I’ve been working alot with RequireJS lately and love the whole modular JS movement, where blocks of code are safely contained within separate functions, that can be loaded in when necessary, without worrying about variable/function name clashes. Generally each module is stored in it’s own file but you can combine several modules into one giant […]
Extending Google Maps class with RequireJS and Underscore
24th January, 2015 - Posted by david
Memcache variable breakdown
30th April, 2014 - Posted by david
At work we use memcache as our local variable cache and the excellent memcache.php from Harun Yayli to give us a simple way of viewing what’s in the cache. One use case we came up with that was missing from the original memcached.php script was a way to group similar variables and see how much […]
Varnish with Apache on Ubuntu, with throttling, logging for multiple sub-sites, handling cookies and more
18th January, 2014 - Posted by david
One of the good things about working in a small company is that you’re more likely to be asked to do things that you’ve never done before and are way out of your comfort zone. Although I’m a programmer/web developer primarily, I like the whole infrastructure aspect of web development too and am always happy […]
Include comments in search in The Bug Genie
4th April, 2013 - Posted by david
Back in July, I was given the task of finding a decent, preferably PHP-based, bug-tracking system and opted for The Bug Genie, as it had pretty much everything we wanted: email notifications, tickets grouped by project, various levels of user access and more. One thing we noticed however, was that when you searched all issues […]
Beanstalkd, Pheanstalk and Daemontools on Ubuntu
20th March, 2013 - Posted by david
On the website I work for, when a user uploads an image for an ad, we generally keep 3 versions of that image, each a different size, simply referred to as ‘small’, ‘main’ or ‘large’. At the moment, these resized images (I’ll call them ‘thumbnails’ for simplicity) are generated the first time they are requested […]
Safari and long lines in Google Maps Javascript API Directions Service
11th October, 2012 - Posted by david
I’ve been working on building the mobile version of CarsIreland.ie lately and one of the features we want is to offer directions from a user’s current location to any of our car dealerships, assuming we have their latitude and longitude co-ordinates. Getting the directions and displaying them on a map are ridiculously simple, thanks to […]
How to set up an SVN server over HTTPS on Apache
2nd August, 2012 - Posted by david
So, I recently started a new job as Lead Developer on carsireland.ie and one of the first things I was tasked with was moving the codebase from a simple PC running Linux to the cloud, so that it could be accessed remotely, outside the office. Now, while I do prefer Git, SVN is still reasonably […]
php, error_log and newlines: a solution
15th May, 2012 - Posted by david
When it comes to coding and debugging, I generally keep things simple, opting for a basic text editor (Sublime Text 2 with Vim key-bindings being my current choice) and simple debug output statements when trying to track down a bug. With my current job, I deal with an API over AJAX so it’s not easy […]
window.onload firing too early in IE
12th May, 2012 - Posted by david
The Problem Where I work, our tool supports 6 different languages, where translations are contained in various sets of language files. One of these sets consists of the translations stored in Javascript files as JSON blocks
oAuth with the Twitter API in Ruby on Rails without a gem
15th December, 2011 - Posted by david
This post is a follow on from my previous post about the oAuth protocol in general in Ruby. Here I detail how to let a user authenticate themselves via Twitter to your web app, request a list of people they’re following (a GET operation) and how to follow a specific user (a POST operation). As […]