Ben Nolan

Webdeveloper Jim Jeffers has been using Jquery to do some interesting things with the comments on his blog.

1. You can select some text and a button appears asking if you want to quote this text in your comment.
2. It shows other posts by the author of a comment, using an :hover event

The really clever part of this is that it requires no adjustments to the wordpress php code, just adding the javascript include and putting some classes on your comments. Very clever.

Read.

Yay should be fun. Me and ingo are gonna go to the little rock on the south coast.

Colors from my 100 lovers. Based on the default word press theme, but with the css all re-jiggered.

Nice.

I think I need a list of links to other peoples blogs…

At lunchtime I.. went for a bike ride, dug over the garden, helped my flatmate put down 4 new rows of plants - then went for a swim in the coooold harbour on an overcast day - swum out to the pontoon and back - then back to the office for an afternoon and electronic music and programm0ring.

Nice.

A christmas letter from my lawyer. Very nice.

It’s just a big criminal gang that watches out for itself. I really can’t blame the public for treating them like the shit they are. It’s a shame really though - I know some fantastic police officers and I know that a lot of them are actually nice people out of uniform - it’s just he culture of being gangsters and arrogant fucks that destroys any chance of mutual respect between New Zealand citizens and the thin blue line.

3 laps of ridgeline extension in slight drizzle is freaking rad! Went up sally alley - which is really easy and fast when you do laps of it. Laps rule. I can’t find the quote - but there’s a quote - or a school of thought that:

Something done only once didn’t really happen

I really like that quote. I think laps are key. That’s why things like one night stands and doing every run on the mountain once are kinda lame. Experience and muscle learning over novelty every time.

Anyway. I got in behind a bus and slipstreamed at 40kph from karori -> kelburn, then did the high speed tunnel of death down vivian street between rows of stationary cars.

Such a big smile when I zoomed across cambridge and terrace with a big HUUUAAH! :)

We could import a few thousand continental europeans and get them to run the bars and cafes. When I got to germany i kept waiting for everyone to get out of control and the fights to start. They never do. We just have a retarded drinking culture and the people need re-education. There’s no problem with alcohol being cheap and plentiful - it’s the drinking culture that absolutely needs to change. More advertising of correct ways to drink - recommending people to call it quits when it’s time, don’t let alcohol companies set the tone. 

wordle is cool. this is a section of the analysis of bennolan.com.

Right behind my macbook is a windowsill of books. From the left.

• German-English dictionary
• Harry potter, deathly hallows, halfblood prince, prisoner of azkaban
• Richard bach illisuions
• The art of happiness - dalai lama
• Peace is every step - thich nhaht thanh
• In defence of food - michael pollan
• How to achieve true treatness
• Carl von clausewirtz - nature of war
• the art of war - sun-tzu
• english-deutsche
• french-english
• perdido street station - china mieville
• The good german - joseph kanon
• to kill a mockingbird - hh arper lee
• the bronze horsema - paullina simons
• masters of doom - david kushner

Nice. Great day in welly today.

They can read your minds with computers now! So awesome.

I want to invent a quantitative unit of psychic measure that can be named the nolan after i get my nobel prize. Will be awesome.

…not do things properly with wordpress. Now my theme is all fucked.

I’ll sort it out in a day or so. Lesson to the wise - don’t edit the default theme - you will be annihilated when you upload the new version of the theme.

Just got back from lunch at the batch with the awesome Rowan. It was super sunny, still, no wind - totally perfect day to be in Wellington.

The view from my desk:

Good times in wellington - super beautiful weather.

… IndigoRenderer.com a bit recently, I’ll be posting here as well - just though I’d show you what I’ve been helping out with.

I got a set of drawers from my dad. They’re really nice. No longer do I have to live out of my suitcase. And they look nice in my room. Compliment all my charcoal drawings on the wall. My simple little life means little things like a nice set of drawers seem really neat. It’s cool being able to enjoy something that’s simple, little and doesn’t beep.

