Recent Posts

A great way to Ides of March

This morning, while driving my daughter to school, the front passenger window of my car simply dropped in to the door well. The motor seems to still be working, I think the window just jumped the clips.


When AJAX Goes Bad

I was recently working a defect at $job to disable submissions of empty "dates" saving to MySQL as epoch -1, when I noticed in my network panel was polling an ajax endpoint, once per second. This poll was happening so that an on screen clock could be displayed showing the time where a potential lead lived.


Cloning all of an organizations git repos

Some of the code at $job (sadly) uses blind inserts, which makes changes to the tables behind them tricky. We were about to embark on a series of changes to tables for our Data Warehouse project, and I needed to verify if anything would be affected by these table changes.


The Difficulty of Parsing the Web

I read an entry in TheDailyWTF.com that made me pause. It was an image of a Google Search, focusing on "Doomworld", and the fact that Google had mangled the Homepage and Filesize fields in the output.


Why I'm Leaving Reddit

Reddit has an amazing story: Founded in 2005 by Steve Huffman and Alexis Ohanian, later acquired by Conde Nast, then spun off in to a subsidiary of Advance Publications, Reddit is one of the largest sites on the internet, and constantly growing. But this isn't a story about the cool things that Reddit has done (and continues to do); This is a story about the sleazy things that Reddit does with regards to moderation.


2012: A Year In Numbers

2012 was an interesting year: I switched jobs (first time in almost 5 years), we moved house (first time in almost 7 years), and I started a business. It was an interesting year for this blog as well.


Pre-combining assets with Jekyll

I recently made a switch on this site to use combined assets (javascript / css files) on this blog. Jekyll Asset Pipeline actually made this fairly easy.