Blog posts written by Robin Winslow

Robin Winslow
28 September 2015

Prepare for when Ubuntu freezes

Notes Ubuntu

I routinely have at least 20 tabs open in Chrome, 10 files open in Atom (my editor of choice) and I’m often running virtual machines as well. This means my poor little X1 Carbon often runs out of memory, at which point Ubuntu completely freezes up, preventing me from doing anything at all. Just a

Robin Winslow
28 September 2015

Robin Winslow
18 August 2015

Django behind a proxy: Fixing absolute URLs

Notes Ubuntu

I recently tried to setup OpenID for one of our sites to support authentication with login.ubuntu.com, and it took me much longer than I’d anticipated because our site is behind a reverse-proxy. My problem I was trying to setup OpenID with the django-openid-auth plugin. Normally our sites don’t include absolute links...

Robin Winslow
18 August 2015

Robin Winslow
5 August 2015

Vanilla: Creating a modular Sass library

Notes Ubuntu

We recently introduced Vanilla framework, a light-weight styling framework which is intended to replace the old Guidelines framework as the basis for our Ubuntu and Canonical branded sites and others. One of the reasons we created Vanilla was because we ran into significant problems trying to use Guidelines across...

Robin Winslow
5 August 2015

Robin Winslow
11 March 2015

A seachange in front-end best practice (but not for a while)

Featured Ubuntu

Despite some reservations, it looks like HTTP/2 is very definitely the future of the Internet. Speed improvements HTTP/2 may not be the perfect standard, but it will bring with it many long-awaited speed improvements to internet communication: Sending of many different resources in the first response Multiplexing...

Robin Winslow
11 March 2015

Robin Winslow
28 January 2015

Auto-syncing revision history from Github to Launchpad

Featured Ubuntu

In the design team we keep some projects in Launchpad (as canonical-webmonkeys), and some project in Github (as UbuntuDesign), meaning we work in both Bazaar and Git. The need to synchronise Github to Launchpad Some of our Github projects need to be also stored in Launchpad, as some of our systems only have access to

Robin Winslow
28 January 2015

Robin Winslow
27 January 2015

Converting projects between Git and Bazaar

Featured Ubuntu

Here in the design team we use both Bazaar and Git to keep track our projects’ hostory. We quite often end up coverting our projects from Bazaar to Git or vice-versa. Here are some tips on how to do that. To convert revision history between Git and Bazaar, we will use their respective fast–import features.

Robin Winslow
27 January 2015

Robin Winslow
9 September 2014

Supporting net neutrality and the Internet Slowdown

Services Ubuntu

On 10th September 2014, Canonical are joining in with Internet Slowdown day to support the fight for net neutrality. Along with Reddit, Tumblr, Boing Boing, Kickstarter and many more sites, we will be sporting banners on our main sites, www.ubuntu.com and www.canonical.com. If there were Internet slow lanes, you’d still...

Robin Winslow
9 September 2014

Robin Winslow
28 August 2014

Saving ubuntu.com on download day: Caching location specific pages

Featured Ubuntu

On release day we can get up to 8,000 requests a second to ubuntu.com from people trying to download the new release. In fact, last October (13.10) was the first release day in a long time that the site didn’t crash under the load at some point during the day (huge credit to the infrastructure

Robin Winslow
28 August 2014