jrgns.net

Promising Product

Last week Christo Davel, founder of the now defunct twenty20 bank, released an online personal accounting service called 22seven.com. It looked like a great product. Something I was looking for for quite a while: A simple online interface that automatically imports my transaction details, and reports on how much I'm spending on what.

I will never use it, though. Why? The app asks for your online banking login details.…

I'm trying to use puppet to setup standard dev and (eventually) production environments. As Ubuntu 10.4 is the current LTS release (at least until 12.4), I need to get puppet running on 10.4. The problem is that although the latest stable release for puppet is 2.7.6, puppet in the ubuntu repo is version 0.25.4. Here's how to firstly set it up, and then upgrade it to the latest version.

I like frameworks. I like working with them, I like writing them. I wrote Backend-PHP, which I'm using personally and at Branded Internet. Unfortunately it has a number of major flaws: It's not easily unit testable, not really a REST web service, and it doesn't conform to any popular coding standards. So I wrote Backend-Core as the first step towards addressing these issues.…

Johnny (an asthma sufferer and fictitious character) died yesterday. He got an asthma attack, but he could not find his inhaler, and sadly passed away. Usually his mother kept it for him and made sure he used it, but on the first day he ventured out alone, he got an asthma attack, realised that he didn't have his inhaler with him, and died. What does this have to do with Singletons or Global variables? Read on...…

I hate repetitive work. I love solving a puzzle. So it often happens that I'd spend 2 hours writing a script to solve a repetitive problem, than just taking the 2 minutes to do it manually. Creating apache config files are tedious and boring, so I wrote a PHP script that emulates Virtual Hosting.…

A simple enough trim function for JavaScript:

function trim(string) {
    return string.replace(/^\s*|\s*$/g, '')
}

The last two weeks I had the privilege of staying in a house on the beach near Mosselbay. This time of the year whales start coming into the bay, and, if you're lucky, you can spot them breaching or displaying their flukes or fins. This inspired me to create WhaleSpotter, a site that uses Twitter to help people spot whales along South Africa's south coast. It took me less than 2 hours to do it. Here's how.…

I have the privilege to be the Head of Development of Branded Internet, a white label ISP in South Africa. I also like to read and think about how startups work, and what they do to make them successful. As I see it, the basic recipe for a startup is:

1. Find a niche market or problem
2. Find a revolutionary / novel way to solve that problem
3. Build the solution
4. Market it
5. See the money roll in.

If you see the company you're developing for as your client or target market, software development follows basically the same recipe.…

I'm working on some statistics surrounding BI's API Documentation coverage: Just how much user documentation have we written?

When I started out, the number was abysmally low: 11% of the 1300 functions. Not good. But I didn't feel too bad when I realized that because it's written as an Object Orientated system, I can very quickly improve the coverage.…

Looking for a new challenge, I started a small project in node.js. Here's a few simple tips on how to get going quickly.…