I thoroughly enjoyed the day, which got under way with an opening by Alan and the host for the day, Christian Heilmann.  The presentations were all of an extremely high standard, and I took something away from each of them.  Perhaps however because of my preference for getting my hands dirty with PHP and tinkering with Linux gubbins I found some of the talks a little high-level and abstract.  That should nevertheless detract from the outstanding talks and the wonderful day I had.  I do believe though that I may have got more out of the day were I more of a freelance front-end developer.  I’m impatiently waiting for next year’s conference, which can’t come soon enough!

With an overarching theme of back-to-basics, Steve Marshall kicked things off with a very interesting discussion about keeping things as simple as they need to be.  From getting lead astray by cognitive biases to avoiding over complicating and thinking too far ahead Steve hammered home the point that if we don’t take that next step, we’ll get nowhere fast.

Steve was followed by Rachel Andrew who discussed choosing the right CMS.  Everyone has their own set of favourite applications, and this applies equally to web applications.  However, when developing a stand-alone CMS, or deploying one as part of a larger system, it pays to choose the right tool for the job.  Sometimes a simple solution is what is required, other times something more ‘enterprise’ will be required.  Ultimately though, the choice should enable the user to publish their content without hindering them.  The content should be front-and-centre, with the CMS seamlessly facilitating publication of great content.

The next talk before lunch was given by Glasgow developer Jack Osbourne, one of the contributors to HTML5 Doctor.  Jack offered a whistle-stop tour through the key new elements defined by the HTML5 specification, given as a novel ‘live’ presentation where each element was demoed in place as part of the HTML5 rendered slides.

After lunch, the wonderfully entertaining Remy Sharp kicked the afternoon off with a presentation that by his own admission, was a little out of his comfort zone.  Rather than what one might expect from Remy; a rather technical discussion about JavaScript and it’s proper application, he shared his personal workflow for fulfilling specifications.  It wasn’t what I had expected but I really enjoyed it!  It’s always interesting to see how other people work, and to learn from those who are clearly successful!

Next up was Mike Rundle; clearly a passionate designer/developer particularly with respect to all things Apple!  Mike’s presentation elaborated on why the Mac design works so well.  He explored Apple’s use of real world textures and their use application of consistent light sources to create a consistent, polished interface.  Not usually my cup of tea; I’ve never really been the creative type.  An interested talk nonetheless.

The final presentation of the day came courtesy of James Edwards who discussed the issue of whether the use of AJAX had become any more ‘accessible’ over the last five years. The conclusion was a resounding ‘meh’. However, some problems can be mitigated by employing the WAI-ARIA spec to aid those viewing the web using technologies other than the traditional web browser. What followed was a slightly tangential discussion of using ARIA attributes to customise web forms to make them more useful for those experiencing the web through less traditional methods. Quite a technical discussion on a subject that isn’t well understood by most.  An excellent talk!

In summary, although not a particular creative type I found this conference enjoyable and informative and commend Alan and his minions who made it all possible.  If there were some slightly more technically oriented topics in future, that would be a big plus for me.  A massive thank you to the speakers who took the time to head north of the border.  I’m genuinely excited by the future of The Highland Fling and look forward to next year’s conference.

First, we get a list of all the currently installed PHP packages:

sudo dpkg -l | grep php > /tmp/php.packages

Next we remove the currently installed PHP packages:

sudo apt-get remove --purge $(dpkg -l | grep php)

Now we need to create an alternative sources list:

sed s/lucid/karmic/g /etc/apt/sources.list |\
sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/karmic.list

Having done that, we need to generate an aptitude preferences file for PHP:

awk '{print "Package: " $0; print "Pin: release a=karmic\nPin-Priority: 991\n"}' /tmp/php.packages |\
sudo tee /etc/apt/preferences.d/php

This preferences file tells aptitude that for each listed package, we want to pin down the installation candidate to that from the Karmic repositories. We can now install the packages that we previously removed, but this time the versions from the Karmic repositories:

sudo apt-get update && apt-get install $(cat /tmp/php.packages | tr "\n" " ")

A quick restart of Apache and everything seems to be working with the older version of PHP!

That’s exactly what I did last night.  I did some digging and found the UK government’s data source for nutritional information, the “Composition of Foods” report.  To use the data, I had to apply for a free Click-Use license.  I didn’t have to specify what data I was using or how I was going to use it; it seemed more the case that I had to have my name added to a list of people who use government data in some way, shape or form.  Once I’d munged the data a bit, I created a CSV, and corresponding XML file as described by the DataTables documentation.

You can use my DataTable by querying YQL (or in the YQL-console) like this for example:

use "http://maxmanders.co.uk/lab/nutritionals/nutritionals.xml";
select * from nutritionals where name = 'banana';