I was out on a walk on a cold day and thought it would be great to be able to remotely turn on the heating in time for when I got back home, which led to this; my first Arduino project. The remote control is achieved over the Internet and the form is web based, so could equally be controlled via any mobile phone with a web browser.

tags: arduino  hack  scala  spring  jetty 

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Recently at work I have been looking at how to document our Restful APIs. After a chat with a couple of developers we had defined the following requirements we wanted from our restful API documentation:

• We needed to be able to document the URIs, HTTP methods, querystring parameters.
• We wanted to be able to specify a bit of descriptive text associated with each API call.
• A tool embedded in the docs that allowed the reader to call the live deployed API would be a plus.
• Being able to define the schema of JSON objects returned by the APIs was a must have.

tags: rest  api  iodocs  mashery  nodejs 

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In my previous post I talked about my motivation for creating pelicangit. I’ve spent this last week polishing it up a bit and have now made v0.1 available on PyPI. If you already have pelican and pip installed on your machine, installing pelicangit is now as easy as running sudo pip install pelicangit.

tags: pelican  git  github  pelicangit 

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When I decided to start writing this blog, I played around with blogger, wordpress and tumblr, but didn’t really get along with any of them - they all seemed a bit too heavyweight for what I wanted. I didn’t need much - just the ability to specify some HTML/CSS for the styling and then a quick and easy way to write and publish posts.

tags: pelicangit  pelican  git  github  amazon ec2  cloud9-ide 

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I was lucky enough to get given a Chromebook whilst attending Google IO 2011 last year and I must admit - I really like it. At first I thought I would get annoyed at the inability to install local programs (other than Chrome and the shell it comes with) - in reality however, when at home, virtually all my computer usage is on the Chromebook. I guess a browser and shell is all I need.

tags: chromebook  chrome-os 

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Scala is a really nice programming language to work with and is easy for devs coming from the Java world (like me) to pick up, due to the fact it runs on the JVM. I thought I’d share the six main reasons I’ve been using Scala for many of my projects at the moment.

tags: scala 

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Amazon EC2 is pretty awesome. In under a minute you can fire up a server in the cloud and SSH in. The SSH access combined with the fact you can run your choice of OS, makes it much more flexible than other cloud platforms as a service, such as Heroku, Google App Engine and Cloud Foundry. The down side is that there is a lot more configuration to do, so it is probably going to take a little longer to deploy your app, than it would with Heroku.

tags: amazon-ec2  cloudkick 

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