ben nolan.com

I’m back on the warpath with weheartplaces - and part of my plan is the facebook expansion. To get started - I need 100 fans before I can claim the weheartplaces facebook username. You just need to become a fan of the weheartplaces page to get things started.

You should become a fan of weheartplaces here.

There is talk of a ycombinator alike in wellington. Ycombinator is a fund in berkley that invests 10-20k in companies of 2-4 developers and gives them 3 months to build a company out to the stage where it has either proved it’s value for a next round of funding, or flamed out. Great idea - has produced companies like loopt and reddit. Here are my thoughts of what a wcombinator could do with:

• Free xero accounts for 3 months for each company
   
• Free ipayroll for 3 months - so that the founders can get paid normally
   
• Support for airnz so that each company can afford to visit San Francisco as part of their startup period.
  Wellington is great, but the valley is where it’s at for matking contacts.
    
• Affordable accomodation from the Cube (Massey) for out-of-towners who come down for the 3 months
    
• Interesting and affordable (500/mo for two/three desks) officespace
    
• Discounted colocated servers from xtreme networks
    
• Weekly dinner meetups with the chief investor and a team of people who can make introductions
    
• Architectural support from thekoz, theminnee or thewakelin. Friendly designers who they can pay hourly for design work.
   
• Regular input from successful, pragmatic entrepreneurs who have done web stuff - people like Sam, Nigel, Rowan, Cameron Mehlhopt. People who have actually scene the company go to profitability, not just blag men (no offence to the blag men).

That is all.

Some listenings for you..

• Gaslight Anthem
• Atmosphere (You can’t imagine how much fun we’re having)

That is all.

To follow on from lance..

1. Have numbers to base your decisions upon.
   
   At Glaretech we weren’t sure what our breakdown of how many users would use blender vs sketchup vs 3dsmax would look like - we made some decisions around where to invest our time, then we found out our ‘best guess’ was completely inaccurate. Not a big loss in this case - but for the sake of a quick survey with your customers or interested parties, you can have much more accurate decision making. Note that this kind of logic is sometimes frowned upon by the ‘do it quick and throw it up and see if it sticks’ crowd.
    
2. Have weekly meetings and make a list of tasks to achieve.
    
   In the fire of everything happening it’s good to see that you’re working through a task list.  In our case this task list focusses on marketing, sales and engaging in niches to grow the business - we tend to let the bigger software development tasks stretch and grow and come up as they need - it’s hard to tell when suddenly you’ll be inspired to dig into the guts of the SketchUp plugin and write an installer for it. But I do know that I’m not often inspired to cold-call customers or write a newsletter that restates everything we’ve blogged over the past month and set up an emailing system to contact potential leads.
    
3. Take time to sit away from the computers and draw on the whiteboard. Nick and I have been getting better at this, getting away from the computer and drawing on the whiteboard, either for him to describe to me ‘wavelength dependent spectral quantities’ (which can be rgb, blackbody, peak, tabulated, constant, textured or shader-driven - simple enough), or for us to draw up a timeline of business growth and goals we need to achieve. The important thing is to move to a seperate area where the computers aren’t, sit everyone down at the table and take an hour to draw on the whiteboard and talk out loud. No particular agenda is required. It takes a good 15 minutes before all the creative juices start flowing and we get everyone on the same page and coming up with solutions to problems that we probably hadn’t even known we had.

 That is all.

• Backflip snowboarding
• Darkside grind
• Climb lead on a 5.11
• Speak french
• Fluent german
• Read russian
• Play classical piano
• Play blues guitar
• Play a wind instrument
• Replace the motor in a classic porsche
• Learn to fly a jet
• Do tabletop jumps on a mountainbike
• Study medicine
• Know the constellations
• Do a standing backflip
• Ride a horse

(The Minister of Communications in New Zealand)

Hi Steven,

I’m a New Zealand web developer and entrepreneur. I’ve lived in Canada and Germany, so my letter comes from that background.

I applaud your governments interest in building better internet access for New Zealanders. Affordable, world class internet access is undoubtedly a requirement for keeping New Zealand competitive on the world stage. I was saddened to listen to my international colleagues express disbelief at the quality of internet access in New Zealand.

“Beautiful country, awful internet access” sums it up.

