Fry-IT

iPhone Developers Group London & SE meeting

2009-04-12T18:17:00+00:00

Fry-IT held the second London iPhone Developer Meeting in our office. You can join the LinkedIn user group which is THE place to reach group members. Meeting announcements and registration takes place there as well.

There was a great talk by Damien (How To Download Data to your Devices) which was an introduction to HTTP communication on the iPhone. Showing synchronous and asynchronous communication as well as a solution for downloading big amounts of data. Lucky me, I just needed this for my first iPhone app!

Charles talked about the whole development cycle of the iPhone app from writing code to getting your app into the AppStore. Following the talk there was a valuable discussion on how bad Apple sometimes is when evaluating your application. Also that we can except quite a slow down of the whole process when OS 3.0 is out.

Again awesome meeting and great opportunity to learn and share your knowledge!

Screenscraping by CSS

2009-04-06T15:00:00+00:00

A lot of developers know how to use an XML parser and manipulate a DOM tree. Some developers even know how to use BeautifulSoup to download some broken HTML and parse its generated DOM tree. But how many know how ridiculously easy it is to parse and search this DOM tree with CSS?

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Crosstips.org "helps you solve your crossword puzzles Crosstips"

2009-03-04T14:00:00+00:00

I've launched a new fun service called Crosstips in Django. It was my first Django project that fully uses I18N (Internationalization) since it's available in Swedish and English.

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Fry-IT boosts my charity fundraising

2008-10-30T22:14:00+00:00

I'm running Flora London Marathon in few months. To do that I'll need extraordinary physical condition. But it is not enough. I also need to raise some funds for Sense - charity that provided me with Gold Bond (like a ticket for that event).

Last Friday I've received a really nice cheque from Marcus, Fry-IT's "financial director" for £1000.

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Programmer Competency Matrix

2008-07-01T13:00:00+00:00

If you're a Level 0 IT recruiter/HR hiring a programming you wouldn't even understand what to do with this. If you're Level 1 you would you would try to use this but get most of it wrong and end up not benefiting from it much. If you're a Level 2 you'd use this and be able to ask all the right questions. And lastly, if you're Level 3 you wouldn't need this stuff because you're probably already a Level 3 programmer.

Programmer Competency Matrix

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My first Grok tutorial

2008-06-03T18:00:00+00:00

This is my first published full Grok tutorial which I'm quite proud of. In my view it manages to keep things very simple and easy to follow even if you're not a senior Grok developer and shows a very powerful pattern.

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Fry-IT will run in London Marathon 2009

2008-04-24T15:31:00+00:00

Not whole company, just me :) I'm hoping for a big support, encouragement not to mention some sponsorship. So there are two major challenges. First is to ran 26 miles and 385 yards without injury and not to die at the end. And it is not simple. I'm a beginner and I've never run, but it doesn't discourage me. If 35000 people can do it, even 80 years old - I can do it too! The second challenge is to raise funds for charity. I'm running for Sense that helps disabled people.

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Lesson learned on "Save expense" button usability

2007-12-13T17:00:00+00:00

Yesterday I sat down with a lady and introduced her to SnapExpense and I stayed whilst she was submitting the first expense. Between the talking I shut up and just sat back observing what she was doing how she reacted. A cheap and quick usability study. I learned a lesson about the "Save expense" button on a form.

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Plone sites in UK

2007-12-07T11:14:00+00:00

How many Plone sites are in UK? I was wondering about this for quite a long time. So I've decided to somehow count those sites. Instead of months of manual labour I wrote a simple spider (Python script) that crawled the web for me. Read more to find out the results.

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Linux Virtualization: OpenVZ vs. Vserver

2007-12-07T02:00:00+00:00

Article version: 1.1 (incorporated feedback from Herbert Poetzl)

Today I will compare relative merits of the two main players in opensource Linux OS virtualization (note the differences to para- or full virtualization explained previously), the venerable Linux-VServer project and a relative new-comer, the commercially backed OpenVZ.

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