Category Archives: techy solutions

Programmatic page layouts using dojo and existing markup

The layout tutorials for dojo that I’ve seen all seem to fall into two categories: Markup-based: adding dojoType properties to HTML elements in the markup Programmatic: creating HTML elements in JavaScript When using a toolkit such as dojo for layout … Continue reading

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Presenting from a single canvas with HTML5

I’ve always been a fan of non-standard presentation techniques to help engage the audience. One that’s caught my eye recently is the idea of presenting from a single canvas, using a defined path but with the ability to digress. The … Continue reading

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Installing Firefox beta nightlies in Ubuntu

There’s a handy PPA for installing Mozilla Firefox nightly builds on Ubuntu but as well as the Firefox 4 builds, it also contains Firefox 3 nightly builds. Thanks to Dom I learned how to reduce the priority of the Mozilla … Continue reading

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Using Jena as a SPARQL endpoint

I’ve been involved in a few projects at work over the last couple of years that have made use of Semantic Web technologies (triple stores, RDF, OWL, SPARQL etc). For most of these I’ve made of ARC, a really great … Continue reading

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Wireless on a Dell Mini 10v in Ubuntu 9.10

I installed the Ubuntu 9.10 Netbook Remix release candidate on my new Dell Mini 10v and the wireless didn’t work out of the box. I think this is because there isn’t an open source driver and Ubuntu doesn’t ship with … Continue reading

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Indicator applet API changes in Ubuntu 9.10

The API for the indicator applet has changed in Karmic and a little internal IBM Python application that I’ve written stopped working. Only a couple of minor changes were needed but trying to track down exactly what these were was … Continue reading

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Building .deb packages for Python applications

Building .deb packages for Python applications Recently I wanted to build a .deb package for an internal IBM application I was writing so that users could easily install it and also so we could distribute them through some internal repositories. … Continue reading

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Building a RESTful Web application with PHP

Recently I’ve been putting together a Web application for a research project. I decided it was about time I really looked properly into REST so my Web interfaces are better structured. I won’t go into all the benefits here, you … Continue reading

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Merging and converting OpenOffice and PDF documents

For my BSL level 3 course I have a variety of OpenOffice documents for different forms etc which make up the portfolio. I wanted a way to merge these into a single document but they each had different margins and … Continue reading

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Going green… slightly

A simple thing but one that made me feel quite virtuous. I’ve written a very very simple script that turns off the screen whenever I lock the computer. Should save some energy every time I go to a meeting or … Continue reading

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