However - I question the necessity of investing in a faster connection between exchanges and residences, when the majority of New Zealanders aren’t using their current copper or cable connection to capacity - due to the high price of internet access here. Cable users can get up to 10mbit downstream bandwidth; ADSL2 users up to 24mbit downstream. This is on existing technology, with no government investment required.

I would ask that - before our public funds are invested in fibe optic cable - the government investigate:

• What can be done in terms of market regulation to increase broadband uptake in New Zealand? 
• Has local loop unbundling been handled well? 
• Will LLU let ISPs compete with Telecom effectively?
• Why is international data traffic is so expensive compared to Australian prices? 
• Is the southern cross cable being used effectively?
• Is international connectivity being wholesaled at fair market rates?

It is my estimation that New Zealand could have world-class, affordable internet access for all, using existing technology - if key parts of telecommunications market were monitored and regulated efficiently.

I eagerly await your reply - and request permission to post it on my blog at bennolan.com.

Your Sincerely,
 

Ben Nolan

Take mouse to your bathroom. Put a dab of aftershave - I use del mar - on your fingertip - rub all over the ball. Be amazed at the gunk coming off. Wipe off the gunk with a piece of tissue paper. Repeat again.

Your mightymouse now scrolls again.

Wheeee!

I had already fixed it once - but on the server with vi, rather than properly by doing it on my local box and then…

rake test
git commit -a
git svn dcommit
cap deploy

(To be honest, I don’t actually run rake test on weheartplaces hohohoho). ;D

I like vibing out with a bit of navel gazing. When it comes to experiences that make me feel all warm and fuzzy inside - there’s nothing better than drinking a beer with a friend in my room, listening to some funky bassy tunes and reflecting on how awesome we are.

“Dude - we’re in such an awesome position! The future is gonna be so great!”

…

I try and avoid doing that these days.It’s the whole thing of doers do, talkers talk. Sitting in Nicks room talking about how fun it’s going to be when Indigo Renderer is a successful company doesn’t get us any closer to the day when we can sit back and enjoy it. Keeping my mouth shut and cutting some code in XCode actually gets you closer to the finish line.

I think there’s a lot of value in internalizing your hopes and dreams. I think this might be part of the reason why people who have been successful don’t tend to open up about it very easily - maybe they’ve got used to internalizing their dreams and congratulations. Maybe they feel uncomfortable letting them out in company?

There is absolutely a place for dreaming and self congratulations and inspiration, when you have to do a leadership role - but I think it’s better to work with peers and leave the congratulations to a quiet drink in a small bar.

So… it seems I broke my iframe that displays the places I like on weheartplaces. I’ll fix it sometime soon.

My girlfriend Rissa has bookmarked a bunch of islands in Australia that look awesome. Thanks Rissa. 

We heart places is my site for bookmarking places that you want to go, or that you want to recommend to friends. It’s quite a neat site - but to be honest - it’s not finished enough yet for everyone to see how cool it is. I also need to sort out licensing for the photos - because they are from flickr and not all of them are correctly CC-licensed.

I recently acquired a set of ps3 rock band drums, and set them up to work with garageband - so now I have  $50 set of electronic drums. It was really straightforward to get running and I like the quality.

Some notes:

The drums aren’t velocity sensitive. I knew they wouldn’t be - and you can still jam out with them - but I wouldn’t spend more than $50 on them. I’ll keep my eyes out for a GWHT or RB2 drums - as they will be velocity sensitive.

Miditar hero is a great program - the UI confuses me a bit, but now I’ve got it sussed - it works really well with garageband.

There is about 50ms latency - which is noticeable - but once you zone in and adapt to it - it doesnt seem like a big program.

The kicker pedal is pretty rubbish. I’ve seen people pull the sensor out of the pedal and attach it to the back of a real practise drum pedal (one with a chain and the swinging action). I’ll probably try this - you’d get a much better feel (i noticed that foot triggers that don’t have a mechanical action tend to suck, like in the dtxplorer set).

Also..

I also got an electric bass last night, and an amplifier for it. Pretty awesome - so now I have a Les Paul replica and SX bass on my wall, and an electric drumkit (hah) in the corner. My band is now officially a 3 piece, and this should make hanging out with friends in my room even more fun. Add olis trumpet and the organ in the hallway and it’s a bit of a musical event.

I found a printer / scanner in the hallway.

       
    A 5 minute sketch from Life Drawing at Vincents.

  
   My pick of the day - with strange finger effects behind it.

