Ben Nolan

When you’re using xero and minutedock, you get used to having nice quality tools. It’s like having chisels that were shaped by master craftsmen. And then there’s your payroll package…

Here’s the non-blocking map reduce class that I was talking about. It uses at most 75% of the CPU, so that the browser remains responsive while your job is processed. You can destroy the job at any stage.

Doing mobile development on your Android but can’t get any debugging action going? Add this code (from the inimitable Tom Shelfer) to the rails controller that provides your json views, so that you can serve your app on a different port than you serve your API:

I’m clustering 1200 points on the iphone in javascript in an app I’m writing at the moment. On my iphone 2g it takes 1500ms in a worst case. There are two fixes I’m going to do:

I’m working on an iphone app that needs 650kb of json data to get started, so I needed a bit of progress display while the data is being fetched. This works on mobile webkit:

I’ll be presenting at Wellington.js on the 13th of July about Backbone.js and my experiences with Capt, my javascript build tool.

I was quite taken with these isometric minecraft renders, so I decided to dig out some of my old game code and try and build an isometric renderer…

Four weeks on from my original post, I wanted to do a follow up about the “Day of Disconnection”.

I use Jasmine to spec / test my Backbone apps. It can be a pain setting up a Javascript testing environment (unless you’re using capt in which case you get a testing environment for free - but I digress. I decided to pull out some code from an existing app of mine and document a bit of it.

I’m writing this post from the above the wing of a 18 seater twinprop plane, with the sun going down to my left, setting over mount ruapehu, which looks to be getting a good coating of powder for this years ski season.

Nick at Rankers turned me onto a new movement. It’s disconnected Sundays. I’ve raised it with Sam Minnee from Silverstripe. The goal is to not do any work, or to use the web on Sundays.

A common mistake people make in Backbone apps, is writing a view that assumes that data exists in a collection, so that when the user reloads the page, the collection is empty and the view won’t render.

I’ve moved out to the east coast of New Zealand to work onsite with a client. I’ve been gardening, programming, brainstorming, prototyping, surfing, swimming and mountain biking. It’s been a nice time.

I’ve been doing some research and development around offline mapping for a client of mine. Here’s my notes on the current state of technology.

I’ve opensourced the repository holding my tile-based game engine. I worked pretty solidly on it for about two months (and put a bunch of videos up at reddit.com/r/hutch/), but it’s become a back-burnered project, so I’ve donated it to the html5 gamedev community.

I got halfway through a tutorial on capt, my build tool for single page javascript applications using coffeescript, backbone.js, eco and less. The tutorial is available here, but it kind of stops halfway down. Feel free to fork the tutorial on github and submit patches, otherwise I’ll finish it up when I have time.

I joined the Greens party in the afternoon, met the leadership in the evening and then was interviewed by the film crew at the backbencher - because I support the Wellywood sign. Video below. It was a fun night.

I give you a time of day, you give me a name for the appropriate meal. I was trying to work out how to do this with a case / switch statement - then came across this syntax which is kinda nice:

I’ve recently had a project morph from an online html5 mapping site, into an application that needs to run offline on netbooks and macbooks. So I’m investigating taking an openlayers, backbone and coffeescript application and packaging it up with Firefox webrunner (or Prism) as an installable package for Windows and os x.

This post comes as a surprise to me. When I planned to visit Brisbane for 8 weeks to spend some time with my girlfriends parents, I didn’t expect the town would grow on me so much. My previous opinion of Brissie have been is as a cultural wasteland of chromed-up bars and old holdens.