A school friend who now lives out in the US is getting married next month and on Sunday we were attempting to buy a couple of gifts from their online Macy’s wedding list. When it came to paying we tried a few different credit cards but each came back with an error message so we gave up and decided we would phone them later in the week. As we left the site I noticed that the items we had been trying to buy were now marked as taken which I thought was a little annoying. Then, in my inbox, I discovered three separate order confirmations, all for the same items!
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Archive for the ‘Web’ Category
Wedding list mayhem
Wednesday, June 27th, 2007Rails Overview: Model
Thursday, June 21st, 2007This overview of Rails has become a little more sporadic than I had anticipated but hopefully I’ll be able to get some momentum going again now! In my introductory post I covered the basics of what Rails is and how easy it was to set up a development environment. The Rails programming model is built around the Model-View-Controller architectural pattern and in this post I’ll cover the first of those aspects: the model.
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Rails Overview: Intro and Getting Started
Thursday, May 24th, 2007So, here goes… there’s plenty to say so my overview of Ruby on Rails is going to be a multi-parter. Note, this isn’t going to be a tutorial – there are plenty of those about. This is my view on what makes Rails hot and where it’s not based on my experiences as a Rails newbie. My background, for reference, is with J2EE professionally, and PHP on the side.
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Hosting by the slice
Wednesday, May 23rd, 2007A couple of months back I was looking for somewhere to host a Ruby on Rails app (of which more in another post shortly). In the end I settled for a Virtual Private Server from US firm Slicehost (who are themselves Rails developers). For just over £10 a month I get 10GB of storage, 100GB of bandwidth and 256MB. Bargain! I’d love to use a host in the UK but I’d easily be paying twice that and getting half the spec (unless someone out there can point me at a good deal I’ve missed).
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WordPress 2.2
Sunday, May 20th, 2007Having missed the previous security update I decided to upgrade to WordPress 2.2. I’m glad to say everything seems to have gone smoothly (although PlusNet managed to take the site down again at one point which had me a little worried). Nothing really different for you, the reader, to see. Widget support is now there out of the box but then I had the plugin installed previously anyway.
OpenStreetMap lecture
Monday, April 23rd, 2007I’ve mentioned OpenStreetMap before on this site so I’d thought I’d plug a BCS Hants lecture this Thursday on the subject. It’s a shame I won’t be able to make it.
Welcome back blogroll
Friday, March 16th, 2007Apologies to those whose sites have recently been absent from the links in my sidebar. The modifications in WordPress 2.1 to use the same categories for posts and links managed to break my pages. Having just moved up to WordPress 2.1.2 this is now fixed so the blogroll returns.
Restricted access
Thursday, February 8th, 2007My colleague Simon Kapadia informs that he can’t access this site from our standard issue 3G cards due to “Vodafone Content Control”. Fortunately if you’re over 18 you can remove the access control (which I’m guessing I must have done at some point in the past) but make sure the children aren’t watching!