I’d scan some more of my better sketches - but they’re all up on the wall. I’ll make some more sketches some time and scan them in.

I’m implementing a new feature for Weheartplaces, where you will be able to embed a map in your own webpage, that shows where you are and what is nearby to you. In doing so - I wanted to center the map around your current location (gathered from fireeagle, twitter or the google geo extensions) and show places nearby.

Because I’m working in an iframe - space is at a premium - so I wanted a more compact way of displaying information than the standard infowindow. This post tells you how I went about it, using jquery and the google maps api.

Step 1 - Prototype the infowindow in Photoshop

As with all fun projects - start in photoshop. First I took a screenshot of the map with apple-shift-4, then loaded it into photoshop and made a template for my infowindow. In this case I used a rounded rectangle with an arrow composited onto it, and added a dropshadow and a stroke to the layer.

      
      This is the window template that I’ll be using.

      
      The photoshop layers settings I used.

Step 2 - Use the slices feature of photoshop to cut up the infowindow

My infowindow is going to be fixed width, but I do want it to be able to grow in length to accomodate the amount of text I put in it. To do this I’ll disable the background in photoshop - so that the infowindow is over a transparent background, then use the Slice Tool (K) to cut the image into two parts - one which contains just the top rounded border - and a larger part which will be the rest of the image. This technique of resizing images is called ‘sliding doors‘. 

        
     The image with background removed and ready for export

I then save for web, put the two files (infow-top.png and infow-bottom.png) in my /images/ directory.

Step 3 - Adapt the google rectangle overlay to create the Infowin class

The overlays reference on the google maps documentation details how to create a generic ‘rectangle’ overlay. We will adapt this code, with some use of jquery - to create our infowindow.

The important things that I needed to change were:

1. Use jquery to create and set the css to make the code more compact.
2. Use jquerys .height() function to work out the size of the html inserted into the infowindow and make the infowindow stretch appropriately.
3. Create an update() method that sets the html of the infowindow.

Source code of infowin.js:

// Infowin class for displaying a miniature info window. Does not
// respond to any events - so you should show and remove the
// overlay yourself as necessary.

function Infowin(latlng, html) {
	this.latlng_ = latlng;
	this.html_ = html;
	this.prototype = new GOverlay();

	// Creates the DIV representing the infowindow
	this.initialize = function(map) {
		var div = $('<div />');
		div.css({
			position : 'absolute',
			width : 234
		}).appendTo(map.getPane(G_MAP_FLOAT_PANE))

		this.map_ = map;
		this.div_ = div;

		this.update(html);
	}

	this.update = function(html){
		this.html_ = html;

		this.div_.empty();

		$('<div />').css({
			'background-image' : 'url(/images/infow-top.png)',
			height : 14,
			padding: '0 0 0 0'
		}).appendTo(this.div_);

		var content = $('<div/>').addClass('infowin-content').css({
			'position' : 'relative',
			'overflow' : 'hidden',
			'max-height' : 100,
			'top' : -5
		}).html(html);

		$('<div />').css({
			'background-image' : 'url(/images/infow-bottom.png)',
			'background-position' : 'bottom left',
			'padding' : '0 10px 30px 10px'
		}).append(content).appendTo(this.div_);

		this.redraw(true);
	}

	// Remove the main DIV from the map pane
	this.remove = function() {
	  this.div_.remove();
	}

	// Copy our data to a new instance
	this.copy = function() {
	  return new Infowin(this.latlng_, this.html_);
	}

	// Redraw based on the current projection and zoom level
	this.redraw = function(force) {
		if (!force) return;

		var point = this.map_.fromLatLngToDivPixel(this.latlng_);

		// Now position our DIV based on the DIV coordinates of our bounds
		this.div_.css({
			left : point.x - 108,
			top : point.y - this.div_.height() - 22
		});
	}
}

This class is undergoing refinement, so you should check infowin.js for the latest version from weheartplaces.com.

Step 4 - Using the Infowin class

Now we can use the infowin class in our google maps application. Here I’m just displaying some lorem ipsum text at a predefined latlng.

  var info = new Infowin(latlng, 'Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur....');
  map.addOverlay(info);

      
   Our infowindow working in google maps.

    
   Compared to the bigger google maps infowindow.
 

I’m off to adelaide for work and pleasure tomorrow morning. At 6. am. I’ll be back in 2 or 3 weeks. Love you all - catch you in a while.