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Month: November 2011

Bye Bye Mangahigh – hello Bairwell!

November 28, 2011
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After just over 3 years working at Blue Duck Education Ltd as the Lead Developer/Systems Architect with Toby Rowland and other very talented people (too numerous to name here) building the Mangahigh Maths Games educational resource which we built from a brand new site to being one of the fastest growing educational games sites – I’m now leaving for pastures new.

So where am I going?

Well, my fiancée and I will be starting, on the 3rd of January, a new company called Bairwell Web Development to combine our two talents. Bairwell will be offering WordPress, Perch and LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP 5 : also some Varnish, PostgreSQL, Memcache, Perl and Systems administration) development consultancy services – so if you want a well designed (Katy), scalable and responsive (me) website: then please get in touch with us via our web development site (Katy is still working on it at this time of writing), Twitter or Facebook.

Fingers crossed!

Hosted GIT Repositories

November 26, 2011
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Many of you developers have used Github, but when you want an organisation’s code hosted (in private repositories), Github can be quite expensive. The current rates are:

Plan Price Private repositories Collaborators Disk space
Organisations: Platinum $200/month 125 Unlimited 60Gb
Organisations: Gold $100/month 50 Unlimited 20Gb
Organisations: Silver $50/month 20 Unlimited 6Gb
Organisations: Bronze $25/month 10 Unlimited 2.4Gb
Personal only: Medium $22/month 20 10 2.4Gb
Personal only: Small $12/month 10 5 1.2Gb
Personal only: Micro: $7/month 5 1 0.6Gb

(Disk spaces on Github are “soft-limits”)
All packages include unlimited public projects.

So, what alternatives are there?

Continue ReadingHosted GIT Repositories

UK Black Friday Technical Discounts

November 25, 2011
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In the US, it’s “black Friday” which means that many companies are having some specials.

Here’s my recommendations of products which are available to people in the UK:

JetBrain’s PhpStorm editor
50% off Personal Licences. £38 instead of £77.
OS: Windows, Mac OS X, Linux
I’ve found phpStorm a lot better than Eclipse and Netbeans: and as well as PHP, HTML, Javascript syntax colouring and checking, it also does .htaccess files, YAML, XML and more (along with integration with GIT and others). Jetbrains also has the discount on WebStorm (same as PHPStorm, but no PHP editing) and RubyMine.
1Password password manager
About half price. $24.99 for a single user licence instead of $49.99
OS: Windows, Mac OS, iOS (iPhone/iPad)
Stores and manages your passwords and secure notes. Extremely useful and handy. Compatible with Dropbox, Chrome, Firefox, Safari, Internet Explorer: so you can have all your passwords on all your computers.
Apple
Discounts from all the range (£31 off the iPad 2, £81 off a MacBook Air)
Prag Prog (Pragmatic Bookshelf)
40% off all items
Offering 40% off all of their products when the coupon code “turkey” is used. Quite a selection of books, but I’ve not tried them before…
Lavasoft Ad-Aware Pro
Save $20
OS: Windows
Buy the popular anti virus and anti spyware application for $9.95 instead of $29.95. I’ve found their free Ad-Aware application extremely good.

Any other tech deals available today to people in the UK that you know of?

Running Jenkins CI for PHP on Amazon EC2 [6/7]

November 1, 2011
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Continued from Installing and Configuring Jenkins CI

Make a backup of the Amazon EC2 configuration

  1. Log into your Amazon Ec2 account
  2. Under the “My instances” select your Jenkins install
  3. Under “Instance Actions” to “Create Image (EBS AMI)” and give it an appropriate name and description

It is advisable to shutdown your EC2 image when you are not using it to avoid billing (not so important with the free Micro instance, but a good practice to get into)

Continued in Relaunching the Amazon EC2 image