Author: Mark Pilgrim Dive Into Greasemonkey Homepage Q: What is Greasemonkey? A: Greasemonkey is a Firefox extension that allows you to write scripts that alter the web pages you visit. You can use it to make a web site more readable or more usable. You can fix rendering bugs that the site owner can’t be bothered to fix themselves. You can alter pages so they work better with assistive technologies that speak a web page out loud or convert it to Braille. Read on →

I ended up seeing two films in the cinema yesterday, and for the record going to the cinema during “working hours” doesn’t make it any less busy dammit! After watching both Sin City and Star Wars - Revenge of the Sith I have only a few comments to make. Firstly I enjoyed Sin City more, Sith seemed to be about 45 minutes too long and, despite the gorgeous backdrops and neat fight scenes I found myself clock watching. Read on →

The bash shell gets more negative press than it deserves from most “real” programmers. Between the “I can’t see what it’s doing, I need an echo after nearly every line!” and the “Why doesn’t it have a check option like perl’s -c!?” most people that only occasionally dip in to bash end up frustrated by it’s lack of features. All because they can’t be bothered to read the man page… Read on →

After the enjoyable and easy to read “22 Immutable Laws of Marketing” (my review) I decided to give “The 22 Immutable Laws of Branding” an afternoon of my time. This book is very similar in presentation, format and even writing style to the “Laws of Marketing”. It’s an accessible, easy read in which each law is broken down in to a very short chapter that makes it as enjoyable to dip in to while on the go as it does to read cover to cover. Read on →

Authors: Al Ries, Laura Ries ISBN: 1861976954 Publisher: ProfileBooks After the enjoyable and easy to read "22 Immutable Laws of Marketing” (review) I decided to give “The 22 Immutable Laws of Branding” an afternoon of my time. This book is very similar in presentation, format and even writing style to the “Laws of Marketing”. It’s an accessible, easy read in which each law is broken down in to a very short chapter that makes it as enjoyable to dip in to while on the go as it does to read cover to cover. Read on →

Authors: Al Ries, Jack Trout ISBN: 0006383459 Publisher: HarperCollins Marketing books ain’t my usual bedtime reading material but as the Open Source movement continues to forge ever onwards the softer skills are going to become every bit as useful as writing code or documentation. While looking for an accessible book on these dark arts I stumbled on Eric Sinks take on the The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing and just had to read the original. Read on →

Is out and hitting mailing lists now. You can find the full details on this very site at the Unixdaemon GLLUG June 2005 page. Organising this meeting has been quite strange, the speakers roster has changed almost completely from my original plan, the dates moved and, because of the summer, a lot of my usual routes of publicity have either cut back or gone off on holiday. I’m actually very proud of the talks we have and the quality of the speakers that have freely given up their Saturday to come and talk so it’s a shame were not getting full exposure. Read on →

I’m pleased to announce that the next GLLUG meeting will be held on June 11th between 13:30 and 18:00 at New Cavendish Street campus of Westminster University. This is located in the shadow of the BT Tower. The nearest tube stations are Great Portland Street, Warren Street and Goodge Street. Tottenham Court Road and Oxford Circus are also within easy walking distance. New Cavendish Street campus on Streetmap. This event is FREE to members and non-members. Read on →

Following on from my cpan_module_tag and some comments from one of my victims/testers I’ve put a version together that translates tag shortcuts to Ruby Application Archive project links. It’s called raa_tag, it’s on my Blosxom Plugins page and it’s GPL'd.

I’m happy to announce the addition of a talk on SVK by its author, Chia-liang Kao, at the June 2005 GLLUG. He’s graciously volunteered some of his time to take us through the headaches of version control, how SVK removes a number of them and, and this is my favourite bit, how to use it for distributed /etc versioning without any version control artifacts getting spread across the file system. I’ve heard a couple of people make very positive comments about CLK’s previous presentations so this should be good! Read on →