Author Archives: Seán Hayes

Advice from my Experience with OAuth

I recently finished coding the OAuth authentication method for accessing Picasa photos from within Darkroom. Since it was written client side using JavaScript I was trying to be as minimalist as possible, so I wrote my own minimal implementation rather … Continue reading

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Setting up SSL on Apache

While locally testing Darkroom over HTTPS, Firefox gave me the following error: “Error code: ssl_error_rx_record_too_long”. Turns out I’d never configured the Apache instance on my laptop to use SSL. Once you’ve got the right information it’s really quick to fix. … Continue reading

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MugTug Darkroom, Online/Offline Photo Editing

For those of you who don’t know, a few weeks ago I joined a project called Darkroom from MugTug.com. It’s an image processing application using cutting edge HTML 5 features such as the <canvas> element, localStorage, and application cache, and … Continue reading

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Fixing Flash

After upgrading Ubuntu I had some problems with Flash not working. I read the following threads and combined information from both to solve my problem: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1244048 http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1373582 Run the following commands in a terminal to remove existing Flash files: sudo … Continue reading

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Using a Test Database in Django

As I mentioned in my previous post, we’re using MySQL on our development machines. It has several advantages, but one of the drawbacks is unittests run slower when not using Sqlite (big ups to MockSoul for posting his benchmarks). The … Continue reading

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Cross Database Incompatibility Using Django South

When our team (at Govnex) started using South Migrations we encountered a cross-database compatibility issue. I was using MySQL on my local machine for its performance and so I could browse the database using phpMyAdmin, while our other members were … Continue reading

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Web Dev Bash Utils

I’ve just open sourced these bash scripts I wrote for web development. They’re available on GitHub. Unfortunately they were written for use on a strict Unix environment with an outdated version of bash and without the benefit of GNU extensions … Continue reading

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Does the Brain Like E-Books?

“Does the Brain Like E-Books?”, NY Times Due to the distractions and time constraints on the Internet, I wonder if publishing is going to change in a way that it would be just as attention grabbing if it were on … Continue reading

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Whitespace Management: Use Tabs, Spaces Considered Harmful

At one of my previous jobs I worked on dozens of websites that had been created by other people. I prefer to use tabs instead of spaces when indenting code, and I can get a little OCD sometimes, so every … Continue reading

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Survey of Best Programming Practices

I was having a talk today with some colleagues about the scarcity of web developers, and even software engineers, who use best practices such as: using version control using a bug tracker writing unit tests using a programming framework In … Continue reading

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