Ah Deadlines

March 04, 2006 by Eric Richardson

So the LA edition of BarCamp starts in a few hours. I remember thinking it sounded cool when Sean made the announcement, but then I sort of forgot about the date. Sunday or Monday I realized it was this weekend and decided that I had a certain project I wanted to get into shape to talk about. Over the next few evenings I proceeded to get a little done here and there.

But now we're five hours before the opening and I've got 565 lines of Javascript and no backend.

I get the feeling this may be more of a Sunday afternoon demo than a Saturday one.

Definitely more here real soon. This project is a concept I've been sitting on for a long time, and I'm really excited about it.

Mmmm... GIS Extensions

March 03, 2006 by Eric Richardson

This may make no sense to you, but just know that it's cool:

houston=# select AsText(the_geom) from buildings where id = 10;

MULTIPOLYGON(((
    3118897.96530012 13838758.1691906,
    3118951.74016637 13838841.8891787,
    3118993.06800402 13838848.7768498,
    3119057.74463768 13838808.25588,
    3119076.59247451 13838796.0172187,
    3119025.06695632 13838713.7759229,
    3118980.06661619 13838703.7761855,
    3118897.96530012 13838758.1691906
)))

houston=# select AsText(transform(the_geom,4326)) 
    from buildings where id = 10;

MULTIPOLYGON(((
    -95.3738909490995 29.7518641865238,
    -95.3737133770184 29.7520897224611,
    -95.3735825199263 29.7521051310476,
    -95.3733827457042 29.7519882370035,
    -95.3733245703251 29.7519529896557,
    -95.3734949130464 29.7517313269132,
    -95.3736376422065 29.7517076774085,
    -95.3738909490995 29.7518641865238
)))

Top data is in the NAD-83 Texas South Central coordinate system. Bottom data is your standard WGS-84 lon/lat. Using PostGIS.

Ah For the Days When These Weren't Part of Web Development

March 01, 2006 by Eric Richardson

I mentioned a few weeks back that I had made some JS code that crashed Firefox on Linux. If you're on Linux you can actually see this live now. Just go to the new Downtown L.A. Interactive Map, click on "Select a Search Type" and select "Residential Buildings". That'll pop up an interface to refine a residential search. When you select something under Type it loads some more options in under Price. Firefox 1.5 on Linux instead just bombs.

On a different site I'm working on (this one's a personal project, not a work thing) I've apparently made some javascript that creates a memory leak under that same Firefox on Linux. — Continue Reading...

Slightly Less Bad

February 25, 2006 by Eric Richardson

Far be it from me to claim to have anything but distain for Internet Explorer, but I have to say that the IE Developer Toolbar is really cool. It's certainly made cross-browser developer quite a lot easier.

Tracking User Interactions

February 25, 2006 by Eric Richardson

One of the more interesting things (to me at least) that I did in the process of launching the new map application was add tracker calls in the database to reflect usage that normally wouldn't get reflected in the stats. I'm using Google Analytics for this, and I hadn't realized just how easy it was.

In the map application it's important for us to know about user interactions. How are people using the map? Are they doing searches? Are they clicking the map links to find buildings on the map? Are they clicking on the map to find info about buildings? — Continue Reading...