Category Archives: Software

Posted on
by

It’s a brand new year!

Well, it’s been a new year for a little while actually, but 2013 has been a busy one so far. I’ve been working hard on some interesting things, but I still managed a sneaky skiing trip.

2012 was an awesome year; I welcomed it in rawkus style with my former housemates, and then a few days later, after the hangover had cleared of course, flew my first passengers as a newly qualified pilot!

I went to birthday parties, ate some great food, climbed, and enjoyed the company of some great people. I played Capoeira with my group at the Oxford Olympic Torch event, but otherwise managed to miss the worst of the Olympics by camping in the Czech wilderness followed by some epic climbing in Italy.

I have some big plans in motion for 2013, hopefully I’ll be able to dial up the awesome a few more notches! I want to finally get to grips with a foreign language, and ideally live abroad for a while in the native country. I want to progress my flying career in some way, advance to more complicated aircraft or perhaps do an aerobatic qualification. I intend to see more of the world, and climb more mountains (both figuratively and literally!).

Work wise, I’m working on a few exciting things (some of which will see the light of day really soon). As an FYI, I’m always interested to hear about your projects, especially if you need some technical and strategic muscle to help you!

Lets go!

Posted on
by

Over the past few weeks and months I’ve had to cause to write, update and dust off a number of Elgg plugins that I’ve had kicking about. As a good open source citizen I’ve stuck them up on github so others can have a play.

Here they are, in no particular order:

» H5F 1.8

This is an Elgg wrapper around the H5F HTML5 form compatibility library written by Ryan Seddon.

This plugin lets you use handy HTML 5 form extensions like “required” and “placeholder”, as well as some of the new types like <input type=”email” /> in your forms and have them work in older browsers.

» Input Country

Input country is a wrapper around Ben Werdmuller’s phpCountryDropdown tool, and provides a handy dandy country selector input type.

Install this plugin to be able to take advantage of this in your forms.

» Profile Completeness

This plugin provides a view and a widget that displays the completeness of a profile based on the number of fields in the profile that are populated. This list of fields can be extended and modified based on a plugin hook.

I’ve used various incarnations of this plugin now for a number of clients, and since it keeps coming up I’ve tidied it up a bit and stuck it on github.

» Recaptcha

Lastly, here’s an Elgg 1.8 version of a recaptcha plugin I wrote some time ago.

It hooks into the Elgg captcha engine, providing captcha verification for registration and the “request new password” functionality out of the box. It also replaces the input/captcha view.

There are a couple of other recaptcha plugins, but I couldn’t find one which just provided the captcha and nothing else, so here’s mine.

That’s it for now, enjoy!

Posted on
by

Helping out a friend and colleague, as well as stretching my programming muscles with a language I don’t often get to play with these days, I’d like to introduce LoveNote Server.

LoveNote is a simple abstract message queue server which lets you pass an message payload to one of a pool of endpoints and receive a webhook callback with the result. You can specify that this message be delivered ASAP, but crucially you can also specify a date and time for the delivery.

How it works

It works by POSTing a bit of JSON to a webhook provided by the server that contains a delivery time, an array of servers to try, the payload and an optional callback URL.

When received by the server, the message is queued. When the delivery time is reached the list of servers is randomised and the payload POSTed in sequence until all servers fail, or delivery is achieved. If a callback is specified, a report is then POSTed back to the callback as a JSON blob.

Why this is useful

Simply, this provides a common message passing framework with a unified event driven API, simplifying your architecture somewhat. It is especially handy if you wanted a message to be delivered some time in the future, for example for a credit card renewal or email reminder, where beforehand you’d probably have to write a dedicated server process.

All you now have to do is listen to webhook pings.

What still needs to be done

This is an early version and was written to help out a friend with a specific need, and although I’ve gone on to use it in a couple of client projects, there are still a fair amount of enhancements that could be made.

Some obvious ones are:

  • Message IDs: Currently messages in the queue are anonymous. It’d be handy to have message IDs since this would allow more sophisticated process control of scheduled messages.
  • Cancel Control: Basic message control to cancel future queued messages.
  • Make message queues persistent: Currently the queue is held in memory, which is simple and fast, but far from ideal. We should periodically flush the queue to a persistent storage so that no messages are lost if a server goes down.

Get involved and send your pull requests to the usual place!

» Visit the project on Github…