Thank god for pills! I will be heading to Singapore again this Friday for Google’s OpenSocial hackathon. The venue will be at Google Singapore office starting from 1pm on Saturday till late. I’ll be staying again at Uncle Nava’s place (i promise that I will write something about this awesome bed & breakfast motel) and hit me up if you want to hangout afterhours for a drink or something.
I think I need to “go live” my other website, which mainly deals & talks about web solutions, open source & stuff like that. But since this is my personal site, oh what the hell.
Google App Engine is cool. Having your application live in the house of Google is way cooler. Should be a -5 degrees weather. Having downloaded the SDK & use it to build some “maybe interesting” apps, I decided to repackage it to a all-in-one ZIP file.
What’s in it? The application server, latest documentation, latest application samples & a script that I created to have a quick & dirty way to start the application server. It’s not perfect, but if you have any idea to make it better, feel free to check-it-out from the repository. If you don’t want to, you can submit a patch. I shall thank you with an ice cream treat. And the script only works for *nix systems. I hardly use windoze anymore, but maybe one day a VBScript version will surface, someday.
I’m still having some trouble to package it for Ubuntu, still learning the hard way. Never mind, I think I should be able to release a .deb package anytime soon.
I took a 12 hour train from Kuala Lumpur to Singapore. I was really excited coming for DevFest.
Arrived in Tanjong Pagar train station at about 8 in the morning. Groggy, sleepy & I smell like the train.
Decided to get a room in Little India. Went to the same backpackers hotel I stayed with One Buck Short for a show in Singapore. It’s called Nava’s Place, and Uncle Nava is a really cool guy. I took a picture with him but it didn’t turn out.
According to Uncle Nava, they closed the whole stretch in Little India for Deepavali celebration. I was 1 day too late.
Got myself to Singapore Management University which was only 10 minutes walk from Little India. Met Jason Costa from Google. Fadhil of JomCode is trying his best to persuade Jason to give him the shirt Jason was wearing. Can fit ah?
Cam-whoring with Arzumy of JomCode.
The registration line for the event. They used a Google Spreadsheet form for registration. Pretty neat, I must say. They could have used the manual “tick-my-name” way to speed things up.
The crowd in the conference hall.
Pamela Fox from Google Maps API. She’ll be coming to Kuala Lumpur for FOSS.my 2008 to present this weekend.
Arzumy & Malaysia’s first line of defense. I must say, Arzumy is a cam-whore, instantly setting a pose whenever the camera is pointed at him. Hahaha…
Patrick from the OpenSocial team. His daughter made the best explanation of what “social” really means. Pure innocent.
On the left side of Malaysia’s first line of defense. Okay, we just sat in the front row seats.
Man, I forgot his name. But he’s one the guys behind the Shindig project. No Perl version yet. Hmmm…
Update: His name is Bruno :) Thanks Pamela.
Break time. Food, munchies, drinks!
Jeff from Friendster.
The presenters & Googlers.
e27 dudes. They sure know how to hold an event. Thank you guys!
The only swag I got from the event. Sorry, no stickers guys. Do you notice something odd about this t-shirt?
Group photo! The Malaysian contigent.
My participation certificate now hangs on my wall of short-lived-fame. I need to get a new frame.
Overall, it was hell of an experience attending DevFest. 12-hour train, running around Changi airport like a dufuss, but DevFest made it all worthwhile. Although the hackathon never really did happen, but the talks & being able to converse directly with the people that created and pushed these technology really made me want to contribute more. You can checkout their APAC Developer blog for updates.
And one piece of advice, 30 minutes before your flight departure with AirAsia is considered late & the gates will close & they will sell your seat. So, come super early. Like 1 hour. Or more. And I was only 30 minutes “late”. Ungh.
Next week on Tuesday, me & 30 other developers, entrepreneurs & like minded people from Malaysia will be attending Google DevFest, organised by the great people of e27 Singapore group. The Malaysian team (sounds like a Pesta Bola Merdeka trip) is coordinated by the also great people of Entrepreneurs.my & they did a well good job getting the representatives coming together. Hopefully it will be fruitful trip.
I’ve already bought my train & flight tickets for the trip, so now, I need to prepare an idea or more or less an application for the hackathon. Hell, this is going to be my first time participating in a hackathon and I have no idea what I will be doing. But one thing for sure, I’m going to go there & learn from the Google OpenSocial engineers who have graciously made themselves fly to Singapore for the event. I hope to bring back some knowledge & also goodies!
Wish me luck :D
This definitely did not go unnoticed by me. The founders of Google, during their anticipated T-Mobile G1 phone launch, had to skate (“skate” is the correct word to use in a sentence when describing this action. Not “rollerblade“) to the venue because they were hold up in traffic or whatever they were working on.
Watch the video that shows a lil bit of rolling here & there by the Google founders.
Awesome. This will bring rollerblading to a different geek level. Hell, most of the best rollerbladers in the world are geeks like Jon Julio (super geek), Randy “Roadhouse” Spizer (super geek) and also Shane “The Mind” Coburn (his rollerblading revelations are by far, geeky). Other than our everyday job, working on geeky stuff, we do this on our rollerblades:
But, don’t roll because it’s cool. You definitely cannot withstand & endure the pain. Roll because you want to.
I love rolling.
Well actually, this is not a how to guide. It’s a story about how I discovered malicious & dangerous spam links appearing at the top of the list from a Google search result. The keyword for today is:
altoid tin ideas
Try it. Fire up your browser, go to Google.com and type in, “altoid tin ideas” in the search box.
Wait for it, wait for it. Zing! You got results! Your results should look like this:
This was the results that I got. Hmmm...
I’m not sure if you get the same kind of results, but this was mine. Now, let’s click on a few top results.
Nasty malware site!
TADAAA! Nice huh?
DO NOT INSTALL!
Nasty nasty ActiveX!
Don't even think about it. Seriously.
Now I got your attention right? Hehehe, you dirty fellas.
Now, a Google board game. Next, we will start having summer olympics between startups: 1Terabyte Race from Kathmandu to Kilimanjaro. You can download the Googolopoly PDF file and start printing these babies out.
I just wish they had make the Monopoly dude to look like Sergey Brin, Steve Jobs or maybe Bill Gates. More relevant character.
Via Box.net company blog.