Uuummmm, this is a tasty ispum!

Are you bored with the same old latin lorum ipsum for placeholder text? Samuel L. Ipsum is one bad ...placeholder text generator. It generates classic Samuel L Jackson movie quotes and also has a safe for work mode, just don't get them mixed up!

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International Day Against DRM

May the 4th isn't only (as Dave so subtly alluded to), Star Wars day, but also the FSF's International Day Against DRM.

DRM can be a huge problem for genuine, paying consumers across a range of media: computer software, music, video and even books. One of my personal bugbears is how difficult HBO make it to access their content online: their close links with the large US cable networks make it absolutely impossible to pay for HBO shows without signing up for a much larger package (in the UK, with Sky). DRM has been extended to such a point that it actively prevents some people for paying to access content.

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Some handy tools for optimisation

"We should forget about small efficiencies, say about 97% of the time: premature optimization is the root of all evil"

Donald Knuth

There are a raft of tools now available to help a developer to optimise a modern web application: either providing pointers for improvements and modifications of the code or changes that can be made directly to the server (such as enabling mod-spdy). Here are a few that I've found helpful:

Webkit's brilliant inspector

Webkit's inspector is a tool that every developer will likely have to hand, but that many won't know how to use to its full potential. The audit, network and resources panel can be a real help in optimising sites. Majd Taby has recently Read more... [Post Comment]

Sublime Text Editor 2

Sublime Text Editor 2 is a favourite here at Gravitywell for developing Web Applications and here's why...

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Recursively Deleting all SVN folders

Here's a quick code snippet for how to recursively delete all SVN folders.

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What is the Semantic Web?

The word semantic stands for the meaning of.

The semantic of something is the meaning of something.

The Semantic Web = a Web with a meaning.

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The Countdown jQuery plug-in and website optimisation

Recently i discovered a jQuery plug-in that allows you to count down/count up from a given period of time, and was quite surprised as to how simple it was to implement, in comparison to standard procedural, DOM based alternatives.

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Allow Google Chrome and other browsers to search your site directly from the address bar

If you type into your address bar in google chrome 'gravitywell.co.uk' and then press space, you'll notice it says 'Search Gravitywell Blog:'.

We can do this because we have an OpenSearch Description meta tag that links to an OpenSearch Description file.

........

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Howto: Merge Javascript and CSS files in Magento

During a lot of the Research and Developement I've done on Magento websites, one of the pitfalls I often notice about other peoples magento websites is that they haven't bothered to merge the Javascript and CSS files.

This is a very simple task - and I'll show you how to do it.

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Linux: Copying from one folder to another without overwriting any existing files

Here are a few tricks on how to copy files in linux from one location to another whilst not overwriting any files.

Using GNU Copy (which is not included in all distributions) you can simple use the -n (--no-clobber) option like follows:

cp -n /source /target

But, if you happen not to be using GNU copy, a nice little trick I found is to do the following:

yes n | cp -i /source /target

As you can see - I'm simply piping an n into the cp command to tell it not to overwrite any files.

Another option is to use RSYNC, example as follows:

rsync -r -ignore-existing /source/. /target/.

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