Mockba Industries

Hmm, oliebollen!

Pablo Román — Thu, 20 Nov 2008 22:52:24 +0000

So, this has been my first experiment with the dutch cuisine. I decided to cook some typical oliebollen, the famous Christmas food here in The Netherlands. The weird thing is that the gift-giver character here is called Sint-Nicolaas (who comes from Spain, apparently), and he comes the 5th of December. So people start celebrating Christmas one month before than in Spain! And of course they have a lot of delicious sweets and desserts. Hm, I think I’m going to put on weight these months (even more).

The recipe is simple: Flour, eggs, milk, and some powdered sugar, so they are not much different from the Spanish churros or buñuelos! I guess my mom will be proud of me.

Lekker lekker! (I have to improve the rounded shape a bit, hehe)

Google implements reverse geocoding

Pablo Román — Sun, 26 Oct 2008 18:55:59 +0000

One of the main goals of the new version of Nulaz website, -which is going to be released very soon- is to provide a more user-friendly interface. Since we deal with a lot of geographical information, we thought that would be a good idea to link all our locations with their correspondent geographical addresses to make easier and provide different alternatives to find out where your friends or you favorite places are. We started to use a pretty shitty -and expensive- commercial API, so two weeks ago I started to toy with the sort of unofficial, custom-made javascript library. (http://nicogoeminne.googlepages.com/documentation.html). That method has a lot of fallbacks and it wasn’t easy at all to build a script that stores addresses in the database given lat/lng. The good part….well, it’s free, but I almost gave up trying to build something decent with that library.

Luckily, this friday just before the beers I found out that the great people behind the Google has released a new method on the Maps API that provides the same functionality as the geocode… but reverse!

http://googlegeodevelopers.blogspot.com/2008/10/geocoding-in-reverse.html

So after a quite busy weekend I spent most part of this rainy Sunday afternoon coding and translating our previous reverse-geocoding system to the goodness of Google. I really missed those silent, lonely coding sessions. Coming soon to your screen!

Choose Helvetica

Pablo Román — Sat, 18 Oct 2008 20:12:00 +0000

Choose Life. Choose a job. Choose a career. Choose a family. Choose a fucking big television, choose washing machines, cars, compact disc players and electrical tin openers. Choose good health, low cholesterol, and dental insurance. Choose fixed interest mortage repayments. Choose a starter home. Choose your friends. Choose leisurewear and matching luggage. Choose a three-piece suite on hire purchase in a range of fucking fabrics. Choose DIY and wondering who the fuck you are on a Sunday morning. Choose sitting on that couch watching mind-numbing, spirit-crushing game shows, stuffing fucking junk food into your mouth. Choose rotting away at the end of it all, pishing your last in a miserable home, nothing more than an embarrassment to the selfish, fucked up brats you spawned to replace yourself. Choose your future. Choose life.

But who would I want to do a thing like that?

I chose not to choose life: I chose something else. And the reasons? There are no reasons. Who need reasons when you’ve got Helvetica?

As seen in 50 Years of Helvetica.