I still think webstock is way too expensive. Yes they get awesome people, and yes it probably costs them a bit to get those people all the way over here - but $900 early bird is just so much - 9 days of SXSW is cheaper than that. Ah well - it’ll still be popular and I can still meet everyone outside of the conference.

New Zealand sucks in so many ways.

Found something like what i wanted. Very cool.

Something like this - but with pixel art rendering. Super! Click to embiggen.

Reminds me of the haidhauser friedhof, wandering through the cemetary down the way from my apartment, skating along on my longboard to gigs at muffathalle. Ah munich - ich lieber dich!

Burn burn burn! Like they did to the Anarchists!

Just an idea - has anyone had experience with stylizing map data using mapnik / postgis / mapserver? I was thinking of getting the wellington OpenStreetMap data and running it through postgis to convert it to a grid of the major streets where everything was constrained to 45′ streets and try and get the grid more regularly spaced - eg stylizing the map data like in a london tube map.

The cool thing would be to then render that data in an orthogonal 3d view (isometric), and then let people draw all the cafes on the map as 3d blocks (maybe keyed from the property boundaries), that way when you search for cafes or bars - you can get an idea of the size of places - eg lafare will be big, so will havana, midnight will be small, mojo mothership will dwarf the mojo on taranaki street.

I think it’s an awesome idea - you could also show people walking around and doing stuff - but yeah - bit of a mission for a day with lots of paid work to do.

I haven’t listened to American Errorist in so long. Such an awesome album. Makes me want to crash my bike and get all muddy and bloody.

It was a thundery night in Transylvania when Stroup shouted “IT’S ALIIIVEE!”. With quivering fingers he typed:

g++ hello.cc
./a.out

And he waited in anticipation until the console replied….

“kill meeeeeeee”

When you use the internet you come across a lot of people that should read Win Friends and Influence People. Being nasty to people is just so unproductive.

I’m tryna psych myself up to go out in these storm-winds to go biking up makara peak.

I really really want to get one of these and electrify it. The hardest problem is holding myself back and saving up some money so I can do it all properly. For starters - I’ve other things I need to sort out first with my monies - but then I want a 1998+ mx5 in black or silver ($9000). A 10″ DC motor located in the transmission tunnel ($3000) and mounted straight to the driveshaft. Then a 130+ Volt Thundersky battery back ($5000) and a cafezilla motor controller ($2000) - you need a really grunter controller to run the car in direct drive. Then there’s renting a garage to do the work, getting the time off work, etc etc. Lots to do - but would be so awesome. I’d aim for 100km effective range (meaning up and down wellington hills) per charge, and a rev limited maximum speed of 130kph (good mix of acceleration and top speed for trackdays).

Another option that is in my head - start ghetto and convert a sw20 mr2 into an EV that can only do 50/60kph (fine for in city driving) - this would be way cheaper (smaller motors and controllers and less batteries) - but this is too much compromise for my liking.

Patience patience! And I will have my $22k mini-tesla-roadster. 

So relaxed and awesome today - todays my day off exercise, still had to go to work for a while.

I just watched the u2 - one video. It’s totally beautiful and awesome here in Wellington at the moment - but I need to go visit Berlin and Munich again soon. I miss the Germany! The streets and apartments and parks and rivers and the vibe of the place.

1. The office dog
2. EXTREME Swimming and EXTREME mountain biking on alternate days
3. Beautiful weather
4. Sun on my neck while I type this. mmmmmm.. suun.
5. Programming in C++ and Cocoa for fun (Wonderland!)
6. Programming ruby, css, rails and javascript for profit
7. Eating well
8. Sleeping well and getting up early
9. Good friends and family

That’s a pretty good list of things to be thankful for.

I just went swimming in the crystal clear waters of oriental parade with paddy the dog. That was really really awesome.

