NickStallman.net

We’ve recently been provided with some really high aerial photography of various places such as Armidale, Batemans Bay, Broulee, Forster and Narooma.

It goes down from 10 to 6 cm resolution on the ground which is 8x better than Google’s satellite imagery in those areas.

It chews up over 100gig at the moment and more areas are being flown. Had to drive a portable hard drive of data to the data center to move it all. When you can very clearly see individual wires on a power line you know its good footage.

PropertyNow Real Estate has just recently opened its doors to agents and its done so in a big way. A very large number of agents have already signed up and more are coming.

So much so, Google has taken a interest. Googlebot has been frantically crawling the past couple of days, and the Crawl Rate settings have changed as well. Usually you cant ask Googlebot to go any faster than 0.5 requests/s  but it is now letting me select up to 1.25 requests/sec or 0.8 seconds between requests! I’ve never seen that behaviour before.

We’ll have to see if that is reflected by a improvement in the search results. Fingers crossed.

One of my latest projects has been a cool idea for Real Estate where you SMS a property id to a number, and it sends a text message back instantly with more details about the property.

PropertyText is the first one I’ve ever seen that automatically creates the text messages from property feeds. That makes it extremely easy to use and very fast.

The idea is the property id gets put on the real estate sign so if the sign doesnt have stuff like price and so on, you can easily find it out. The agent gets the enquiry in a control panel and can ring the enquirer back.

Well I need to redo a property handling system from scratch. Code to move properties from one site to another.
Not only does it need to do that, but it also needs to only send what has changed, and it needs to do it very quickly.

So that means I’ll need a complex forking PHP daemon, one master to set tasks and then some slaves to focus on specific types of property transmission (e.g. REAXML) and then some more slaves for just minor tasks which can be run in parallel. E.g. fetching images.
All the communication will be via Gearman. Its a lot easier that way because Gearman handles queuing and can also do priorities.

Most methods of moving properties around is just XML deltas where a element is only specified if it has changed. When a new property is made then the full data is sent. There are hacks to emulate that, but I will be going will a full history system where every single change is stored, and if required can be replayed.

The main thing I’m not looking forward to doing is working on the code which makes sure that all the separate slaves are still running.
It needs to be able to reset its self if anything goes wrong, and log errors. Not easy stuff.
I’ll probably create some kind of heatbeat system.