You know when your brain is just not co-operating when you type ls into the mysql client console.

Not strictly a tech post, but I made some back-of-a-fag-packet calculations on how many seats parties would have won in yesterday’s election had their vote had some form of proportional representation. I simply took their percentage share of the vote, as reported by the BBC, and multiplied it by 650.

I’m currently bug-fixing on a Rails project, and encountered the need to convert the default UTC date-formats into local times, seeing as we’re enjoying our extra hour in our glorious British summer time. The documentation is a little confusing on this point, but I found that a good solution is to keep UTC for…

Far from having a hardcore readership in Russia, I learned the hard way that running a custom WordPress installation invites hackers to manipulate its fallible security measures. It would seem that the variety of users signing-up with a .ru address have figured out how to inject php code into wordpress, and my 2.8.2 version…

I’m currently working on a project to develop a content management system for a leading publisher, that generates content for a DVD. The system, developed in Ruby on Rails, naturally has a significant amount of background processing to do, with various assets respresented with large, binary files, often requiring server-side processing. For instance, we…