clearoverlays in google maps v3 api

Posted on July 27th, 2010 by thiswayup.
Categories: dev.

Since api v2 has been now officially deprecated, I've been recently relearning some of the stuff to the new v3 api and trying to figure out the differences. One of the annoying things (as of writing) is the lack of clearOverlays().

There's a few ways to do it but the easiest way to do is maintain a separate array of markers then remove them one by one. So the code would look like :

while(markerArrayList[0]){
   markerArrayList.pop().setMap(null);
}

We keep going through the array in the while loop and pop an item until we don't have any more at which point the markerArrayList[0] will return false and stop the loop.

Example code here

I hope this helps some out there! Please feel free to comment!

0 comments.

Interesting modx bookmarks May 2010

Posted on May 31st, 2010 by thiswayup.
Categories: dev.

I don't have much to post about this month so I'll post some interesting Modx links I have.

Introduction to MODx Revolution, Pt. I - http://vimeo.com/8335791?hd=1

modx and kohana - Someone has attempted to bridge between Modx and Kohanahttp://forum.kohanaframework.org/comments.php?DiscussionID=4221
 

Getting back into modx when you have locked yourself out - http://www.lucidgreen.net/webbybooth/?p=27

Wordpress vs modx - I just found this thread recently, old but interesting http://modxcms.com/forums/index.php/topic,15341.0.html

Stats plugin for modx - http://modxcms.com/about/blog/zaigham/slimstat-plugin-for-modx.html

More modx tutorials - http://www.modxrules.com/

0 comments.

example code of how to geo code addresses

Posted on April 25th, 2010 by thiswayup.
Categories: Uncategorized.

I've had this in my book mark for a while and thought was handy. Essentially the code shows how with a database of address how you can usea call to a google service to return a xml file which you then iterate through to extract what you need.

Geocoding Addresses with PHP/MySQL

0 comments.

weekend of coding at secret london

Posted on April 25th, 2010 by thiswayup.
Categories: Development, London gems.

I've had this post sitting in my draft posting for the past couple of months and had completely forgotten about it until recently, so I thought it best to commit some thoughts down for future prosperity..or something.

It was back in February when I noticed a call from secret london for developers to help build a website and so looking for a small project at the time to sink my teeth into, I thought I'll come down. I head to where they had a small cozy office off oxford circus to meet the small gang of 4. After chatting a bit with a slightly shy girl who I thought was called Georgia (for some bizare reason) go through the website concept. This girl turned out to be Tiffany, the creator of the facebook group! At the time with my tired mind I was unawares of this! (sorry Tiffany if you are reading this)

Anyways...walking through the site idea, I had commented how I could possibly offer a few hours of my time a week over the next few months. Obviously Tim (the main dev guy) had thought about scalability and having a fast backend from the start. It was a shame he had decided to do it in Django and some weird data engine called Solr but I was enthusiastic working with people who knew what were doing. The real kicker or as Greg (who I considered the energetic and charismatic "ideas man") came out with the punch line... they were planning to create the whole thing in a weeks time! I was a bit stunned but said I will try get back to them (but still enthusiastic to try help out). I left thinking decisively "These people were slightly mad.", my favorite type of people

Moving onto the following weekend with some great planning and scheduling done through gdocs, the "guerrilla style" site build was underway starting on the Friday near Farringdon. Unfortunately I could not attend from the start and joined them on the Saturday. My php skills would be slightly rubbish for this project but decided to help out as best can with the javascript side of things.

I met some fantastic peeps on the day, chatting mainly to Ruth and Andy The setup was was very fun with a large area to accommodate the gang of designers, developers, editors and content people with booze and food around. I found it amazing to see so many people spending their weekend pushing forward something they believed in and credit is due to Demetrios for keeping the atmosphere positive, making sure everyone was happy! The content people had a very arduous task of transferring as much of the information from the facebook website to the site database. There was then the 4-5 developers  nd roughly same amount of designers do the front end work.

It was a bit of a shame on my part as I had a couple of bday do's to attend on that particular weekend, I wanted to hang around a bit longer to polish off my section! After spending a few hours here and there, trying to play around with the google maps local search api, I managed to offer a small contribution in the form of a google map showing the secrets for the first version of the website. I finally left late on the sunday after the design team had did the initial load of the site on a beta domain, at that point it truly struck me how an amazing feat they had achieved with the number on the posters indicating how much data they had loaded and the functionality they managed to squeeze in!

The experience was definitely a positive one and it made me realise how doing coding for projects like this is really good fun. I should do more of these! I had a chance to learn some new stuff that I wouldn't otherwise expose myself to and got a tasty curry and beer for my troubles! Would I do this again? Definitely.

Further links

• Secret london blog
  
• The secret london site idea on tech crunch
  
• Secret London guest posting on Tech Crunch - I'm famous! Though my head looks like it's growing out of Tim's

0 comments.

ultimate SEO list

Posted on April 13th, 2010 by thiswayup.
Categories: dev.

