Interesting Things

5 ways to make using bash more productive

Richard Bradshaw — Sat, 27 Sep 2008 12:33:02 +0000

If you are using Linux or a Mac these days, then you likely have bash as your default shell. It generally comes with a few nice features (tab-completion, history etc.), but there are a few tips and tricks which will make it much nicer to use. Here’s a run down of my favourite 5. These tips [...]

Writing dynamic XML sitemaps using PHP

Richard Bradshaw — Sat, 13 Sep 2008 16:41:44 +0000

Since Google introduced sitemaps in 2005, they have grown to be accepted by the 4 main search engines: Google, Live Search, Yahoo and Ask. As the offical sitemaps page describes: Sitemaps are an easy way for webmasters to inform search engines about pages on their sites that are available for crawling. In its simplest form, a Sitemap [...]

3 Ways Google Applications can enhance teaching

Richard Bradshaw — Sat, 06 Sep 2008 10:17:56 +0000

Having recently started working at a school where email, calendars, documents etc are hosted by Google Applications, I felt that it would be worth while incorporating these into my teaching and planning. This post describes the benefits I have found from this in the first few weeks, and will outline some plans that I have [...]

Benchmarking Chrome’s V8 Javascript engine

Richard Bradshaw — Fri, 05 Sep 2008 18:28:24 +0000

Having previously looked at the memory usage of Google’s Chrome, it’s time to analyse it’s much mentioned javascript engine, V8. Assumedly named after the engine with the same name, V8 compiles javascript to machine code, rather than bytecode to achieve greater performance. In this respect, it’s similar to Firefox 3.1’s TraceMonkey, a JIT javascript compiler again [...]

Google Chrome Memory Usage

Richard Bradshaw — Tue, 02 Sep 2008 19:23:15 +0000

Google Chrome Memory Usage, originally uploaded by Rich Bradshaw. Browsing to about:memory in Google Chrome gives you this interesting display showing memory usage for both itself as well as other browsers running. According to the browser, this is the memory usage of the following browsers on blank pages. (Although Chrome is on the about:memory page, that’s a different [...]

A Vision of Students Today

Richard Bradshaw — Sat, 19 Jul 2008 11:08:45 +0000

An interesting view into how students live today. I’m thinking that it depends what degree you study on how much work and classes you have to do - 3 hours of class + 2 hours work a day is much less than I did, and I only graduated last year! Also, noone brought laptops to lectures [...]

5 mistakes new web developers often make

Richard Bradshaw — Sun, 29 Jun 2008 13:33:01 +0000

Image via Wikipedia Having talked to some university students who had taken computer science/IT degrees, I was amazed by how little they seemed to know about making anything that’s secure or even remotely logical. The group I met with primarily had been taught PHP. Having looked at some sites they were designing I realised 5 things [...]

Official Firefox 3 download counter

Richard Bradshaw — Tue, 17 Jun 2008 19:27:14 +0000

Head over to this page to see the official download counter, with sub division by countries. Currently it’s in 670,000, with 9700 downloads per minute… Related articles Nerds only: Firefox Download Day [via Zemanta] Mozilla aims for Guinness World Record [via Zemanta] Firefox 3: now available bug-free, say devs [via Zemanta]

Twhirl Update (0.8.1i)

Richard Bradshaw — Tue, 10 Jun 2008 19:18:02 +0000

Here’s a new screenshot – shows seemic integration, not something I’m particularly excited about… Looks like it still has the scroll bug it used to have as well… CrunchBase Information seesmic Twhirl Information provided by CrunchBase

Web 2.0 … The Machine is Us/ing Us

Richard Bradshaw — Mon, 09 Jun 2008 20:29:48 +0000

Web 2.0 … The Machine is Us/ing Us Really interestingly made video, definitely worth watching! Covers the history of the internet in a really creative way.