Category Archives: Programming

An approach to creating groups and persistent URLs in Drupal 7

A major project has been exploring the creation of a collaborative space using Drupal 7. Somebody else has taken this over whilst I concentrate on other parts of our system and integration but I thought I would post about the Persistent URL (PURL) creation. Fortunately Drupal 7 comes with a fair few options which the […]

Creating a simple video gallery using Drupal 7

As a side project, I’ve been looking at Media Uploads in Drupal 7. I am interested in using Media as a sort of asset management system at a machine level with web services allowing for the ingestion and listing of files. Anyhow as a side experiment, I wanted to take the idea of a video […]

New year, new directions?

We are in the middle of the dead days, as Marcus Sedgwick describes them in one of sequences. It seems like a time for soem reflection, partially based on an intepretation of Steve Poland’s What startup to Build? post on Techcrunch. This is not to say that I an necessarily thinking of building a startup […]

Using Tesseract with Python for OCR

Following several conversations with Alex Butterworth over pots of tea in the crypt of St Mary’s Church in Oxford, I’ve been having a look at Python and its bindings with the Tesseract library. A quick Google search brought me to this post by Roy on building an HTTP service using Tornado. I am fairly new […]

Streaming MP3s with Node.js

In the midst of doing some research for work into some technologies that we’ve begun, or are thinking of,  using, I’ve gone back to playing with Node.js . The ever useful Elegant Code blog has a quick guide to streaming files using Node that pretty much comes out to the box, or Github. Using some […]

Reflections on improving my programming skills

I’ve been thinking about programming this week. Perhaps this comes from the new started in our team this week and the energy  boost that we’ve had from that. Might also come from the fact that I’m off to Drupalcon tomorrow morning. Either way… I caught a post on Hacker News about becoming a better programmer […]

The overrated ‘death’ of middleware

I like the High Scalability blog but a recent post on the death of middleware did leave me shaking my head. Although discussing the idea of Platform as a Service, the article argument argued that the traditional middleware layer is dead, replaced by items such as RabbitMQ or ActiveMQ. I can see the argument if […]

Thoughts on DevOps

I’ve been reading a little about DevOps. I’ve come across it before but never really tried to explore it in detail. Until now. Why? Well it is increasingly clear that it will be helpful to our team and in part is something that I’ve moved towards in my last couple of jobs. At the previous […]

More autocompletion with Redis and Drupal

Last week I began working on an auto-complete function using Redis behind Drupal 7 to do some auto-completing functions. I needed to get some county data, and possibly other sorts, put into some forms so that it can be standardised. One of the issues that I’ve been trying to do is to make sure that […]

Auto-completing Drupal with Redis

I’ve been working on some functions for a forthcoming site at Janet and have been looking at the user functionality in some of our forms. In a reversal of roles, I’ve been trying to find ways of making it easier for users to complete the forms for various products and services which has taken me down […]