I thought I'll start creating a SEO checklist for my personal and whoever likes to reference this, at the moment itd quite small but will add more and more over time.

General site structure

• "keywords" meta tag - google ignores
• h1 tag - descriptive term
• description meta tag -
• friendly url - that describes the page hint: should be close to H1 tag
• Keep content as high as possible
• Vary the media
• Add alt tags to all picture
• If using flash add spiderable content of what the flash content should have

Making google happy

• Optimise for speed

More techie stuff

• Robot.txt
• Sitemap.xml - generate automatically
• rel="Nofollow" - add to outbound links which you do not want the search engine to give weight or scrae through
• When using ajax to update content, make sure we can degrade to non-javascript mode as I do not believe the spiders render the page to figure out what content will appear

Content guide

• html site guide
• Privacy policy

Tools

• Googleweb master
• http://www.pluginseo.com/
• majesticseo.com - report on backlinks
• ubervu.com - tracking how people respond to your website. Helps with building relationships and back linking further?

Other

• Backlinks - get other sites to create a link to your site

2 comments.

using xdebug on wamp under windows 7

Posted on April 13th, 2010 by thiswayup.
Categories: dev.

I recently had windows 7 installed on my machine at work after it had been running like a dog for the past 6 months, previously I had Win Xp. I tried to install WAMP and xdebug but was finding that I kept on having random connection issues and breakpoints was not working, bloody annoying! At first I thought this was because I was running php 5.3 wamp but then tried to put in php 5.2 but pin point it to recent versions of Xdebug not playing very well with WAMP.

I read a couple of posts and just changed dll used to version 2.0.0 and it suddenly worked!

Also for future reference :

zend_extension_ts="C:/wamp/bin/php/php5.2.9-1/ext/php_xdebug-2.0.4-5.2.8.dll"
xdebug.remote_enable=on
xdebug.remote_handler=dbgp
xdebug.remote_host=localhost
xdebug.remote_port=9000

Got this from the netbeans wiki

UPDATE: Really useful xdebug wizard to work out which binary and instructions for your specific setup. Awesome juice!

0 comments.

Large Hadron Collider stuff

Posted on April 5th, 2010 by thiswayup.
Categories: humour, justgeek.

I've been seeing a few things about the Large hydron collider of recent time and thought I'll drop these two gems of a find links from the nytimes explaining the basics of the Hadron and also the plans to use the london circle line as the Hadron version 2

0 comments.

Snowboarding in bansko bulgaria 2010

Posted on March 31st, 2010 by thiswayup.
Categories: fun.

Just got back from Bansko and I thought I detail as much of the experience for future reference as possible. I went with a buddy Donald Wokoma. We arrived in Sofia airport after getting a package holiday (costing about £270) which included a flight with Easyjet. The transfer from Sofia to Bansko was about 3 hours and by the time we arrived, it was nearly midnight at the Polaris Inn. The transfer (£53 each) we took was with the travel agent, a bit of a mistake given we could had found it cheaper just by going online.

One of the reason's I chose the Polaris Inn was the fact we wanted a place which was relatively close to the Gondola and also it said it had a spa. The walk was about 5mins away which was just great but unfortunately, being "lower" season, the spa was closed. Luckily, we found a couple of other places with a spa and the one we chose was a 30 sec walk from our place called the Winslow Highland Hotel. It hasa full pool, steam room and sauna with enough space to hold a few dozen odd people in the different parts of the spa. Costing us £7 a visit, it was relatively good value and had a on site masseuse doing special deals for March (low season thing again). Our apartment was pretty damn good though there was some confusion on the first night with only a double available then they brought in a second bed the next day plus they forgot the breaky!

One of the most amazing things about Basko was the price of the food. A big concern initially was the food and drinking cost compared to other ski resorts, paying something like 5-6 eur for a pint and some basic grub over 20 eur! As it turned out a beer was typically £2, a nice evening meal about £10-15 (main and starter) and a filling lunch on the slopes was about  £5. All in all, if you stretched the budgetI reckon you could probably survive on £20 a day comfortably, pinching the wallet, probably £10 a day! So basically, compared to other resorts your food/drink bill would be over halved!

