Ben Nolan

I have a little joke going that I think a hosted silverstripe would be quite a good competitor to wordpress.

I have a new menu and header design coming for twitterplaces. A preview:

For twitterplaces, I’ve been using the Random Walk theory of software development. I pick up the software each day, and work on whatever feature I feel like. There’s no plan, no vision, no long term overarching story that directs my work.

My favourite band in the world cancelled their Australian and New Zealand tour.

I think this sums it up for me:

I ready about the sale of Dextrose to Zynga by Paul Baukaus, and it got me motivated to poke around with some html5 gaming again (a nice sunday morning thing to do). The outcome was an island generator using three.js and jquery ui.

I was interested to read the twitter engineering teams overview of how the newtwitter works.

I got my R scripts running on production for twitterplaces - so if you browse to Wellington or London, you can see twitter densities. That’s all well and good and very rough, there’s a lot of work to do:

I lied. I wasn’t really building twitterplaces, I just got back from 5 days snowboarding, relaxing and reading books by the fire. Now i’m back in the office and started the week with getting my production box set up so I can deploy the next release of twitterplaces.

I’m taking a week off blogging so I can focus on building. Please excuse my silence - and I look forward to resuming communications with you all sometime next week.

Ever since I discovered that you can index all of the worlds geotagged tweets with Twitter, I’ve been working on the next generation of twitterplaces. It’s a challenge. The app has to work on datasets the size of Wellington (around 110 tweets per day) to New York (around 15k tweets per day) and provide an intimate experience for every user.

I’ve been waiting to make this post for a few weeks now. I bought a Pansonic Lumix GF1 with the 20mm prime (non-zoomable) lens. It’s a real beauty! It takes lovely photos, is a joy to use (nice and fast) and fits in my coat pocket. I bought it as a present to myself for three months working for Lonely Planet in Melbourne.

The Twitter streaming API now lets you recieve all geotagged tweets, not just geotagged tweets in specified areas. This means that with a command like:

I regenerated by tweet density graphs using contour lines, and got this nice looking animation of tweet density in london over the course of a day.

One of the benefits from working at home is that I get to play trumpet and guitar as much as I want. Which means lots of time to practise.

Just as a quick follow up to yesterdays post - this is the very rough visualization I came up with using R, openGL and ffmpeg.

Choropleths are those heatmap style maps you often see. I’ve been keen to render some heatmaps out of the twitterplaces data I have, so I spent today learning R and using it to generate some graphs.

I like Heinleins quote, so instead of Follow Friday, I decided to try and post Art on Friday. So, an old charcoal drawing that’s been hanging in my office, and 90 seconds of my acoustic guitar.

I’ve been making a real effort to avoid coffee in the afternoon. I’ve made the discovery that although the first cup of coffee in the morning is awesome, afternoon coffees are just that ‘cup of stress’ that my vegan friends talk about.

I use postgis extensively in my geo-local development. If you’re working on a project that involves geo data and you haven’t seriously looked into postgis, you’re doing yourself a disfavour.