Ever since I set my blog up I have been using the awesome pixeled theme by samk, unfortunately it’s so great there are thousands of blogs now using it so I decided to try and make it more my own.  The great thing about this theme is that though it looks like it’s built from complex CSS with layers in transparencies it’s actual much simpler than it looks.  To find out how I created my new theme click the read more button.

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In the developer community test driven development pasterns are becoming more and more mainstream.  By what ever name you call your paradigm Extreme Programming, or Agile Development, it become quickly clear to anyone who tries test driven development how useful and important it can be to your project.  It also soon becomes clear how important the correct tooling can be, or rather how frustrating it can be without the correct tools. EclEmma is a code coverage plug-in for Eclipse that helps you ensure that you are meeting your code coverage requirements in a way that integrates with your development cycle, instead of being an extra strapped on stage.  It works with your existing JUnit tests and gives you details on exactly which methods, lines, and instructions are being covered by your tests. (continue reading…)

One of my friends has pointed me at his latest project over at www.hacktags.org www.ptrtovoid.net called HackTags.  If you remember Geek Codes, this is something like that, a badge to show off your geekyness and promote your favourite open source projects.  The project is still only in early “pre beta” stage, only 48hours of coding upon writing this, so some things are likely to change but the auther Didi is happy to hear any ideas or suggestions about the site.

Nearly all webmasters have now heard Google Analytics, Google’s website statistics package, so having set this blog up I took the opportunity to try it out.  Setting Analytics up was easy, if you already have an Google account registering for Analytics takes seconds, agree to the usual EULA and enter your website address and your almost ready to go.  Google Analytics uses Javascript to track usage and the next step of setting up the service is adding their script snippet to every page on your site.  Because all I have at the moment is a blog on here, all I had to do was edit one template file and everything was set up.  Note however the analytics page does show data in real time, processing is done in batches once every two hours, which isn’t exactly clear so you have to weight a little while before data starts getting shown.

One thing I have found out is that it’s probably worth setting up filters strait away, else you may get all excited only to find out all your traffic is coming from yourself.  If you have a static IP this is easy just go setting page (link is found just under the google analytics logo on the home page) click edit next to your domain and find the button for “add filter”.  Name your rule, and choose to “exclude all traffic from an ip address”.  You will then need to enter your internet IP  address bellow, in the form “192.168.1.1 ” the back slashes are needed because anything entered in a filter is treated as a regex.  If you are using WordPress you might want to add the following rule as well, to block post previews from the stats too, as these are likely to be all from yourself.

Name: preview
Filter type: Custom - Exclude
Filter Field: Request URI
Filter Pattern: preview=true
Case Senstive: true

I have encluded an example output from the Analytics dashboard to give an idea of some of the information the tool gives you, though with a few more visitores I am sure it would be more interesting.  The report is only an overview of the information avaliable and it is possible to drill down further to find out for example which of your blogs posts people have spend the most time on, as well as being able to view the path people traverse your site with, and the details that people used if they searched for you.

So now with all this information, I can work on getting more viewers to this blog; anything greater than 1 has goto be a win.

Just a quick post today, having a quick review of Linode VPS now I have had chance to play with it.  For those of you who havn’t heard of Linode, they specialise in providing Virtual Private Servers (VPSs). Signing up for acount was easy I went for their base package of Linode 360, which gives you 360mb of ram, 12GB storage and 200GB transfers for $19.95.

Once payment is completed Linode let you reserve your VM.  Linode use 4 data centres, and once you paid you get to chose at which data centre you want you VPS hosted.  Only three of the 4 data centres had free slots so I chose a data centre on the east coast.  From then on you can get into the Linode Dashboard to manage your VPS.

Next up is creating your boot drive, Linode has a whole bunch of distros to choose from, including Debian, Ubuntu and CentOS, there is even Gentoo if you have the time to build it on a VPS.  I decided on Ubuntu 8.10 64bit edition and used up 8GB of my storage allowance to make the boot image, and used the remaining 4GB for my /home.  The Distro wizard automatically sets up everything needed to boot them image and starting the VPS is one click away.

Setting up the home drive was a little more complicated but, but all it took was adding the /home drive to the bootimage config and editing the fstab to mount the drive on boot and everything was set up.

Linode also provide a SSH based Console calls Lish, so even if you muck up your iptables or say uninstall your ssh server you can still access your VPS, as well as charts of your recent CPU/newtwork usage, and progrss bars so you keep track on how much bandwidth you have been using.

So for less than a week of use I would give linode a thumbs up!

Background

My parents have been with Pipex internet for 5 years, having excellent service, and never having to call support.  Then in July of 2007 Pipex was bought out by Tiscali.

The Issues Start

Everything went fine until without warning in February of 2008 Tiscali transferred them to their LLU product.  This is when the trouble started, Tiscali’s idea of transferral is unplug from the old service and forget to plug into the new service.  So a number of calls later, and almost a week of no internet later they work out that they have made a mistake and reconnect us.

So it gets to September and our current subscription with Pipex/Tiscali runs out, two weeks after they first can’t take the money they send us a letter demanding a years internet at £281.30.  Unhappy with the service my Dad calls up Pipex to cancel the contract at this point, and even though he is the card holder and phone line holder Tiscali will not talk to him because I opened the account.  Eventual they agree to call me and I authorise them to talk to my Dad.

After much argument and a number of phone calls Tiscali agreed to a new deal with us, £7.99 a month with three months free (basically their new customer deal).  So dad paid up for the year (£71.51) thinking that would be it.
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Edit
So back on my PC now, and some other points I would add to the above. As the above proves the iPhone WordPress application also lacks any sort of spell checking beyond auto-suggestion. It does however let you write a draft post and upload it without publishing it, so if thing of something on the road you can still write about it and correct it once you back.
Set up of the application was relatively easy, other than miss typing my domain and user name on the silly touch keyboard. You do however have to do is ensure that remote RPC is enabled if you installed WordPress yourself, so it’s worth turning this on if you think your going to use the application in the future.
As I said above one of the menus failed to draw properly when I was testing the application, but when I restarted it corrected itself and didn’t really cause any usability issues.
Overall I think for the avid blogger the WordPress application is worth adding to your app collection, it is free after all, just don’t expect to be writing essays on it.

So I finaly got around do sorting out some hosting and this is going to (hopefully) be where I am going to ramble about things.  I expect there to be a heavy bias to technology but not really sure yet.

I am currently just playing around with things like themes and setting up my home page and knowing me I may end up just nuking everything before long, but if this blog survives I will let people know what I learn along the way, as it has been a long time since I have tried to set up Apache properly.