We chose to get the snowboarding package which was £220 that included equipment (board, bindings and board), ski pass and lessons. Though initially we were told it was a 5 sets of 4 hours, turns out when the documentation arrived it was actually 3 sets of 2 hour lessons. Looking at it a 6 day pass would cost £134, hire from a local place was about £120 and lessons varied in cost. The lessons included was with one of the bigger schools ULEN. As I was a beginner-intermediate/improver (whatever) I got stuck on the nursery slopes on day 1. My instructor was a sweet Bulgarian named Jenny, who then told me that I was going to put in the 'advance' group after a couple of pointers. This actually just meant riding with an instructor on some of the slopes the next day. On the day 2, our 'advance'  group consisted of four people. The instructor Jenny, Shaun (an irish accountant from london, Mark (a expert skier trying boarding) and myself. My initial worry was that I was going to be stuck in a group of speed crazed fools. Turned out that I was the speed freak! Unfortunately I got a bit of a scolding for going a bit too fast and lacking in enough control for such speeds! Lol! Day 3 must've been the best lesson, as I actually felt the new instructor, Emil, really had a deep deep understanding of the board. He had been working for 4 years in Dubai in the indoor snow dome and riding for 17 years. During the summer time he had been training as a cage fighter!

Halfway through the holiday, we got invited to someone's 21st birthday bash. Don had decided to try some private tuition from one of the recommended British ski school, Method. They had been recommended by at least 3-4 different people and Don decided to take them up on their offer the thursday. At the party, I had a chance to chat to some different people including one crazy Saffa lass and engaged in a conversation on the merits of getting decent equipment, so the very next day I did! I went to Bansko ski hire to get a decent equipment, dumping my already hired equipment. I managed to snare myself a decent burton's board with some of those nifty toe bindings and after the initial run, I was surprised how much I could carve down the mountain! From this point on, I had decided to just take on some better equipment and extended my hire. The surprising thing was that if I had went for the 6 day hire from the beginning, it would have cost me 120 lev or £60! For premium equipment, that was a bargain I thought.

The actual experience on the slopes was was damn good. I stuck to 4 medium/longer runs, one of which was a nice blue run was from the top of the mountain. As mentioned previously, we were in the low season and it really felt like it. The main slopes was pretty much near empty enough for anyone to take their time and carve across the runs without too much fear of bumping into another person, apart from the last run of the day situation when people were heading back to the main base for the gondola down. The mix of slopes is definitely enough to keep beginners and intermediates happy, couple of blacks to challenge the experts. Though there wasnt a snow dump since the week before, the snow was kept relatively well groomed and there was too many bumps on the slopes to throw us boarders off.

When it comes to apre ski there was a some pretty good choices. I bumped into a couple of people around the place who had different stories on where they were staying but the common factor seem to be the price yet again. A party of 8 people was paying around £200 for a half board chalet including transfer to the slopes back and forth from the slopes. Another couple I bumped into paid £150 for an apartment which thee found on ebay. Next year I'll definitely do the same and book it all separately. Transfer would cost about £35 each and with enough people that could be further reduced. I would probably also get a loada flights through easyjet and whizz air since the earlier booking will make it cheaper.

Overall the experience was excellent! The price of the whole holiday and relative quality to that price meant that I would definitely recommend a few friends next year who have not tried boarding to head out there. Loved the range of choices for various things and defo head back!

Places of interest:

• Winslow Hotel - Had 1-2 bed apartments and was the place we went to use spa facilities
• Bansko mania - Hired quality gear. week rental would be £60
• Victoria restaurant - Higher end restaurant but a really nice meal for reasonable prices. Also serves pizza's!
• Friendly pub - nice pub/restaurant with loadsa choice and cover band that plays the same set ...every night!

1 comment.

CMS and Modx introduction presentation at london web

Posted on March 19th, 2010 by thiswayup.
Categories: dev.

I decided to spread the word about my fave CMS framework, Modx,  last night at the London web meetup. It was really good fun, the initial nerves was banished once I got going. I made the mistake of trying to build a whole site and do a code demostration. I managed to do about 70% of it though obviously got stuck here and there! Still, it was a pretty good presentation and people kindly commented how good it was being my first presentation! Definitely a very positive experience and looking forward to more of these things

I think I managed to get a few people interested in Modx and through this I'm hoping that I can give back to the community. After all, the more people who use it, the more it will spread!

My talk was then followed by a great informal chit chat of SxSW from Nathan. He discussed his faves talks, the mad life, the interesting people and situations plus the general sub-culture around it! I really do fancy going next year and planning to book my ticket

Here's my slides on the modx talk to download

UPDATE:

Check them out on slideshare and the video is available also

0 comments.

IE9 first impressions

Posted on March 17th, 2010 by thiswayup.
Categories: dev.

Just read the gizmodo.com round up of ie9. Looks quite interesting, especially the following:

• h.264 video - Whoot! No more needing to install flash!
• SVG and 2D acceleration - Again above and will look cool when we have some people building some extra funkness into site. Maybe building a version of Mario to natively run in the browser?
• HTML 5 - Though on the face of it I see this as being a VERY good thing. I'll like to see how MS will "interpret " the standard

Another big surprise is the dropping of WinXp support! Sigh, I guess I'll have to leave my cozy WinXp machine at some point then
 

0 comments.

« Previous Page — Older » « Newer — Next Page »