James R J Constable » James

Memcached Output Caching Library for CodeIgniter

James — Thu, 08 Jul 2010 16:16:15 +0000

As a reworking to the MongoDB caching library I posted recently I made a version that saves output cached data to a Memcached server instead. At the moment this works with just a single Memcached server but i’ll add support for multiple servers / clustering in the future.

MongoDB Output Caching Library for CodeIgniter

James — Tue, 06 Jul 2010 16:13:13 +0000

Recently I’ve being experimenting with CodeIgniter’s built in web page caching mechanism to speed up rendering on an application i’ve been building at work. As an experiment I’ve overwritten the caching mechanism to cache to MongoDB rather than the file system. I’m assuming this will be faster but haven’t had time to do proper analysis yet. This post is really just to announce that the code is available over at GitHub.

The library overrides the existing cache handling but it syntactically compatible with the existing caching functions so you won’t need to alter your application code to use it.

Feel free to check it out and let me know your thoughts on it. I’ll write an update soon once i’ve done some reasonable testing to compare metrics.

SiftLinks: Links sifted out of Twitter and into an RSS feed for you.

James — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 21:16:41 +0000

There’s a couple of things I’ve been wanting to play with recently – the Twitter Auth protocol (and subsequently the Twitter API) and MongoDB. There’s also been something bugging me about Twitter recently. I follow a few interesting folk who post a lot of interesting links. But sometimes I disappear for a few days for work or for fun and despite seeing these links on my iPhone, I don’t really get the chance to properly read the articles.

What i needed was a way to strip out Tweets with a link in them and pick those links up in my feed reader when I get the chance to catch up with whats going on in the world.

And so I combined the aforementioned desire to experiment with new stuff and the need for an rss of my tweets with links in them to build SiftLinks. It’s still in the testing phase and I’m making various optimisations as I go along – but it works. If you have a need to extract links from twitter then give it a go and let me know how you get on.

Facebook Connect Library for ColdFusion

James — Fri, 26 Feb 2010 14:53:00 +0000

I’ve dropped an initial release of the Facebook Connect library for ColdFusion I built onto my GitHub account. It works perfectly under the limited testing i’ve actually done. I’ve only tested under Railo 3 but dont think there’s any real reason why it won’t work fine in the Adobe CF server. There’s no documentation yet but i’ll get to that eventually as well.

Review of the Manic Street Preachers at King Tuts, 18th February 2010

James — Fri, 19 Feb 2010 16:12:24 +0000

You can read the review I wrote of the Manics at King Tuts last night (18th Feb 2010) over at STV Entertainment. Feel free to leave some comment over there if you were at the gig as well.

Ginza Station

James — Sun, 24 Jan 2010 10:58:18 +0000

Ginza Station, originally uploaded by WeeJames.

Installing Subversion 1.6.6 from source on Ubuntu 8.04

James — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 13:55:44 +0000

I’ve got a number of servers that are currently running the latest LTS release of Ubuntu, 8.04. Unfortunately this release doesn’t have the latest version of subversion (1.6.6 at time of writing) available from apt and as the various clients that get used to access these working copies get updated, they stop working with the command line version on the server (1.5.1).

I found installing from source a bit fiddly at first but after some research managed to get everything hooked up as required.

Start off by grabbing the latest version from the subversion site and untar/gzipping it

wget http://subversion.tigris.org/downloads/subversion-1.6.6.tar.gz
tar xf subversion-1.6.6.tar.gz

There’s a few pre-requisites that need to be installed to compile subversion so if you’ve not already got them add these packages.

sudo apt-get install libc6-dev g++ gcc
sudo apt-get install libapr1 libapr1-dev libaprutil1 libaprutil1-dev libneon27 libneon27-dev

Configure the compilation from within the newly uncompressed directory and declare where you want the binaries to be saved to

./configure –prefix=/usr/bin/subversion-1.6.6 –disable-nls

And finally run the make process

make
sudo make install

All being well you should have the latest version of subversion accessible from the directory you specified (in our case /usr/bin/subversion-1.6.6). If you want this new version to precede the existing version so you don’t have to write in the full path each time. Alter /etc/environment and add the path to the newly installed subversion to the start of the PATH variable. e.g.

PATH=”/usr/bin/subversion-1.6.6/bin:/usr/local/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin:/sbin:/bin:/usr/games”

Reload you environment file with

source /etc/environment

And type svn ––version to check that you do indeed have SVN 1.6.6 installed

svn, version 1.6.6 (r40053)
compiled Nov 3 2009, 12:19:16
Copyright (C) 2000-2009 CollabNet.
Subversion is open source software, see http://subversion.tigris.org/
This product includes software developed by CollabNet (http://www.Collab.Net/).
svn, version 1.6.6 (r40053) compiled Nov 3 2009, 12:19:16
Copyright (C) 2000-2009 CollabNet.Subversion is open source software, see http://subversion.tigris.org/This product includes software developed by CollabNet (http://www.Collab.Net/).

Rich Snippets for STV Local

James — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 09:26:46 +0000

Over on STV Local we’ve added support for Google’s rich snippets on search results using the hreview-aggregate microformat.

Soon (hopefully), the search results for places like Piece will have extra information like the number of reviews, the average rating and (where available) the average cost of a meal for 2.

X-Factor Finalists on Muxster

James — Wed, 14 Oct 2009 08:29:17 +0000

Muxster is getting closer and closer to a stage where we want to start user testing and as part of the testing process we’ve set up a bunch of Mux’s for the various X-Factor finalists to demonstrate some of the features.

The various illustrations you’ll see were done by the very excellent illustrator, Claire Murray.

You should follow Muxster on Twitter to keep up to date with what’s happening and to let us know if you or your band are interested in doing some testing for us.

Update: None of these links work now. Now that Muxster has been launched we decided to remove the test accounts we set up and start afresh!

Preview Video of Muxster

James — Mon, 05 Oct 2009 20:50:19 +0000

As some know I’ve been working on a project for a wee while now called Muxster. We’re almost at a stage where user testing of the Beta version will begin but for a wee preview of whats going on check out this video that Andy put together.