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Yahoo! Open Hack South East Asia 2009 results

At last!

In case you didn’t know, Yahoo! just had its first Open Hack Day in South East Asia 2 days ago (Nov 21-22). The place? Balai Kartini, Jakarta, Indonesia. It consisted of two main events: The Tech Talks (Nov 21st 9:30 - 16:00) and the Open Hack itself (Nov 21 13:00 - Nov 22 13:00).

Nothing much to say on Tech Talks except, the speakers from both Yahoo! and Koprol (Koprol is a fast-growing Indonesian startup company and also Yahoo!’s highlight at the event) were giving talks on various topics (Yahoo! services and APIs mainly). There’s Jon on YAP and YOS, Shreeni on YQL, Angela on YUI, and Alfred on Mobile Blueprint.

Some of the slides from Tech Talks are available here:
YAP and YOS: http://www.slideshare.net/jcleblanc
YUI: http://whimsical.nu/hack/yui-slides.pdf

November 21st, at 13:00 sharp, the 24hours countdown timers are set and participants are away with their own business. After a long session of discussion, countless keyboard taps, hours on top of bean bags (which is nice), overflowing snacks and candies and chocolates, midnight “Jamaican Cafe” acapella band performance (great people), souvenirs giving, keyboard taps (again), some frustation tweets (server is not curl-enabled??? FUUUU-), bottles after bottles of RedBull (FTW!), and the terrifying presentation session (in which I messed up), — the judges are ready break the news.

Open Hack Day results

Listed here is the hack categories and the winner from each:

Honorable mentions went to: Rendevoo by Yahuud and Mobile Health Surveillance by iTeam

Hacker’s choice award: ChatPlus
ChatPlus is a multi-function chat application. It was developed by a one-man team (Kristiono Setyadi) and was the first to present.
Here is the demo link: http://ohd2009.kristiono-setyadi.net/

Best local hack: TwitterMania
An analytic-style app presenting various Indonesia-specific data from twitter (popular topics/users etc). It was also developed by a one-man team (Jimmi Kembaren).
You could view it here: http://www.bacabaca.com/twittermania

Best mash-up hack: What’s On Today? (that’s us!)
‘Us’ is me and @rizkysyazuli. About the app, I’ll just put the description we had entered into the app-registration page here: “What’s on Today? shows you events and movies that are happening today, at your city - and what others are saying about them. It is also a Twitter client with a tweet-translation feature. It is built on Yahoo! tools and services like YQL, YUI, Upcoming, Geo and OAuth and external contents from Twitter and 21Cineplex movie site.”
Here is the link to it: http://www.airslash.net/x_neon

Best productivity hack: OfficeKami
A map-heavy app created by Nazrul Kamaruddin. I didn’t really get what this is about, so here’s the description: “A Yahoo! mashup built on the YAP platform using YQL, Yahoo maps & Google Maps to extend OfficeKami.com website.”
Demo are here (although I’m pretty sure that you must use a GPS-enabled device to access this): http://openhacksea.redboot.net/officekami.php

Best social hack: PeopleBUZZ
It’s a Titanium-platform enabled Twitter-Youtube-Flickr Android app (and could be easily ported to another platform). Developers are Dominick Danao and Jon Danao, both from Philippines. They were demoing it via an Android-phone emulator at the presentation. This one is awesome. I’m serious.
Link to PeopleBUZZ is here: http://grab.ph/ydn/peoplebuzz.apk .

Best overall hack: ChatPlus
And the most prestigious title goes to ChatPlus. Congrats.

Want to see what the others had made? All of the hacks are listed here: http://developer.yahoo.com/hacku/show/2009/nov/openhacksea

Useful links:
Workspace:  http://openhack2009sea.pbworks.com/
Photos: http://www.flickr.com/search/?w=all&q=openhacksea&m=tags

Posted 24 November 2009 † airslash § Uncategorized ‡ Comments (0) °

This blog is not dead (yet)

Contrary to the popular belief (ha!), this blog (and me) is not dead (yet). Works and constant distractions (and the lack of writing materials) have made this blog stagnant and I’m not proud of it.

