ProjectX Blog

Rails 3 is a rewrite / merger with Merb, and includes Yehuda Katz, Merb lead developer working on it full-time. Here are some posts which were published recently:

http://yehudakatz.com/2008/12/23/rails-and-merb-merge/

http://weblog.rubyonrails.org/2009/7/30/community-highlights-yehuda-katz

http://yehudakatz.com/2009/03/06/alias_method_chain-in-models/

http://www.engineyard.com/blog/2009/6-steps-to-refactoring-rails-for-mere-mortals/

There are lots of lessons and techniques in ruby, rails and general programming to be learnt from these posts. Enjoy!

Google has just released their new version of their Google Maps Flash API, the big feature in this is their 3D map view perspective. This allows the map to be controlled similar to what is found in Google Earth, but with simple tiled maps, rather than complex terrain.

More info and demos can be found here: http://code.google.com/apis/maps/documentation/flash/3d-maps.html

ProjectX has always a keen supporter of Summer of Code. Among the many aims of Summer of Code is help IT students upskill. Recently, I did a workshop for students to learn and get their hands dirty with version control software (git).

Git with it’s popularity and simple operations was the best choice I found for teaching beginners. The workshop files are posted on the Summer of Code blog (http://blog.summerofcode.co.nz/2009/07/31/code-management-git-workshop/)

This post was cross-posted at Thong’s personal blog as well.

Here are the visualisations of the Google crawler on the [business:ZoomIn] site on the 21/7/09.

I’ve made 3 videos, one of NZ , Wellington and Auckland.

Its interesting Google actually indexes harder the more traffic we get !

New Zealand view

Auckland view

Wellington view

I’ve been playing around with Google Earth animations to test its visualisation capabilities. I wanted to see how the google crawler was indexing [business:ZoomIn]. Google indexes over 150K pages a day. I’ve been curious to see how it does it. So I created a Google Earth Animation to visualise the process. We’re in the process of uploading the videos online. (The KML is too big to embed in the browser !)

In the mean time here are some images from my animation.

Here are 3 pictures showing all the points that the crawler indexed for NZ, Wellington and Auckland. (click on the images to see full size)











Enjoy! Videos to follow.

We have a couple of rooms available on our floor for rent or sub lease in our office in Johnston Street. Both rooms are approx. 4m x 4m.

Share the floor with [business:Lushai], [business:CBDrealty.co.nz], [business:Cloudbreak] and [business:ProjectX Technology] .

The space can be furnished or unfurnished, and shared internet is also available. Email John if you’re interested.

Writing documentation for Javascript and HTML means code samples. These code samples need escaping so that they can be displayed on the web page. Instead of doing it over the web, why not do it in Ruby?

Here are a couple of simple scripts that I did (encode method straight out of the h method in rails):

http://www.pastie.org/557036
http://www.pastie.org/557037
Read the rest of this entry »

The [business:Summer of Code] is back on again. We calling all Wellington ICT companies for partipication.

• Have you got a skunk works project that’s been sitting in your bottom drawer?
• Have you got some processes / system that need improvement or tuning ?
• Do you have an idea, you’re looking to commercial

Then Summer of Code is for you. We help companies connect with smart ICT students over the summer period. Together with Grow Wellington, we assist in helping companies apply for Tech NZ grants to help subsidise your companies projects.

If you’re interested in knowing more check our company page on the Summer of Code website.

Here at [business:ProjectX Technology] we are quite excited to see that Google are working on a new version of their Mapping API.

Version 3 is still in it’s early days in Google Labs, however it is already showing exciting features and improvements, as well as a much better code structure.

I recently built a quick demo of the capabilities of it’s new Geocoding system, to show the improvements on the data being returned. It’s exciting to point out that Google has now listed this as an official demo for Version 3 of their API.

Although there is still a wee way before this API is ready for serious use, it should be a good step forward when it’s ready.

Patrick Meenan of AOL has released aggregated data results of a years data of web page testing from webpagetest.org.

Here a quick summary of the results:

Average Load Time: 10.1 seconds
Average Time to First Byte: 1.1 seconds
Average Time to Start Render: 3.8 seconds

Average Page Size: 510 KB
Average Number of Requests: 50
Average Number of Redirects: 1

Comparing that to the web performance audit of the top 100 NZ websites.

Average homepage size: 359.6K
Average download time: 3.85
Average total requests: 57.2

Looks like NZ homepages are starting to get the message.