For the attention of last week — Things I wished I'd known a while ago

iPhone4 HD video test, huge robots & APIs

September 19, 2010

I was passing Trafalgar Square last night, and happened across this robotics display as part of the “OUTRACE” art installation. The perfect excuse to give the HD video on the iPhone4 a try.
Aside from being pretty, on further investigation this is actually a huge, ultra expensive web mashup.
Mashup you say?
Mashup indeed. I shall illustrate [...]

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Boris Bikes on Fusion Tables

September 3, 2010

To road test the release of the new geometry styling controls in Google Fusion Tables, I threw together a live visualisation of London Cycle Hire Rank availability. Using the Ruby Fusion Tables gem it sips data from the Boris Bikes API, and is basically a total rip off of homage to Oliver O’Brien’s (excellent) original [...]

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Fusion Tables gem & yes, a twitter example…

August 10, 2010

I just released a gem to help interactions with fusion tables.
It’s on github, or you can install with a straight:
gem install fusion_tables
The main rationale behind making this gem was to make it easy to upload geospatial data to make quick exploratory maps of large datasets. As an example, here are the results of sampling [...]

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UN flag suitable for famfamfam icon set

July 24, 2010

Totally geeky way to spend a lunchtime, but what the hey. Here’s some takes on a 16×11 pixel UN flag paying homage to the FamFamFam style.
They should fit in well with the FamFamFam flag icons set available here: http://www.famfamfam.com/lab/icons/flags/

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PostgreSQL friendly IPinfodb SQL import

July 24, 2010

Title says it all really. I finally got tired of importing the ipinfodb into postgreSQL via CSV (the SQL they provide on their site targets MySQL), and have made a dump available on S3. Knock yourself out.
http://stokumine.s3.amazonaws.com/ipinfodb_one_table_small_pgsql.sql.gz
to use:
psql -U[your_user] [your_db] < ipinfodb_one_table_small_pgsql.sql
creates a table called geo_ips

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Using Tolk with Google Translate

July 18, 2010

I love DHH’s Tolk. For those that don’t know, it’s a rails engine that makes translating your base locale in your Rails app really easy . While I was translating, I was getting bored with doing simple things like translating the days of the week and so on, and sometimes needed help with more complex sentences. [...]

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Using split locale files with Tolk

July 16, 2010

The vanilla method of storing view translations in an i18n’d Rails project is to maintain a huge locale yaml file. A step forwards is to maintain many yaml files split into folders mirroring your controller or view structure. Splitting is better for maintenance, however many tools and services, like DHH’s Tolk which can help with [...]

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