Often in a rails app - users want to be able to filter their index.html.erb views by various fields, eg project status, completion date, who’s working on it. You might start by just adding GET parameters onto the url. eg:

/projects/?completion_date=2008-04-04&status=active

But that turns crappy after a while - eg having your select_tags reflect what the filter parameters are - doing validation on the filter params etc. I do it like this:

# app/models/project.rb
...
require 'ostruct'

Project::Filter < OpenStruct
  def to_conditions
    query = 'TRUE'
    args = []

    if !user_id.blank?
      query << " AND (user_id=?)"
      args << user_id
    end

    [query] << args
 end 

# app/controllers/project_controller.rb

@filter = Project::Filter.new params[:filter]
@projects = Project.find(:all, :conditions => @filter.to_conditions)

# app/views/project/index.html.erb

<% form_for @filter, :url => projects_url, :method => 'get' %>
  <%= f.select :user_id, [...] %>
<% end %> 

To be honest - the code is a bit ugly and voodoo-rific, but it works, is simple - requires no crazy whacky plugins and lets you treat the filter just like you would treat a activerecord object, and you get to hide away any whacky joins and optimizations into project::filter (rather than cluttering up your controllers).

Weee. Rails post from me!

I think someone should create a coffee cart at scorching bay and call it Little Fishie. That would be cool.

For future reference - a good read on training northern breeds of dog. DOGGIES!

Looks like Arnold is promoting high-speed rail in california. We need this in New Zealand. Imagine walking down to wellington train station, loading yourself and your ski gear onto a modern comfortable train, and arriving two and a half hours later at the ohakune ski village. Or all the people that could commute from Hamilton to Britomart in 35 minutes.

I imagine a lot of the track would require significant upgrade to get fullspeed rail - but by upgrading the wide open stretches to 200kph+, making the sequencing (start/stop/load/unload) faster, and improving all the worst bits of track to 120kph, you could probably get most of the way there.

We’d save lives, reduce carbon emissions, be less dependent on oil, employ lots of people (or use labour from the prisons), and open up the interior of New Zealand to development. People commuting to Wellington from Palmerston North would have their trip halved in time, people could live in Taihape or Waioru and do a day trip to the capital!

Hey all, I’m wondering if someone can recommend me a good book about accounting for small businesses in New Zealand. I want to know what I’m talking about before I hit up xero and find a new (and better) accountant.

“Carrying a majority of the popular vote, Obama did especially well among women and young voters, who polls showed were particularly sensitive to the current climate of everything being fucked.” — Onion

It’s obamarama baby!

Okay, so several years too late I got onto skype out and skype in and have a working 415 number and a sweet headset. My work is now way more productive.

Give me a call at Nolan Consulting if you wanna chat.

Mean movie. Super awesome movie. The middle east looks happening. Definitely on the one-day holiday list.

Dear Ninternet,

How do I make gem install default to –no-ri –no-rdoc?

Thanks,
Ben

Always make sure you have tests in your crawlers so they don’t go rouge and put 2^18 bad rows in your database. And then when you stop your crawler, restore responsiveness to your slice and delete the rows from your database, remember to vacuum analyze full - otherwise your apps just won’t start again.

Man it’s beautiful today. Up at 6.30am for the win! Now to actually do some work. But I will! Because I want to go on holiday to germany for a wonderful bavarian holiday, so it’s typing time.

And bike riding later on today - before the 140kph winds become too gale-forcey.

See this helpful hint.

Ahahah! There’s gold in this post. I’m learning the c++ aye.

It’s a sunny sunday morning and im on the couch cooking breakfast and having coffee and about to go biking. Wooooooooo!

Rad - me and the greens agree.

I did many hours of consulting. I reviewed a future project. I skipped a lot. Wonderland potentially got a modeller on board. I didn’t do anything on the moneyshot project. I biked around the office a lot.

It feels like san francisco here at the moment (right at my desk), it’s got that buzz about it, of things moving, things happening. It’s a nice vibe. Nice vibe.

