London’s Alternative Olympic Mascots
Wednesday 19th May 2010
The master’s of decency here at Head have prepared some truly British alternatives to the official London Olympic Mascot launch and the press have already caught on after the mascots were featured on the Guardian Sport website today.
The series of alternative mascots range from pork scratchings and 50p pieces to pints of ale and dirty fivers – mainly pub lifestyle orientated. As the Guardian put it “What about some pub snack characters, offers James Kirkup who, it would appear, reckons that by putting arms on any object you can create an Olympic mascot”.
To see the rest of the entries and a few more of our ideas head over to the Guardian’s gallery here.
SVN Branching/tagging and Redmine integration
Thursday 6th November 2008Here at Head, we use Redmine for our issue-tracking and collaboration needs, and it’s truly great. We’ve now replaced Trac, which was also really good, but we’re finding that the multiple-projects support in Redmine really trumps the single-project-per-installation model of Trac.
The only problem we’ve run into so far with Redmine was a problem setting up SVN branches when using Redmine.pm, the Perl authentication module. Any attempt to branch a repo resulted in an Apache segfault and an explosion on the client-side. The relatively simple solution was to replace the apache2-mpm-worker module with the apache2-mpm-prefork module. I found this solution tucked away in the Redmine forums, but I figured I’d better make a note of it as the solution was a bit hard to find.
Getting on Rails Quickly for Debian-based systems
Monday 3rd November 2008Just to speed things up for anybody who needs it, here are the commands we use to get Rails sites working on a fresh Debian-based system.
Next, go to http://rubyforge.org/frs/?group_id=126 and download the latest rubygems package (grab the .tar.gz file).
Extract it, and run
When that finishes, you should be able to type
And get a version number (like 1.3.1 at present). If this doesn’t work, it may be the case that it installed as command “gem1.8″ (rather than “gem”). So we can fix this pretty easily:
[code]sudo ln -s /usr/bin/gem1.8 /usr/bin/gem[/code]
Lastly you can install all the commonly used gems we use here:
[code]gem sources -a http://gems.github.com
sudo gem install mongrel ruby-debug mysql mislav-will_paginate ferret
acts_as_ferret rmagick fastercsv rails capistrano rake[/code]
Installing Phusion Passenger on Centos With a Custom Apache2
Monday 21st July 2008We’re currently running Apache2 on an old (and very stable) version of CentOS. It’s so ancient it didn’t come with Apache 2, so we’ve got it installed from source. Today we’re making the big move to running our Rails apps on Phusion Passenger (a.k.a mod_rails), but we ran into some problems with the compilation of the Apache module, mainly because passenger-install-apache2-module couldn’t figure out where any of the Apache development headers were. It’s a great installer but it can’t magically figure out where Apache’s keeping its development headers.
The solution was pretty simple, extracted from here and boiled down, it’s:
[code]export APXS2=/usr/local/apache/bin/apxs
export APR_CONFIG=/usr/local/apache/bin/apr-1-config[/code]
You may need to change the path depending on where you’ve got Apache installed.
Got Gimme?
Friday 14th March 2008
A 50p McDonald’s gift certificate, an air freshener, driftwood with google eyes glued onto it , anything from Lush… we’ve all received the occasional ‘less than satisfactory’ gift, but not anymore. Now you can let your family and friends know exactly what you want and where to find it online.
Head Labs had just released Gimme – a new Facebook application that lets you make product lists and keeps you clued-up on the latest trends.More than a wish-list, Gimme acts as your own product storage list of all the stuff you want online, you can add and edit any product found through our integrated search or found by you on your internet travels with our customised bookmarklet.
- An integrated search – find what you want easily by searching thousands of online retailers all within Facebook.
- Price comparison engine – buy your friends what they want at the best price.
- Editor’s Picks – our dedicated team of shopping aficionados scour the net looking for intriguing products you might like.
- What’s Popular on Facebook – it’s what everyone else likes the most.
- Themes – customise your list by adding a graduation, birthday, wedding list, or just a funky looking theme.
- Steal stuff off your friends – perfect for the lazy shopper, just add items from your friends list without all that thinking.
- Birthday alerts – lets you know when your friends’ birthdays are coming up and what they want.
Find out what all the hoopla is about at the apps page over on facebook.