Ben Nolan

Visa.com and mastercard.com are down (as of 3pm Thursday in New Zealand) from the anonymous ddos. For my part, I made a protest sign that shows my feeling about how Sweden is acting as an independent and sovereign nation with respect to Julian Assange:

I thought I’d do a post showing how a social network over XMPP works. This isn’t any invention of mine, I’ll just point to the relevant specs and give my understanding of how it can work. I’m not an XMPP expert though, so take this with a pinch of salt.

I like Facebook, and at the moment I think it does a great job of managing privacy on the Facebook site. My only concern is that of censorship. If the US government asks Facebook to censor something, Facebook has to acquiesce to their request.

Any time you click a broken link (like this one for the october update) on the Diaspora site, you get this guy staring back at you.

When you’re young and you have problems or obstacles, you are comforted by the fact that you’ll get through this and in the future you won’t have such problems.

Working on twitterplaces I get around 2 million tweets per day. The importer is a streaming curl session that I pipe into a ruby script that analyzes the tweet and sticks it into a postgres database.

My Nokia 5230 arrived today. What a cool phone for 120€! It has satellite navigation (with a suction cup to stick it on the windscreen), a big screen, decent browser and facebook right on the front page. It’s no iphone, but it’s 1/5th the price.

After my post yesterday - I decided to extract out an example app from my current work.

The idea behind Weheartplaces is that I want to be able to bookmark places to go on my desktop computer, and then sync these places to my mobile so I can access them offline.

Sorry I’ve neglected my blog for two weeks. I was finishing up a contract, and then took a week break to work on some personal projects, as well as sort out various life things.

I’ve just posted a new video of Hutch. New features include terrain generation, better collision detection, item interaction, tile interaction. I’ve been looking around the web and also found a few people doing truly amazing javascript stuff:

I’ve been playing around with Hutch lately, and have been reading some game design articles. I found this pearl of wisdom from the developer of some old Commodore 64 games that I used to love as a kid.

I went to a R users group in melbourne and got all turned on by data analysis, so I went home and started crawling all the tweets in the world and sticking them into a Postgres database. I then went and build this site.

I took Matt McCrays excellent Coffeescript glue for Backbone.js and moved my saveChanges function into it.

I’ve been doing some work on getting the private beta of Weheartplaces out. I’m using tagging as a way to categorize places, so you can quickly add a place and tag as ‘todo’, ‘cafe’ or possibly ‘avoid’.

I’ve been away from the internet for a bit - chewing through some work for the good folks at Youdo (you should try their ITIL tool - Beetil) and doing various business development work. One of the most enjoyable business trips I’ve ever been on can be summarised by this photo:

I just sat down at my Mac. Here’s a recap of the last hour.

Want to write a modern webapp using lots of javascript? Here’s my recommended toolkit:

After watching Exit Through The Gift Shop last night, I wanted to do something creative, so I played around with isometric projection using css3 and applying stencils to canvas. I came up with something vaguely similair to what I was imagining….

Sorry for not blogging this week. I’ve been in a client office and furiously working on getting a sprint out. On Monday I had my product development day, so I started work on weheartplaces. The first iteration of WHP is due out by the end of October, and I plan to have it working on Iphone, Nokia and Android. To do this I’m using jqtouch which hasn’t seen a lot of work in the past year.