Oh snap it’s the po-lice! (For the googs)

I’ve been working on a client project building a consumer website which has been done many many times before. I was talking to Will Bryant about it yesterday and he pointed out that there is nothing wrong with re-inventing the wheel in this way - but the important thing is to target niches and do them well.

So identify the market segments that would want to use the site - then make sure the site totally kicks ass at serving that one market segment - but without marketing yourself into a corner - so that once you’ve nailed one segment - you can build out your user interface, data and processes, get a second segment absolutely kicking ass - then you can tell your customers about this new segment you serve.

As opposed to building a crappy version of everything, do a few things well. There’s lots of benefits to it yeah?

The sun is out, blue skies and still. Great day for a bike ride. Im glad I didnt make myself go out to makara in the wind and rain yesterday.

Straight outta compton is great funny album. And my flatmate nick wondered if ice cube ever googles for “bus timetables, compton county”.

Told you postgres was awesome. :/

Went biking yesterday, up early - up to makara peak. There were so many freaking people up there it was nuts - so I decided to head out to the leaping lizard which is a trail I haven’t done before. It’s awesome, a rolling grass route along the top of a ridge - with a dozen or so awesome jumps with really sweet landings. I took it kinda slowly (no flips, just big jumps) since I hadn’t done the route before. After doing the top bit - I decided to take the ride down to the road end - instead of back up Nikau Valley.

I was kinda wondering why all the other tyre marks headed back up Nikau Valley. I found out - it’s because the bottom of Leaping Lizard pretty much Sucks. It’s steep as hell, rocky as hell - and has some 10 metre drops off the side of the trail. Lol. Not really my cup of tea.

I had some fun hacks of the weekend working on a site im thinking of calling ferretkiller. For kicks you know.

Just been reading about Simons experience in Morzine, I guess I’m going to have to get a fully-suspended bike and some hard-out mates one day and learn some of that insane-o body armour mountain biking action. Gulp.

I’m an Anarchist!

But when it came time to throw bricks through the starbucks window!

You left me all aloooone.

– Against me! eheheheheh

Okay - off biking.

I can’t remember how to explore mysql databases without using a gui - but postgres rules:

Use these binaries. They’re good ja.

The people at peachydandy.com (the $5/year host i run my blog on) seem to have restored my blog from a Really Old database backup, so I’ve lost the past few months of posts.

Hopefully they can get this sorted out, otherwise I’ll have to recommend people to keep the hell away from them.

From my comment here, about a terribly ugly app coming out for the iphone soon.

I think that it doesnt follow the apple ui guidelines (not that i’ve read them, just what i’ve observed). But I don’t think it matters. He’ll probably make tonnes of money selling this app and most people won’t know or care that it could work a tonne easier.

Maybe in a years time the developer (or someone else?) will put out a mileage log that does use the UI guidelines, casual users will have adapted to the expected apple human interface guidelines  - and so will prefer to use the HIG-compliant tool.

For now though - it’s like ebay (or windows vista). Cheap, cheerful and ugly, but people don’t care. 

I might end up working with the clever, intelligent and beer drinking fellows at buddycloud. They do all sorts of location social networking cleverness (for example, they can tell you how often they go to hofbraukeller, what the popular places after hofbraukeller are, and where ross went after he had one beer too many and it all turned a bit grey).

Anyway - if things progress well - you’ll see the updates on the buddycloud blog.

Munich next week for me!

Punk4punks is my favourite radio station of the day!

I found it on shoutcast.com. They list many different genres of music. Punk4punks is my favourite though. Loud, fast, funny. Just like life! 

I moved this blog over to wordpress - which is a blogging engine. If anyone wants to set up their own weblog or small website - I can recommend wordpress. You’d have to have someone technical help you out probably - but it doesn’t take too long. I did the theme for this blog myself.

Here’s a photo I took earlier this week while in Paekakariki.

I’m working on an iphone application that records where you go. It’s pretty smart and uses some ideas from buddycloud, plazes and various other places. I’m packaging it up at the moment - once some friends have tested it I’ll try putting it out for more people.