Facebook Puzzles Solutions

I’ve recently been having a go at the Facebook Puzzles as a way of brushing up my skills in languages other than PHP (which I use every day at work). As I go along, I’m putting my solutions on GitHub, along with all the other code I’m releasing, in case anyone is interested.

Release of FormFillFlatten

I’m pleased to announce the release of FormFillFlatten (FFF), a RESTful web service which allows you to submit a PDF with form fields and the values you want those fields to have. FFF will return a PDF with the form fields completed and ‘flattened’ so that they can no longer be edited. It’s a bit […]

Alternative DNS book

Jan-Piet Mens, who I’ve met at various UKUUG events, has just released his Alternative DNS servers book as a PDF, available for free from his website. It’s well worth a read if you want to do something with DNS other than running a BIND server with zones stored in plain text files—e.g. storing DNS data […]

Writing and releasing open source software

One of my goals for this year was to contribute to an open source project, in the form of filing/fixing bugs, as a way of giving something back because open source software makes my life a lot easier. I’ve partly managed this through filing numerous documentation bug reports—some of which have been fixed already—and in […]

BarCamp Manchester 3

This Saturday I attended my first unconference, in the form of BarCamp Manchester 3. Part of the reason for attending was to see how the unconference model works in preparation for UKUUG’s FLOSS UK Unconference in October this year, and also to do a bit of networking within the web development community. Things stuttered slightly […]

Identify LaTeX symbols

Those of you who use LaTeX regularly (as I do, both for my academic work and other papers) might find this LaTeX symbol classifier helpful. Basically you draw the symbol you want to produce in LaTeX and it will provide you with a list of matching symbols and the commands to reproduce them. Far more […]

Responsible behaviour

The latest xkcd (work safe) cracked me up this morning when I saw it in my feed reader (edited so that it will fit into my blog – horizontally it’s too long otherwise). N.B. For non-geeks, signing a public key of someone you don’t know is probably worse than sleeping with them, as everyone can […]