June 12, 2015

Convert pdf to text on Ubuntu

We had rather an ugly scanned pdf of a very lovely poem over on our feedback website so I thought I would try to post the text from it using Optical Character Recognition using tesseract.

June 5, 2015

Five tips for five years

I saw some wonderful tweets the other day where the author gave their former naive self some time-travelling advice from their present self about how best to get started with programming.

June 5, 2015

Don’t apologise- it’s just feedback

I’m cross posting this to my team’s blog which can be found here to bring together my two worlds of programming and Linux-geekery with the Involvement and experience in UK health services which I use programming and Linux-geekery for in my job.

May 22, 2015

Downloading Lucida Console on Ubuntu

Well, it’s been a horribly long time since I blogged anything.

January 31, 2015

Primum non nocere- gathering feedback data in the NHS

One of the bits of the internet where I hang out is alive with debate around this comment piece in The Guardian.

December 23, 2014

I did it! I edited some open sourced code!

I do try to promote the benefits of open source wherever I go, and one of these many benefits is, of course, the ability of endusers or intermediate parties to modify the source code to make changes to the software.

October 24, 2014

All hail the mighty Cron- setting up cron jobs and a mail server to collect their output logs

At a certain point, everyone with a penchant for databases and Linux is going to want to make use of cron, whether it’s to back up their data, run maintenance on certain fields of a database, or something else (in my case, do a huge pull of MySQL tables and format ready to drop nicely into a Shiny application).

September 9, 2014

Querying Google analytics data with R

This post is in response to a question on Twitter, but it may be of interest to others.

August 13, 2014

Book review: PHP Cookbook by David Sklar and Adam Trachtenberg

This is a book review of PHP Cookbook by David Sklar, and Adam Trachtenberg.

August 8, 2014

Open source vs. commercial off the shelf

A government department in Australia reports saving very large amounts of money by shunning paid for proprietary software and implementing their own version with R (link to story).