I’ve been wanting to put more codes/tutorials here to compensate for the scarcity of posts but currently have no idea on the topics. (not to mention that I have to overcome embarrassment of posting my own code first) So yeah, might be best to see for ourselves later.

Oh, and, I’m looking forward for the Yahoo! event (OpenHackDay — there is a sign-up link here if you are also interested) that will be held on 21st-22nd November (damn, that’s next week). Gotta study hard.

Posted 16 November 2009 † airslash § Uncategorized ‡ Comments (0) °

Alright…

A: Hey, the codes I got from the web don’t work. Could you check them out for me?

B: (stops typing) Okay, where?

A: Here.

B: Where’s the error at?

A: Dunno, it just don’t work.

B: … Where did you got this from?

A: Wait a sec… Here’s the URL.

B: (opens page) Hm.. Okay, here’s the explanation of it: (read aloud) .. is that what you need?

A: Hmmmmm.. not really.

B: Then why did you use it?

A: Hm.. I don’t know.

B: …

Posted 11 October 2009 † airslash § rant ‡ Comments (1) °

On blogging

If I have to name two out of a gazillion of a blogger’s worst enemies, it would be, 1) crappy internet connection, and 2) Spam.

Okay, I’m not exactly a blogger, seeing how I abandoned my own blog like this (geez, months of no updates). Let’s just assume I am a (borderline) blogger, for the sake of simplicity.

So, how does a crappy internet connection harm you then? Well, if you are like me, and you care for everything that comes out from your keyboard, you’d clog your tube (read: use the internet extensively), for research and the wellness of your post (even if you are sure that most of them will end up in the Drafts section anyway, uncompleted, or just stopped being an interesting topic anymore).

Research.

Let’s say that you are writing about the ways a baseball cap would make you look cool in every occasion, you would want to search for images of those aforementioned caps to put in your post. Maybe one or more images of people actually using them and looks cool. In a situation like this, a crappy internet connection would surely put your anger to the same level with Jack Bauer.

Cap fail

Cap fail

from http://www.flickr.com/photos/benkimball1/3862934209/

Additionally, you’d want your post to be enjoyable to read too. The experts have said that you should have valid opinions and a correct and readable writing, in order to succeed at your endeavors in getting your points accross. That’s where the browsing on the web comes in. Fact-finding. Read about it beforehand to know what you are talking about. Arrange your points so that they are easy to understand.

Questions like, “Is this true?”, “What about that?”, “Could they understand?” are some of the questions you have to constantly ask yourself, whenever you feel like telling someone something.

…

Okay, I’ll admit it, it’s damn hard to write a good post. Heck, even this post are not remotely useful. There are little facts in here, not to mention the ultra-subjective sentences and opinions that are coming from the unicorn’s land. But at least, yes, at least, try to use your language right. Try to check for typos and the meaning of words and the correct way to use them in a sentence before publishing it. Wear a helmet before presenting yourself to a skyscraper construction site.

All of this, off course, have the drawback of throwing you further from ever posting a single article on the web. Every now and later you should not think too far and just post whatever crap you are writing, regardless of amount of time you spent preparing it, just for the sake of getting something up. The writers call this a “Writer’s block”, and a good way to overcome it is to “stop thinking and start writing”. The same thing applies to artists, software engineers, and many more professions as well.

Enough of that, let’s move on to spam. It comes with publishing your blog to the web, just like Nunu following after the Teletubbies, to clean up every mess they might have made, but instead of cleaning, the spam comments are littering your blog.

I’ve found that spam comments are getting more and more creative than usual. They usually stuff their comments with links and words regarding money and stuff enlargement etc. until Akismet sniped out every one of them. But now, even you (a human, right?) will have a hard time distinguishing which one is a real comment from a reader (yay!) and which are from faceless spambots. One of my favorite was:

“Hi, this is a good post. But I think that you are missing out something. See my response here: http://www.a-seemingly-innocent-url-that-you-will-possibly-click.org”. Alex from the neighboring site has his own problem with this kind of spam. Good luck with that, Alex.

