March 2012
1 post
How elastic are Amazon Elastic Load Balancers...
Update: Since I made this post, Amazon have in fact been in touch and have been extremely helpful looking into this issue and running numerous tests to ensure ELB is performing as it should. As soon as we have completed running all tests and conclusive findings, I will make another follow up post detailing the results.
Recently I’ve been working on a project that will feasibly need to...
February 2012
1 post
MaxCDN versus Amazon Cloudfront
Following on from my bad experience with MaxCDN in November, I thought it would be worth a follow up post for those who are interested in how MaxCDN stacks up against Amazon Cloudfront. All my experience is based on production issues I have had with easyBacklog, a simple backlog management tool designed for agencies.
On a positive note, after the outage in November and my numerous support...
November 2011
2 posts
MaxCDN review - seriously unreliable
* Update 22 Feb 2012: Read my follow on post MaxCDN versus Amazon Cloudfront *
I know, this post will probably come across as a rant, but it’s not. I have recently launched my business (Easybacklog - http://easybacklog.com) into public beta and every customer and client I attract is valuable to me. So when my CDN goes down, and therefore my site is effectively unusable as all...
URL regular expression for links with or without...
I’ve just come across a pretty common requirement to convert any text that looks like a link into a link within some HTML text. Strangely, after searching for a good 15 minutes for a regular expression, all I could find was either a regular expressions which detects URLs with a protocol such as http://mattheworiordan.com/, or a regular expression which detects URLs without such as...
October 2011
1 post
Infinite scrolling tab system for JQuery
Google Docs Spreadsheets has a useful worksheet tab system whereby if there are more tabs than the space available, a scroller device automatically appears. Whilst building the new sprints functionality for my backlog management tool easyBacklog, I went on a search for a scrolling tab system and couldn’t find one.
So I’ve built a JQuery plugin inspired by the Google Docs Spreadsheet...
September 2011
1 post
Setting up a Jenkins (old Hudson) Continuous...
Following on from my recent full stack integration work on easyBacklog, the Agile Project Management app I am building, I have set up a Continuous Integration server which will run both unit tests and integration tests across the entire app each time I push a commit. In order to do this, I needed full support for Selenium and Capybara-Webkit, along with Cucumber and RSpec.
I looked at various CI...
August 2011
3 posts
A library for simulating a drag event with a...
I have been working on thorough integration testing of my new Agile Project Management tool called easyBacklog, and came across a problem whereby it seems there is no easy way to test / simulate drag and drop events with a JQuery UI Sortable widget.
Whilst jquery.simulate.js provides functionality to simulate many JQuery and JQuery UI event, it is unable to simulate a drag event for a JQuery...
Testing :focus with JQuery and Selenium or...
Recently whilst trying to write integration tests for a JQuery heavy front end application, I came across a very strange issue when testing to see if an element has focus.
What I found is that if an element has focus, yet the actual browser or tab does not have focus, then using the pseudo selector :focus from JQuery (or Sizzle) will not find the focussed item. Putting it another way, the...
Cucumber and Capybara-Webkit automatic screenshots
This post has been superseded by a Gem I have written to do automatic screen shots for Capybara (not just Cucumber, also supports RSpec and Mini-test). Please go to https://github.com/mattheworiordan/capybara-screenshot
Writing Cucumber front end tests (AJAX & Javascript) can be pretty damned painful and slow, especially when a failure does not come with any useful error message....
July 2011
1 post
Rate limiting Javascript requests
I recently needed to rate limit requests to a particular function in Javascript, and was surprised nothing obvious came up in Google searches so here is my contribution for others who need this.
Note that I am a big fan of Underscore.js and have thus simply extended the _ to include my new rate limiting function. Also, many people immediately think that _.throttle will achieve rate limiting, but...
April 2011
1 post
4 tags
Full stack integration testing with Rails 3,...
I find it enlightening to be part of such an active Ruby and RoR community where Gems, code samples and responsive community support is available, however I also find it hard sometimes for that very same reason to figure out what stack to use for my new projects because there are just too many options.
One of the problems I’ve had for a while now is figuring out what stack to use for my...
December 2009
7 posts
Do it, donate to Wikipedia, they need it and you...
I decided to donate to Wikipedia today not because I feel especially altruistic today, but because of the following:
It’s genuinely a brilliant website, and it costs money, lots of money to keep it going. I have and continue to gain a lot of benefit from its existence, so I want to ensure it continues to live on the web.
As I continue to embrace open source software and the open source...
3 tags
Why I chose tumblr over Posterous
I recently set up my personal blog as I am desperately looking for exciting new ways to waste my time expressing myself online. As I am spending quite a bit of time learning Ruby on Rails recently, I thought my best bet would be build myself a little blog in RoR and that would give me another excuse to use my new skills. However, I soon realised that building my own blog would only result in the...
Google Chrome billboards literally outside my home
I’m not quite sure what to make of it. Madness, or genius? I am in some way confused though as to why Google chose to develop their own Chrome browser when they could have just supported Mozilla in their efforts to build their own browser (which I love bar the speed and lack of page tabs at the top).
Although Chrome is open source, I do wonder how many people actually contribute to Chrome...
Even Google employs idiots
After setting up the fantastic Google Apps Enterprise Edition for my email on my domain, I ran into some issues when I tried to migrate my 5GB of email from my Exchange 2007 server to Google Apps.
So I contacted their support service which is a commercial service they offer because I pay for the Enterprise Edition, and I was kindly taken care of by a technical support idiot who had no...
“Life is short, go large”
– Eli Thompson
Lemon Studios website is now up on Wordpress →
I've decided to have a blog
Because everyone else seems to think it’s a good idea and there’s no point me bucking that trend. I’ve been told that Posterous and Tumblr are both fantastic to get up and running quickly, so this is my exploration into which one is right for me. What I’m looking for is a beautiful yet simple interface for users, and stupidly quick and simple for me to get content up....