This is our company blog. You'll find articles here covering all sorts of topics from the obvious software and technology articles, design articles, political views all the way to self-indulgent navel-gazing.
October 1st, 2008
Cheesy title eh! :-)
Many of our customers are worried about the current economic slow down. They’re tightening their belts, thinking much harder about their planned investments, especially in the realms of software and the web. We at Beanlogic appreciate the pressures on business in these times. Well, Beanlogic is tightening its belt as well. We are happy to announce a 30% cut in our rates effective for work commissioned in October ‘08.
September 25th, 2008
September 18th, 2008
A few weeks ago I went over to see Tim O’Donovan at Horan Construction (no website yet, we’re working on it). They are a successful civil engineering company based in South Wales that undertake a variety of projects, varying from road surfacing to the design and construction of household-waste disposal centers. Despite being successful and respected in their industry they currently have no web presence.
Beanlogic are developing a new content-managed website for them. This kind of small-scale project is a common occurrence and we have a streamlined process and a collection of the tools and frameworks that we have become proficient with to implement just this kind of project. One of the tools we use is Radiant , an open-source Ruby on Rails based content management system (CMS).
August 13th, 2008
Ever tried to install a specific version of rmagick ? That is a version that isn’t the latest. Most people that find this page on Google have probably noticed that it doesn’t always go smoothly. Other readers familiar with rubygems are probably thinking “It’s easy, you just do this…”
$ sudo gem install rmagick --version X.X.X
That’s certainly what I thought, I then spent the next 1/2 hour trying to figure out why one of the most simple tasks wasn’t working out.
August 8th, 2008
Back in ‘99, when I took my client-side software blinkers off and moved from C/C++/Java rich-application development to developing for the web I noticed a few things. Not least was the different disciplines that had to be learnt and design patterns employed. The one thing that I could immediately relate to was constructing user interfaces, especially forms. There are familiar elements here, such as text boxes, text areas, radio buttons & checkboxes, select boxes and combo boxes… oh hang on, that’s a lie. There are no combo boxes. In fact there has never been a standard browser implementation of a combo box (to my knowledge, please correct me if I’m wrong). Well, like blue Smarties, the combo box should come back and join the party.
July 16th, 2008
I had a peculiar requirement in a recent project recently, in which we used restful_authentication, where we needed to protect every controller and action from access without authentication. However these same actions also responded to XML requests for ActiveResource models in another app. The XML needed to be available without authentication. This posed more difficulties than I thought it would.
July 12th, 2008
You watch any screen-cast of any of the Rubystars out there, they’re using Textmate on a Mac. Textmate is great, really it is! It has two serious flaws however. They are that you need a Mac to run it and … that you need a Mac to run it.
Now, I have nothing against Macs. They look nice, they work well and have lots of cool little (and not so little) apps to help a developer with productivity. It would be more accurate to say that I have nothing against Mac OS X. What I hate about the Mac hardware is the compromises that have been made in the pursuit of – what I have to admit is – attractive design. I have a Dell laptop, it’s a lot uglier but it does plug into my docking station both in the office and at home with no fiddling with wires for monitors, keyboards, mice etc. Keeran and Mark would both insist that it’s worth it just to have something pretty on your desk. I’m not convinced…