Currently I don’t have any problem with spam on this blog here. I’m thinking maybe:
1. Because of my uncommon choice of URL. I decided to follow xkcd’s style here, being the uncreative stooge that I am. I assume that most of the spambots targets domain.tld/blog/ or blog.domain.tld/
2. Because of the highly unusual amount of traffic. (Yes, it’s that low)
Anyway, here I am, throwing out assumptions again after I’ve talk about the importance of research.

Posted 11 October 2009 † airslash § personal § rant ‡ Comments (2) °

What did I do?

“So, what do you do?”

That, dear good reader. is somewhat an obligatory question whenever a person is chatting with his/her long-time-no-see friend.

When I am asked that by people, my usual reply is:

“I work as a programmer, or to be specific, web developer.”

“Oh, so you are a web developer?  Where is it?” usually follows after that. But, for non web-workers, which 90% of my friends or family are, that will pretty much threw them off a great distance, leaving only blank faces and mouths saying, “What is that?”.

Okay, so, that, apparently, is not helpful and nothing but a waste of breath. Being driven by the mindset to keep things practical (and being a lazy that I am), I decided that I should came up with something.. that is easier to understand.

“So, I make websites.”
Sums it up pretty good. Most of them understand now, that I make “websites”, those pages with text and images filling up their screen when they surfed the Web. The problem comes after this, which is to make them understand, that I didn’t actually do the design and is just focusing on the development side. Which is the engines, or the stuff under the hood, or the kitchen, or the electricity and plumbing system or whatever. Chances are slim that I have to go into great length to explain about the details, since most of them didn’t ask, or it probably didn’t even cross their mind.

There are still some, albeit very small, number of people that has never heard about a website (probably know but didn’t familiar with the term?), so most of the response to this are, “Oh, I see.” or “Wow”, which is nice, because it means that they’ve got it.

Along the line of this, I’ve heard something as disconcerting as, “So, you kind of, created the Facebook and Wikipedia? Awesome.” once. That’s like saying to a police, “So, after enhancing their images from the surveillance camera, you locate and use those cool auto-rifles to shoot the bad guys, eh? Awesome”.

“I work in front of a computer”
Correct, because I work in front of a monitor all day. But then so are graphic designers, copywriters, illustrators, animators, cashiers, secretaries. This often ends up with them asking more about the details and me switching to another response. Easy to understand, but still impractical (the vagueness).

“I write web applications and sometimes also server-side scripts to support Flash-based websites”
Bam. End of story. Change of topic ensues.

Posted 11 October 2009 † airslash § personal § programming § rant ‡ Comments (3) °

Cube cube cubing

I’ve picked up a new hobby recently. Yet another one with minimal muscles involvement. (sigh, I kept telling myself to go pick up a real sport (as in muscle activity) as a routine, but, oh well)

Scrambled Rubik's Cube

Rubik’s-friggin’-cube

Solving Rubik’s cube, or simply, cubing. And it got at least 5 popular categories, from the mostly known speedcubing, blind-folded solve (or BLD), one-handed solve (or OH), least-move solve, and feet-solving (basically solving a cube with your toes, aiming for speed).

I chose to speedcube, since it’s the easiest and I don’t really think that learning feet-solving is a great idea. (might be great to keep your friends at a distance, though)

For those who don’t know yet, the Rubik’s cube has about 43 quintillion combinations (that’s 43 with 18-zomg-zeroes), with only one correct combination (now that you’ve known how many combinations it has, feel free to correct those saying only billions, or even millions). Despite the number, every combinations is actually solvable with a maximum of 22 moves. (correct me ?)

I first learned to cube-solve from an article in wikiBooks. The beginner method, they called it, took me about 4 days (in between works ftw) to learn the notations and to memorize the steps. Back then my time was about 5 - 10 minutes iirc.

