ProjectX Blog

Free Seminar on Using Google Maps

September 22nd, 2008

We’re working with Zawadzki Limited to bring a high level seminar on “Using Google Maps”. The seminar is in Wellington on Friday 26th September 8:30am to 10:30am. The event is free, but you will need to register for the event.

Here is the overview for the seminar:

Using Google Maps

Google Maps is a great tool for making the data you already hold more accessible to your staff, your customers, or the public. Using Google Maps as your platform, you can:

	make it easy for all your staff to benefit from the geospatial information you already maintain
	link information stores to Maps and help users find and interpret information faster
	engage your public with interactive Maps-based applications

In this two hour session we will cover:

What types of information can be presented using Google Maps

How to use Google Maps to visualise your existing information sets

How to augment your systems with Google Maps as a front-end

Examples of effective use of Google Maps

What is involved in piloting your first Google Maps application and common pitfalls

Licensing for Google Maps and differences between the Free, Premiere and Enterprise versions

Posted in New Zealand | No Comments »

Xapian search – acts_as_xapian tip (II)

September 20th, 2008

Further to my first post on using acts_as_xapian, I have been trying to make xapian work with pagination and association proxies properly

class Lesson < ActiveRecord::Base
# Index user_id as a term in xapian

    belongs_to :user
    def self.find_with_xapian(search_term, options={})
      ActsAsXapian::Search.new([self], search_term, options).results.collect{|x| x[:model]}
    end
end

class User < ActiveRecord::Base
    has_many :lessons do  #Extend this association
      # Override the method in lessons
      def self.find_with_xapian(search_term, options={})
        ActsAsXapian::Search.new([proxy_reflection.klass],
          "{proxy_reflection.primary_key_name}:#{proxy_owner.id}  #{search_term}", options)
        .results.collect{|x| x[:model]}
      end
    end
end

This will ensure that current_user.locations.find_with_xapian will find the correct number of locations, enabling us to work with pagination, etc. What’s left to do is to get the Search object out so that we can get matches_estimated out. I’ll leave out for next time.

This post was brought to you from Software Freedom Day, New Zealand.

Posted in Technology | Tags: acts_as_xapian, association_proxy, rails | 2 Comments »

Xlinks Digest – 20 / 09 / 2008

September 20th, 2008

Here is a collection of interesting links as discovered by the ProjectX Team

7 accounting tips for beginning businesses

Added on 09/20/2008 at 11:47AM

Jason Frieds 10 things we learned at 37 signals

Added on 09/20/2008 at 11:47AM

How to never forget anything ever again
Added on 09/20/2008 at 11:46AM

Why small web design companies should think big
Added on 09/20/2008 at 11:45AM

Those who have succeeded at anything and dont mention luck are kidding themselves. – Larry King
Added on 09/19/2008 at 11:56PM

Success consists of going from failure to failure without loss of enthusiasm – Winston Churchill
Added on 09/19/2008 at 11:55PM

How to make a million dollars
Added on 09/19/2008 at 11:54PM

Stanford offering free Computer Science and Robotics courses
Added on 09/19/2008 at 11:51PM

AWS content delivery service: Amazons lifting the bar again
Added on 09/19/2008 at 11:48PM

Freakanomics look at the current banking crisis
Added on 09/19/2008 at 11:46PM

Tim O’Reilly – Stop throwing sheep do something worthy
Added on 09/19/2008 at 11:45PM

What it costs to sack a person
Added on 09/19/2008 at 11:40PM

Sergey Brin’s personal blog
Added on 09/19/2008 at 11:39PM

Squirrelfish Extreme
Added on 09/19/2008 at 11:31PM

iPhone v Android: platform vs product
Added on 09/18/2008 at 02:40PM

SVG effects for HTML content
Added on 09/18/2008 at 12:19PM

Polypage – wireframes via ajax
Added on 09/18/2008 at 12:15PM

CSS transformations now in Gecko
Added on 09/18/2008 at 12:14PM

Posted in Links | No Comments »

Search as Locator Entry

September 16th, 2008

Jakob Nielsen has just written an article on location finders. The article outlines some behaviour changes of users in finding locations over the years.

