Sunday Breakfast
I was waiting for a backup to finish running last night, so I was just wasting time catching up on some feed reading, and saw a post about making English Muffins from what is one of the best food blogs there is: Delicious Days.
I had some time to wait, so I decided to give it a whirl. The actual recipe is here, and it couldn’t be easier. The dough needs to rise overnight, so it’s the perfect thing to make late at night. The dough is pretty sticky when you’re making it, but it’s fun to get the hands goopy every now and then.
Then this morning, I punched the dough down, cut it up into pieces, gave it a second rise and then cooked them in the frying pan. While they were cooking I fried up some bacon, scrambled some eggs and bingo: perfect sunday breakfast.
Maps, Geocoding and Great Timing
On one of the sites I’ve been working on for quite a while (SchoolSeek) we’ve been wanting to add the ability for users to find out how far a school is from their current location. There are services that have been able to geocode addresses for a while, but they were either based in the US, or cost money. Not a lot of money, but free is always good.
A couple of years ago, Google Maps launched in the US and opened up a massive range of possibilities for programmers to develop cool “mashups”, which took information from one site, mashed it together with maps from google, and created a whole new website. They were all really cool, but unfortunately (at least for the non-US based of us) it was nothing more than something we could sit back and watch - which was kind of weird because the team of developers that built Google Maps was based in Sydney.
But finally the Australian version of google maps was released, and then recently integrated with Local Search, which means you can search on Pizza shotps near a particular address. Which is cool.
What is even cooler (if you’re a ruby developer), though, is the release of this: GeoKit. It integrates with all of the major geocoding/mapping services and provides a huge range of options and services. So now you can do stuff like this:
add_1=GeoKit::Geocoders::GoogleGeocoder.geocode("1 St Georges Terrace, Perth, Western Australia")
add_2=GeoKit::Geocoders::GoogleGeocoder.geocode("1 York St, Albany, Western Australia")
distance = add_1.distance_from(add_2, :units => :kms)
Which returns
@ 389.248018478531 @
which is, of course, how far it is between the main streets of Perth and Albany in Western Australia.
Sawwweeeeeet.
Update
Well, that didn’t take long at all. A quick loop over the existing schools in the SchoolSeek database got the lat/long information for all the addresses. Then adding this line
acts_as_mappable default_units => :kms
to my Address model allows you to do this
@addresses = Address.find(:all, :origin => "18 Bland St, Ashfield, New South Wales", :conditions => "distance < 10")
which gives me all of the addresses within 10Kms of 18 Bland St, Ashfield. Nice.
So, basically GeoKit let me add distance searching to the site within about 45 minutes (allowing 25 minutes for me to read through the examples and such!)
Mechanical Turks
Recently, a computer scientist called Jim Gray went missing off the coast of the US. A search was mounted, but nothing found. Then amazon stepped in, utilising a new satellite image and their “Mechanical Turk”http://www.mturk.com/mturk/welcome (basically a brute force computer program that uses real people doing mindless tasks for small amounts of money).
Via TechCrunch
Children of Men
9/10
Not sure what to say about this. A great film, but it’s still being processed in my head. Fantastic.