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Thoughts on Privacy - A Long Comment
A few of my thoughts on privacy prompted by a recent blog post. 29th Jun 2010
The following post was actually written as a comment to a post by Pete Williams on Some Different Thinking on Privacy. Unfortunately I had difficulty posting it as a comment, running into a few vaguely described errors which I think centered around Blogger's 4096 character limit to prevent spam... hmm maybe I am... read more
Beanstalk Queuing in CakePHP
Simple implementation of the Beanstalk work queue service in CakePHP 15th Apr 2010In between the busyness of moving office, bug fixing Nightvibes and doing some dev on our new company website. I was fortunate enough to spend some time in the past few weeks on a cool upcoming project we have going on at Inlight that had an interesting challenge. A key part of the project required a... read more
AppImage Updated - Large Image Resizing for Google App Engine
A solution for the 1MB image resizing limit within Google App Engine 16th Feb 2010Context
It's been nearly two months since I first posted about getting started with Google App Engine. The post discussed web services and the ways in which parts of your application can be outsourced to larger, more scalable platforms - with a specific focus on Google App Engine (GAE). At... read more
CakePHP Tip #2 - Run Multiple Releases of CakePHP At Once
A technique for accessing multiple CakePHP releases from the command line 27th Jan 2010Context
The CakePHP community has just recently begun actively pushing out version 1.3-beta (download here) of the framework. It is of course still in beta and version 1.2.5 is considered the stable release, however I've been hearing mostly success stories from people making the upgrade,... read more
CakePHP Tip #1 - Named Parameters
A method for defining mandatory and optional named parameters 10th Jan 2010This post is the first of a series of small CakePHP tips and snippets that I'd like to share with fellow CakePHP developers reading this blog. Having been developing in CakePHP for almost a year now, I've found (as I'm sure you have too) that there are very few days that go by without discovering... read more
Revving with Google App Engine
Two Google App Engine web services for Email and Image Manipulation 22nd Dec 2009Context
Recently at work we've been researching ways to improve the performance and flexibility of our web apps. We've begun trending towards outsourcing CPU intensive tasks and storage to bigger players such as Amazon and Google, basically to ensure that our web server is doing exactly (and only)... read more
Apps for a new Mac
Some essential and fun applications for any new Mac 8th Dec 2009Yesterday was a great day (surprising, I know, for a Monday), but as the end of a successful year at work draws closer I was very generously given a shiny new 27inch iMac as my new "workhorse". I'm currently spending my time setting it up and tuning it so it purrs like the leopard it is, however at same time I thought... read more
Spam, Spam, Cake and Spam
Countermeasures for reducing form spam, a CakePHP behaviour 1st Dec 2009Context
Since I've now entered the the world of blogging I wanted to start off proactively in what I've heard is a continuous fight against comment spam. With only one a handful of comments so far, its not out of urgency that I've put in safeguards, but simply out of curiosity. If I wasn't in the field of web... read more
Cutting it with Snipplr
A basic PHP library for the Snipplr API 27th Nov 2009Context
I'm a big fan of Snipplr. It's an online code snippet storage/sharing service (similar to DZone Snippets or Snipt). Often when I'm writing code and I hit a wall I find myself traveling towards Snipplr, bypassing my usual Google search. I enjoy the succinctness of reading a code snippet as opposed to... read more
Hello World
The humble first post 27th Nov 2009After months of being in that deadly ~80% complete stage, I've finally pulled together the last ~20% needed just to get this site live. Here it is. Welcome to Developing In The Dark!
I love new technologies and they seem to sprout up everyday - most notably when doing the breakfast twitter check. Its the thrill of... read more