All Posts

  • 2010-08-26 Titanium development on Linux

    Here follows my notes on writing a simple application using Appcelerator Titanium. Appcelerator Titanium allows you to build cross-platform native applications for mobile using Javascript. Since I’m currently posing as a Javascript fan-boy I thought I’d take a look.

  • 2010-06-11 Logging into Ubuntu using works access card

    I’ve been playing with NFC (Near Field Communication) technology for work recently, and as an aside this Friday afternoon I decided to set up my Ubuntu development box to log in automatically when I scan my work pass. Perhaps a little pointless, but it could have some uses… Anyway here are my notes.

  • 2010-06-11 Testing browsers concurrently

    Over the last few months I’ve been using Cucumber to write Behaviour-Driven-Development tests for my web projects. The tests I’ve been writing have been fairly simple and sequential. The tests would, for example, authenticate a user, perform some action and then log out. Only one user was required to perform an action at a single time. If two users were required to interact then the test would log out as the first user and authenticate with the second. The application could wait for the other user to re-appear before delivering it’s action. I’ve recently started writing some BOSH applications which require both users to be logged in at the same time. Testing these require two browsers to be open concurrently.

  • 2010-06-08 Customizing JForum with Maven2

    JForum is an open source forum or bulletin-board webapp written in Java. Recently was required by work to produce a customised version for deployment. The customised version would integrate with the Single Sign On solution employed, namely CAS, and would be decorated with the skin or template of the web site. In this article I describe using the Maven2 tool to apply my modifications in a separate source tree from JForum.

  • 2010-06-01 Project history in Netbeans

    I found that my Netbeans IDE was not opening my Maven projects because it had some previous project metadata associated with it. This is just a quick hint on how to clear the project history in the Netbeans IDE. This has only been tested on version 6.8.

  • 2010-05-30 Deploying Openfire and OneSocialWeb to Vagrant

    I’ve been working on putting together some scripts which will install an Openfire server with the OneSocialWeb plugin on a virtual machine.

  • 2010-05-27 BOSH

    I’ve been studying the OneSocialWeb project recently. It’s taken the lead from Google Wave and uses XMPP behind the scenes to handle messages between users.

  • 2010-05-01 Vagrant for Debian testing

    I’ve recently been looking into Vagrant. Vagrant allows you to build virtual environments and easily distribute them. By pragmatically describing virtual environment it easily allows developers to share configuration during development, and also eases the pain of setting systems up for distribution.

  • 2010-04-28 Code snippet - line in file exists

    A Bash code snippet which checks to see if a line exists in a file, and if it doesn’t then uses ‘sudo’ to append the line to the file.

  • 2010-04-28 Android SDK and Lucid Lynx

    I found that after installing Lucid Lynx the Android SDK would not detect my Nexus One. Remembering that the same thing happened when I last installed the SDK on my machine I’ve decided to document the fix. I must remember to remember things.

  • 2010-04-27 CouchDB 0.11 and CouchApp Notes

    I’ve been playing with CouchDB and CouchApp recently. These are my notes on installing CouchDB 0.11 on Ubuntu and creating basic CouchApp applications.

  • 2010-04-27 Signing Android applications with Maven

    We’re about to release an Android application for work. We need to self-sign the APK file so it can be installed onto devices. The easiest way to do this is using Eclipse. We, however, have got a Hudson integration server configured to pump out builds whenever we need them.

  • 2010-04-22 Writing PHP applications with Maven and Jetty

    This is a quick tutorial on using Maven2 to build PHP web applications and deploy them with Jetty. Maven is a powerful build system which makes projects of the same type to follow a similar structure. Jetty is a light weight HTTP server ideal for integration tests. It also has a highly configurable Maven plugin which can be hooked into the build life cycle.

  • 2010-04-21 who-needs-wp version 0.7.0

    I’ve just pushed version 0.7.0 of who-needs-wp onto RubyGems. Improvements in this version include:

  • 2010-04-15 Releasing Maven projects to Github

    This is a quick-start guide to deploying Maven projects to a remote repository and then using the maven-release-plugin to publish them on GitHub.

  • 2010-04-14 Android with Maven

    I’ve been playing with building Android applications using Maven and the maven-android-plugin. There’s some excellent documentation out there, but I made some notes as I followed it.

  • 2010-04-13 Kramdown and who-needs-wp

    I’ve just upgraded who-needs-wp to use Kramdown instead of RDiscount. I started using Kramdown for 2 reasons; It’s written entirely in Ruby; and it adds some useful extensions to Markdown.

