commands (or pages) in Chrome but after a bit of digging around I stumbled upon a whole list of other about pages that display some rather interesting information and user options that allow you to modify your Chrome experience (see the full list below).