The lastest research has found…

It’s still striking that 73% of users went to a search engine (mainly Google) when we asked them to find a nearby location for a specific company. Only 13% went straight to that company’s own website, while the remaining 13% went to a dedicated mapping service.

Given this changing behavior, we now have guidelines for search engine optimization (SEO) for the locator.

We’ve focused on making ZoomIn SEO friendly from day one so that businesses can be easily found. We constantly tune our system to ensure that we’re at the top the list for a result.

This re-inforces the need for businesses to make sure that their locations are being “found”, using ZoomIn is a good way to make sure that happens!

Posted in Technology | No Comments »

Xlinks Digest – 16 / 09 / 2008

September 16th, 2008

Xlink is a collection of interesting links as discovered by the ProjectX Team

Donkey Kong source code found….

Added on 09/16/2008 at 09:29AM

10 aspects of web 2.0 strategy that every CTO / CIO should know
Added on 09/16/2008 at 09:27AM

What entrepreneurs need to know about founders stock
Added on 09/16/2008 at 09:23AM

Don’t buy that textbook download it for free
Added on 09/16/2008 at 09:22AM

GPS tracking can drive employees over the edge
Added on 09/15/2008 at 08:25AM

20 visualisation libraries
Added on 09/12/2008 at 10:54PM

Seth Godin – 8 startup insights
Added on 09/12/2008 at 10:48PM

20 best countries in the world for startups: Come on bloody New Zealand
Added on 09/12/2008 at 10:39PM

Curious Hack. How to solve a maze in Photoshop
Added on 09/12/2008 at 10:33PM

Space invaders in javascript: Cool Well done Chris
Added on 09/11/2008 at 01:13PM

UA Profiler
Added on 09/10/2008 at 05:29PM

Awesome Time Waster: YUI Pacman
Added on 09/09/2008 at 02:53PM

The “Feedization” of the Web
Added on 09/08/2008 at 10:28AM

NZ VC scene… Nothing Ventured
Added on 09/08/2008 at 10:26AM

Posted in Links | No Comments »

Runtime page optimiser now live

September 16th, 2008

Runtime Page Optimiser (RPO) is now out of beta, the team from www.actionthis.com have release the automagic web optimisation tool for IIS based sites. RPO is certified for ASP.NET 2.0 and MOSS/SharePoint 2007 intranet and internet sites.

Here’s a list of benefits:

But wait there’s still more, the team are going to release shortly an online webpage optimisation report tool based on AOL Page test.

Congrats to the ActionThis team and I’m looking forward for future improvements.

Posted in Technology | No Comments »

ProjectX moves into the heart of Silicon Welly

September 12th, 2008

We’ve moved!

ProjectX moved to Level 3 Symes De Silva House. We’re sharing the space with Plan HQ and the heart of Silicon Welly.

New Contact Details:
Level 3 Symes De Silva House,
97-99 Courtenay place, Wellington

Phone: 04 910 3100

Posted in ProjectX Technology | No Comments »

Xapian search – acts_as_xapian tip

September 11th, 2008

We use xapian as our offline indexing solution here at ProjectX. Recently, Francis Irving from mySociety has started a fantastic Rails plugin, acts_as_xapian. I’ll leave the introductions to the aforementioned pages. Suffice to say that it is quite easy to install, and it utilizes all the power of Xapian in a very smooth way.

One thing I have not been able to crack is to utilize association proxies on searches. Locomotivation has a solution using named_scope, but that approach removes all ordering, in addition to issuing one more unnecessary SQL statement.

class Lesson < ActiveRecord::Base
    named_scope :find_with_xapian, lambda { |*args| {:conditions => ["lessons.id in (?)", ActsAsXapian::Search.new([Lesson], args.to_s).results.collect{|x| x[:model].id}]}}
end

But if we do this instead, we can now do association proxies

class Lesson < ActiveRecord::Base
    def self.find_with_xapian(search_term, options={})
      ActsAsXapian::Search.new([self], search_term, options).results.collect{|x| x[:model]}
    end
end

current_user.lessons.find_with_xapian "something"

That would automatically scope and return lessons that belong to the current user only. Awesome!

Update: The code is not showing quite as nicely. I have pasted the same code in Pastie – http://pastie.org/270114

Posted in Technology | Tags: xapian | 1 Comment »