  • 2010-03-28 Re-naming MySQL tables

    Here’s a handy little script which re-names all the MySQL tables in a database. I wrote this because Dreamhost added a prefix to my Wordpress installation. When I wanted to load the database on my local machine, I no longer wanted the prefix.

  • 2010-03-27 Who needs Wordpress?

    The majority of web sites are consumed. Visitors will stumble upon the site, read a few pages (if you’re lucky) and then disappear. Normally for every visitor to the site each webpage is generated dynamically. Each visitor has their own version of the web page for that particular moment of time. Is this really necessary? How often does the content on the web site you are visiting change?

  • 2010-03-01 Crafting usage messages in Bash scripts

  • 2010-02-27 Re-writing Viki's Makefile as a Rakefile

    I’m not a fan of Makefiles. :-( I don’t find find them particularly easy to write or maintain - and they are often too tightly integrated to the programming environment or the developer. I’ve spent far too many hours trying to resolve dependencies on Makefiles. To be fair however there are other tools out there, but the scars still show. :-)

  • 2010-02-21 Viki - A wiki built on Git

    The last few days I’ve been helping contributing code to Frank Dean’s wiki software - Viki. Frank has been maintaining a TWiki which me and a few of his friends have been contributing our technical notes. Whenever we find something which may be of interest to others we posted it on the Wiki.

  • 2010-01-23 Packaging with RubyGems

    I’ve been writing a fair few Ruby applications recently, including BetterBankStatement, and a bugzilla poster. Previously I’ve been pointing people to the relevant code repositories and giving them a list of dependencies to install. This hasn’t been ideal.

  • 2010-01-18 Encrypting folders in Ubuntu on Dropbox

    My BetterBankStatement application parses my bank statements and produces summaries of what I’ve spent my money on. I’ve also started storing my documents online on Dropbox, which keeps my files synchronized on my home computer and at work. Not wanting my personal information to fall into the wrong hands I decided to encrypt the folders containing my bank statements.

  • 2009-12-23 BetterBankStatement

    I’ve been trying to get a grip over my finances - and the best way of doing this is to have a budget - and stick to it. The problem with budgets is that I’m a little optimistic with my budget and manage to underestimate how much I spend.

  • 2009-12-14 Making sense of Virgin phone bills

    I’m the one that pays for the broadband and phone bill at my house. It’s part of the rent agreement with my parents, I can get a super-fast Internet connection - if I pay for it. When choosing broadband provider it was obvious that Virgin Media offered the best speed, and that it would be cheaper if I transferred the telephone line along with it. After all, it was only an extra £2 per month plus call usage. That shouldn’t really amount to much.

  • 2009-12-13 Optimizing Thematic theme using YUICompressor

    After making my theme changes (as mentioned in the previous posts) I noticed that my Wordpress blog seems to take too long to load. Without examining how long should be acceptable I decided to make some small optimizations. If I’m thinking about how long something takes to load, then it is too slow.

  • 2009-12-12 Using LessCSS for Wordpress themes

    I’ve been playing around with modifying Wordpress themes again. Taking my existing “ogboumatic” theme and re-writting the CSS using Less CSS. LessCSS makes CSS much clearer by adding variables, embedded rules and mixins.

  • 2009-12-02 Droidcamp, London. 1st December 2009

    I recently attended Droidcamp - a Barcamp in London enthusiasts of the Android platform. I’ve tried to summarize each talk I attended to in 6 sentences or less.

  • 2009-11-27 Using Google Charts and gchartrb

    The Google Charts is a simple API for generating charts and graphs. It’s designed so it can easily be embedded into web sites. The API consists of sending different parameters to a URL hosted on Google’s servers. It makes more sense when looking at an example:

  • 2009-11-20 Installing Statusnet 0.9.x on Ubuntu Karmic

    This guide will show you how to install Statusnet on Ubuntu Linux 9.10.

  • 2009-11-17 rm -rf blog.owengriffin.com

    My Dreamhost hosting was up for renewal and I realised that I hadn’t really used by blog. I’ve not really used much of my hosting at-all, except when I need to upload a quick experiment and hack - and work’s servers aren’t accessible enough.

  • 2009-11-17 Modifying Wordpress themes

    It’s been a long time since I used Wordpress. I’ve been dabbling with different content management systems in my spare time and at work we’ve built our own bespoke Java web application. After spending the last few hours playing with Wordpress I’m impressed at how the project has developed and the plethora of plugins, extensions and themes available. There’s a lot of love out there for Wordpress - the project must be doing something right.