Spent some time ;ast weekend and built a simple facebook app; di mana anda?

The goal:

• user visits page, and fill in address, when (s)he'll be there,
• user shares with friends
• friends can therefore keep track when user will be where.

Confused enough? Go try it out.

App was built with google app engine and facebook's python client.

Got an email from google saying my application for appinventor was approved.

After a while, there were some stumbling blocks and I failed to connect the phone to appinventor. Tough luck.

So, back to real android coding. I've setup my android development with eclipse(aptana) and ADT. The docs at developer.android.com helped a lot.

I first tried android dev some time back. Lack of time and sheer laziness made me forget. So, I restarted with the tutorial at developers.android.com and after a while I started toying with WebView.

In a sense, I cheated a bit. I have already developed a simple site with jqtouch. What I did was encapsulate that in a native android package by using WebView.

Smart eh? Not!

At least it's a start. Will find some time to do more with native code, rather than "cheat" by using jqtouch :)

So, here it is. If you have bar scanner installed check out the qr code.

Else, get it

What it does, get the latest news and a few other sections in Berita Harian.

Attended Google Devfest KL. It was a blast.

That I can attest. The atmosphere was different compared to other conferences I had attended. Although initially things look like it will be the same as other confrferences I had attended in KL.

The crowd was better, more responsive and active; apart from the regulars ;)

The sessions was what I expected; technical enough with real world demos. The internet connectivity was bad though. Although that's to be expected when 400+ accessed the net too. It'd be better to have separate net access for speakers.

The t shirt is cool. Don't envy me eh :)

The #devfest twitter stream was active too. Though if the speakers took questions from twitter, even better!

Some of us are shy one.

And I wondered why no buzz for devfest. I guessed many in the crowd are still not sure where buzz fits. Count me as one.

I have buzz accounts, but seldom updates or interacts or follows others.

@timothyjordan said buzz is where he shares thoughts and ideas. Buzz competes in the same space as twitter, methinks, but not limited to 140 characters. And buzz has more too, multimedia, mentions, etc.

All in all great job by @nazroll and crew. Thanks a bunch and hope there'll be more coming to KL

MOSC 2010 started today. There were a lot of interesting sessions. However, it looked like this years crowd is much smaller compared to last year.

And from the schedule, the cloud is the theme for this years conference.

Some good:

• great sessions: meant for the beginners up till intermediate
• there were lectures, and there were some dev sessions
• after conference sessions are the highlight - ubuntu jam, codeandroid, to name a few
• good food, although a bit late today. no break food, only lunch
• good to see friends old and new; some I still need to meet
• twitter really is buzzing; maybe because of the ps3. but taking only quantity into consideration might not be a good idea. look at substance too? but that would make it harder to judge.

Some improvements:

• registration could be better; categorizing/alphabetizing would've made it smoother
• schedule ran off
• much smaller crowd
• lucky draw - 1 per day?
• biz users get the same as others - and we pay more? i know, i know, but at least add the t shirt?
• no python.my :( guys, so busy ah?

We'll see tomorrow. Looking forward to codeandroid and @ditesh's talk

It's been close to three months since i changed to HTC Legend from nokia S60 phone.

here's my take.

Physically, HTC Legend is very attractive. I really like the aluminum unibody. Classy, indeed.

It fits nicely in my hand. There are a few physical buttons that line up at the bottom and by the side.

I seldom use the optical track since most touching is much easier.

One thing that's not particularly nice is the phone edge may hurt my ears if I pressed too hard while making a call.

Android is a new experience to me. I really like it. In fact i <3 it.

Hope to do some app once I brushed up on my Java.

Now, there are a lot of free apps in the android market. No paid market, though.

Here's a list of my must have android apps::

• ConnectBot to connect to any accessible ssh hosts
• FeedSquare an rss reader that ties to google reader
• twicca/toutier twitter client. Still undecided between the two clients
• Dolphin HD2 a web browser, fast enough with gestures
• where's my droid for when I forgot where my droid is
• speedtest just to test bandwidth
• timeriffic to enable profiles according to time
• meebo + nimbuz for chats+skype
• iquran
• vuvuzela for worldcup
• gtasks for tasks that sync with google tasks
• BarcodeScanner for scanning qr codes for now
• ASE for scripting in android (python!)
• appmonster + appsaver

and of course all the google apps that tie in nicely.

Having android really make me appreciate and manage time and tasks.

One plus, I changed from Digi 20 to Digi smart plan. I get unlimited data for RM 68 monthly.

The good thing was I had to pay around RM200 previously. Now I pay less, RM 130 or less. Which is good.

Do you have your favorite apps? Or good/bad experience with HTC Legend?

Decided to continue my grok journey by continuing on what i did previously with grok 1.0b4.

The grok site makes use of youtube api services via gdata.

Since this was built quite some time ago, it was using gdata-2.0.0.

Decided to upgrade grok to v1.1 and gdata to 2.0.10. That's when the fun started.

Once grok and gdata was upgraded, we kept getting errors. Kept getting elementtree tracebacks. A sprinkling of print statements in service.py (from gdata) help determine that in fact the google home page was returned, not the targeted youtube feed.

That's why elementtree threw fits with SyntaxError line col 0 since it's not a xml document.

Downgraded gdata to the v2.0.0 and stuff worked again. Dang. Upgraded to v2.0.9, and stuff still works.

And I spent a few hours on this since I upgraded both grok and gdata.

Lesson learned.

Here's my simple test script for a working gdata:

  import gdata.youtube
  import gdata.youtube.service
  yt_service = gdata.youtube.service.YouTubeService()
  print  yt_service.GetYouTubeVideoFeed('http://gdata.youtube.com/feeds/api/users/kedai/uploads')