If you are a beginner and is looking forward for a fast and effective way to master this, don’t follow the previous link. Go to Erik’s site instead (Erik Akkersdijk is one of the world’s best when it comes to speedcube). Erik, if you are reading this, I thank you for your lessons.

Long story short, I bought one of the original 3×3 Rubik’s from a local distributor (it comes pre-lubed with a measy one dollar additonal fee!). I’m now at 60 seconds, give or take 5, and is constantly (cough) practicing fingertricks to get into 30-40s range. Wish me luck.

(By the way, I heard that practicing speedcube would supposedly increase my guitar picking speed. I hope it’s true)

Posted 20 July 2009 † airslash § personal ‡ Comments (5) °

Poof!

.. and just like that, May was over and we’re all on June, the middle of 2009. When did that happen ?

Posted 10 June 2009 † airslash § Uncategorized ‡ Comments (1) °

Implementing the Konami codes

Found this on Reddit comments while reading about Facebook implementing the code on their pages. (heh)

Here’s how to do this.


konami = function()
{
	alert('konami');
};
var r = [];
document.onkeydown = function(event)
{
	r.push(event.keyCode);
	if (r.length > 11)
		r.shift();
	if (r.join('') == '3838404037393739666513')
		konami();
};

Demo here.

Konamicodesites.com has a list of the websites implementing the Konami codes.

Posted 09 May 2009 † airslash § code ‡ Comments (1) °

Yahoo’s 34 Rules for Speeding Up Websites

If you are a web developer or one of the people that actually care about your website(s) performance, and looking for ways to improve it, then Yahoo’s Best Practices for Speeding Up Your Web Site is definitely a must-read. If you are not, feel free to skip this post.

Yahoo has put up quite a research into this field and has compiled the 34 rules for your convenience. Separated into 7 categories : Content, Server, Cookie, CSS, Javascript, Images, and Mobile, some are just general stuff, such as: don’t scale your image, minify your javascript files, blah blah, but some are good to know, such as: implementing “Never expire” policy by setting a far future ‘Expires’ header, putting scripts at the bottom (never knew that it would make a difference), configuring ETags (wtf are ETags ?), and so on.

It’s been on the web for quite some time now, I wonder how I could missed this one. So, what are you waiting for ? Click the link. Go. Now. Scram! (be sure to come back here later though)

Oh, and, for you Firefox + Firebug users, there’s an add-on from Yahoo to scan for those points on any webpages and grade them accordingly, it’s called YSlow (lame name IMO, sorry Yahoo). Neat stuff. I mean, NEAT. I sure wish that I’ve known about this a long time ago. I’m bonking my head to the wall now, in deep regret. (don’t worry, I’ll survive)

Posted 14 April 2009 † airslash § Uncategorized ‡ Comments (0) °

When your web server is low on memory

I’ll list some of the common things that could happen when your standard web server (Apache PHP MySQL) is low on memory (based on personal experience) :

  • PHP throws a “Fatal Error : Out of memory (allocated x) (tried to allocate y bytes)”, where x is a large number and y is usually a very small number. This one is easy to spot. (well, duh)
  • If you are running PHP as a CGI program ,  ”CGI process exited before printing response header” error  occasionally will be shown instead of the error above. This happens more often when I tried to access phpmyadmin. (probably because phpmyadmin used up way more resource than your average webpage)
  • Your script quits unexpectedly. This could happens sometimes and especially hard to track, since you’d usually thought that there was an error at your script (which is not the case). Most of the times, the script quits when it tries to execute a database query.
  • MySQL starts throwing “Error 12″, which means that the system refuses to give more memory to the storage engine (apparently because there was nothing left to give). In most case, this is the reason behind the quitting script above.
The points and arguments listed above might or might not be accurate, though, since I’m in no way an expert either, but I sure hope that someone somewhere could benefit from this. Have a good weekend.
Posted 04 April 2009 † airslash § web development ‡ Comments (1) °