Muffin Research Labs

favicon

Favicon Generator Launched

The first of several projects I've been working on with former colleagues Ed Eliot [http://ejeliot.com] and Cyril Doussin [http://cyril.doussin.name] is now live as part of Project Fondue [http://projectfondue.com/], which is a place where we're collaborating on various projects both

Bazaar

Bazaar: Moving files after the fact

I recently came across a useful flag that can be use with Bazaar's move command. --after can be used to update bazaar's internal reference to the file after you've already moved the file. The syntax is as follows: $ mv foo bar # Doh should have

puppet

Puppet: Server Configuration Made Easy

I've been working on a few collaborative side-projects in my spare time which has ended up requiring several servers provisioned by a couple of different providers. The majority of them are Slicehost VMs but we also use Bytemark as a way of distributing risk for the unlikely event

PHP

Large Temporary Files Left Behind by ImageMagick

Recently since moving the CSS Sprite Generator [http://spritegen.website-performance.org/ ] to a new server we've had a couple of cases where the site has stopped working due to running out of disk-space. The cause was due to some epic temporary files being left behind by ImageMagick [http:

Life

Molly Emilia Monteiro Colville

Our second daughter Molly was born on Sunday 11th Jan 2009 at 15:51 weighing 5lbs 13oz. I can't express how totally awesome it is to be a Dad for the third time.

OSX

OSX Mysql app: Sequel Pro

Generally these days I'm tending to access mysql from the CLI but when writing a data importer script I needed to be able to see what tables I was accessing from two different dbs. Initially I was looking for an ERD tool but I stumbled across the successor

OSX

Lineform: Vector Graphics App for Mac

I've been noodling around with a few vector based designs this weekend (makes a nice change from coding). When if comes to vector I've never ever got on with illustrator as it's alway seemed a million miles away from the the photoshop interface. A

Web Development

Inline Code Finder

Robert Nyman has released a new and improved version of his inline js finder which now also locates inline styling as well as JavaScript. Inline code finder is a great way of identifying the kind of code that should always be avoided. More details can be found at Robert'

Python

Python 3.0 Released

So Python 3.0 is out [http://www.python.org/download/releases/3.0/] - here's the list of what's new [http://docs.python.org/3.0/whatsnew/3.0.html]. There's a lot in there and it specifically say it's incomplete

bittorrent

BitTorrent and the Long Tail

(SVG Long Tail Diagram by Hay Kranen [http://www.haykranen.com/] via Wikipedia) BitTorrent is a highly useful technology that helps to share the burden of many people getting access to content available from the internet by distributing the load via a P2P network. The big problem with bittorrent is

Amazon

Amazon now offers DRM free mp3s in the UK

Amazon's Mp3 store is now available in the UK which is great news. They seem to have a lot of tracks and albums available and track pricing is variable but seems tio start at the 69p which undercuts Apple's iTunes music store by quite a bit.

lazyweb

Dear lazyweb: In-ear headphone recommendations

My trusty Senheisser CX300 headphones have given up - one ear has lost volume considerably so I'm in the market for a new set of in-ear headphones? Seeing as everyone and their mother has an ipod these days I'm up for hearing recommendations of what you&

Work

Inspiring a Sense of Ownership

Former colleague Mike West talks about how inspiring a team's sense of ownership around a project is the key to great things happening: http://mikewest.org/2008/11/the-inspiration-of-ownership. Quality stuff.

shell

Checking tarball contents before extraction

When you are about to unpack a tarball you didn't create it's a good idea to run the -t flag instead of just assuming it's been packed in a sensible way. tar -tzf foo.tar.gz This lists all of the files in the

bash

Bash: Resolving Symlinks to Shellscripts

Here's a way to resolve symlinks that call a bash shellscript. The Problem I like to be able to use something like this in my bash scripts:SCRIPTDIR=$(dirname $0) Which is great for a reference to where the script is, but it suffers from the problem that

ubuntu

Ubuntu: change editor globally

I found the update-alternatives on my travels and very handy it is too especially when on a bytemark box by default the editor is set to "joe". From the man page: > update-alternatives creates, removes, maintains and displays information about the symbolic links comprising the Debian alternatives system.

Linux/Unix

Linux: Changing UIDs and GIDs for a user

Just had to do a quick switch over of UID [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_identifier_(Unix)] and GIDs [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Group_identifier_(Unix)] for a couple of users. I'm using Puppet [http://reductivelabs.com/trac/puppet] to manage server configurations and it'

DjangoCon

DjangoCon 2008

I though it about time I put together a write-up of the First DjangoCon held at the GooglePlex in Mountain View, I enjoyed it immensely and look forward to Euro DjangoCon. Whilst we were out there our trip co-incided with a YUI 3 event so we thought it would be

vmware

VMware Server: Convert Fixed Disk-images to Growable

Quick tip if you ever want to convert from a fixed disk image to an expandable one then the following command should do it: sudo vmware-vdiskmanager -r source.vmdk -t 0 expandable.vmdk Just replace "source" and "expandable" with your disk image file names. For more

SVN

SVN Tip: Get List of Files Changed Between Revisions

svn diff -r REVNO:HEAD --summarize Just replace REVNO with the start revision and HEAD with the end revision if you don't want it to be the latest revision.

OSX

Leopard Bug - Screensaver causes coreservicesd to crash

I've just found a fix to an annoying issue. I have a keystroke set to activate the screensaver and the lock the screen of my work MacBook Pro via an applescript. I was recently finding when I came back from lunch the system is pretty much dying on

ubuntu

Ubuntu: BUG: soft lockup - CPU#0 stuck for 11s!

So this post falls neatly under the "watching paint dry" category, so if you're susceptible to rage induced by reading terminally dull posts avert your eyes now. I've been having some interesting issues with VMs running on VMware server of late. Basically the problem

Coffee

FAIL of the Week: Caffè Nero

So this week I'm nominating Caffè Nero for a cup of coffee so utterly failsome I don't think someone with a kettle and frieze-dried coffee could do worse. What's even more annoying is that this kiosk has a La Marzocco machine. La Marzocco are

unicode

Working around uTidyLib's unicode handling

A couple of weeks back I was giving uTidyLib a hard time for exploding when passed a unicode string. (see FAIL of the week: uTidyLib unicode error [https://muffinresearch.co.uk/archives/2008/07/17/fail-of-the-week-utidylib-unicode-error/]). Looking further into using uTidyLib for tidying HTML I found there is a way

vmware

VMWare: Fixing Time Drift in AMD Dual-core Systems

I've been having some really nasty time drift on VMware servers guests of late. This is a big pain because so much relies on accurate date and time. The problem I was seeing was that the time on the guest was running very fast so I took the