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On 'internet piracy' and 'copyright infringement'

Tue, 01 May 2012 18:57:55 GMT

This is a bit of a departure from the usual nature of my blog; but after the recent court ruling in the UK banning ‘The Pirate Bay’, I thought I’d throw my two-pence worth into the debate. You might also want to read James Ball’s article on The Guardian’s Comment is Free Blog.

The online community is full of ways to circumvent such ridiculous censorship measures, rendering the judgement practically impossible to enforce — but then; most of the tech community online already knew this, so I’m not really banging on about anything new.

Instead I’m going to talk explicitly about ‘infringement’, and focus on the ‘piracy’ of television programmes.

Rendering vertical Japanese text in a web browser using only CSS

Mon, 09 Apr 2012 20:21:37 GMT

The Japanese you read online is typically rendered horizontally and arranged for reading form left-to-right, much like in English. This is great - but there is also another, traditional way of writing Japanese - from right to left, top to bottom from the top right-hand corner of a page (or other point) down.

Typically this pretty vertical arrangement of text is used in books, poetry, newspapers and calligraphy but is generally avoided in print (except newspapers and magazines) and the web. One of the main reasons for its absence on the Internet is that the ability to render the text correctly is still beyond many web browsers.

I thought I’d have a go with using nothing but CSS and sensible markup to see if I could, at least, approximate vertically rendered Japanese text. If you just want to skip ahead, the finished example is here.

Reflections on the past year of running a Tech Startup

Fri, 23 Mar 2012 14:09:56 GMT

This post is about me coming to terms with, and understanding some of the mistakes I’ve made of the past year with my company, what I did about them, what I learned and how I’m going to ensure mistakes aren’t repeated.

It’s pretty personal. Writing honestly about where you’ve screwed up is always hard. I hope this helps other people to maybe avoid the same mistakes I’ve made. I certainly don’t come off looking too clever here, but for me, this post is to bring closure to a long period of self-doubt and hard reflection.

It's time for a change

Thu, 08 Mar 2012 21:19:59 GMT

This website has served me very well for quite some time, but now it’s starting to look rather dated and doesn’t really give away much about me, my interests or my personality.

That’s changing slowly, and I’m writing this entry to explain and chronicle how my approach of ‘Cultured Localisation’ is informing the reimagining of ryanstenhouse.eu and the design and engineering decisions I’m having to make.

I’m also taking a ‘Mobile First’ approach to the design, with the idea that no matter what device you visit this site on, you’ll always get the best possible experience.

Are you sure your CI setup is doing anything useful?

Wed, 30 Nov 2011 13:01:09 GMT

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how Continuous Integration (CI) is used, especially within large distributed teams and kept coming back to a lightning talk I delivered at the Scottish Ruby Conference in 2010.

It talked about the common strategy of running your CI tool off of your ‘master’ or ‘gold’ branch – which is probably the one that ends up going into production – once someone has pushed their code up to that branch of your repository. I’ll call that branch ‘deployable’.

The problem with that is that if someone on your team hasn’t, or couldn’t run your tests / build your application before pushing up – you’ve got broken code right there in the branch that should always be deployable and your CI tool going crazy.

A new job for the new year and speaking at SRC 2011

Thu, 30 Dec 2010 15:39:49 GMT

The coming year has me filled with excitement and a little trepidation. For one thing, I’m leaving the wonderful PCCL, where I have been privileged to work since January 2007 to join the team at FreeAgent Central.

This is a big change for me and it seems fitting that I’ll be starting the New Year in a shiny new job. I’ll deeply miss my friends and colleagues from PCCL and am grateful for nearly 4 great years of fun challenges, interesting work and a great working environment.

I’m going to be speaking at the 2011 Scottish Ruby Conference on the subject of the Payment Card Industry’s Data Security Standard (PCI DSS); a subject which has been a very intimate part of the last year of my professional life. If you’re coming along, come see me speak and I’ll talk about how you can use Free and Open Source Software to help reduce the cost of compliance.

Ruby / Rails the 'Enterprise' and how software works in the 'real world'

Tue, 26 Oct 2010 22:55:54 GMT

The ‘real world’ is an emotive term when it comes to software development. It parcels off your skills and experience to one side and holds it against and in comparison to a mythical archetype of ‘reality’ which seems to have little, if any, relevance to how, where and why you work. In this context, the ‘real world’ is subjective and is defined by the person who is making the comparison.

The ‘enterprise’ is another one of these terms which conjures up different images for different people and is the subject of many debates across the internet, especially in the Ruby world.

In this post, I draw upon my own work and personal experience to discuss both these topics and try to see where Ruby and Rails sit in the ‘real world’ as it pertains to me, and within the ‘enterprise’.

Ruby and Rails people are rampant Cargo Cultists

Mon, 20 Sep 2010 23:28:47 GMT

A cargo cult is a type of religious practice that has appeared in many traditional tribal societies in the wake of interaction with technologically advanced cultures. The cults are focused on obtaining the material wealth (the “cargo”) of the advanced culture through magic and religious rituals and practices, believing that the wealth was intended for them by their deities and ancestors.

From time to time, the term “cargo cult” is invoked as an English language idiom to mean any group of people who imitate the superficial exterior of a process or system without having any understanding of the underlying substance.

From the Wikipedia Cargo Cult Article.

You may be familiar with the story that our (the UK that is) Prince Philip (The Duke of Edinburgh) is venerated as a god by the Yaohnanen tribe on the southern island of Tanna in Vanuatu. A similar thing happens pretty much every single time a shiny new ‘paradigm shifting technology’ pops up the the Ruby world.

Introducing Geekspaces - A Business Idea

Fri, 03 Sep 2010 10:24:59 GMT

I tweeted last night about finally talking myself into making a go of a business idea I have been kicking around for a while. Here is the outline of it, I’m putting it out here for feedback and criticisim from my peers to find out if the idea has legs before taking it to the next stage of development

Geekspaces will be a new kind of bar and meeting venue designed to attract customers with a keen interest in Technology who need a casual space where they can eat, drink and use their laptops.

Find out more at the Geekspaces Website. If you like what you read, please take the time to complete the survey.

PCI DSS and some advice from the trenches

Sat, 14 Aug 2010 01:48:50 GMT

For a while now, my responsibilities at my work have revolved around the Payment Card Industry’s Data Security Standards (PCI DSS). As of publishing this article, PCCL are compliant as a Level 1 Service Provider, the highest possible level of compliance.

Ruby played an important part in our overall compliance and I’m going to talk about how Rack and Sinatra play an important part in our compliance in a later post. For now I’ll explain a bit about PCI DSS itself and give some general advice for anyone working towards compliance.

First, I need to give a semi-obligatory disclaimer. I am not a PCI DSS QSA, all of what you’ll find here is based on my own experience as part of the two man team in PCCL who were responsible for designing and building our compliant infrastructure. From this, I’ve gained a good understanding of the specification; but you will need to speak to a QSA if you want advice which you can make business decisions on.

What follows is from my own experience at PCCL and the work undertaken for us to be compliant at this level to the PCI DSS Standard.