Recognise the portly pair above? Well, Rob and I have decided to take on a new challenge outside of work, to run the Cardiff Half Marathon this October with the aim of getting fit and raising some money for charity.
Archive for July, 2009
In Search of the Perfect Product
Tuesday 21 July 2009…Well the perfect product module that is.
Myself and Rob have recently been rebuilding the backend of our CMS (Content Management System). We were finding that we were making lots of changes to the core files each time we wrote a site for a client, and since the big benefits of using a CMS for us is confidence in the integrity of the code (as we can run unit tests against the core files), as well as speed of writing a new site by using existing modules.
Therefore, we decided we needed to go back to the start and make each of the modules as generic as we possibly could to cope with every eventuality. For the most part this is proving fairly straight forward. For a news module for example you will want a title, the date it is published, and the story, whilst with a Frequently Asked Questions module you will want a question and an answer.
But the products module wasn’t so easy…
Disposable Servers in the “Cloud”
Thursday 16 July 2009Recently we’ve been having a server hosting review, and as a result moved some of our hosting into the “cloud”. I always think “cloud computing” is a somewhat mysterious term, but to me it essentially means abstraction of hardware from function. If I rent a dedicated server I am renting a physical linux box with XXX RAM & XXX processor, in a “cloud” environment I rent an “instance” which has XXX RAM & XXX processor. Sounds similar? Well, it is. And the cloud “instance” functions pretty much the same as a physical linux box.
So what’s all the fuss about with this “cloud computing” marlarky? Well, the cloud has several very powerful features that you wouldn’t get with a normal dedicated server. Several cloud services are available, here I will be talking about features of Amazon EC2 service (but Rackspace also do an alternative although with a much less mature API).
Carnation Cook-off
Thursday 02 July 2009
I recently designed a recipe card for Carnation Berry & Lime Cheesecake and it really did look delicious (the cheesecake I mean, I’m far too modest to say that about the design!)
Now I’m partial to a pudding, so after days of salivating over the pictures I decided to put the recipe to the test!
1