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App Camp 2008

After last year's successful Facebook Developer Garage there were some requests for more technical sessions that covers the technologies used for developing applications on the Facebook platform. Now Mentez and Microsoft are arranging App Camp 2008 which is a more detailed event covering best practices, infrastructure and technology that can help you with your application development.

More info and RSVP links included below (space are limited so request an invitation soon!) :
 

"Mentez (www.mentez.com) is inviting developers in South Africa to join the App Camp 2008 events that will be hosting together with Microsoft in Johannesburg and Cape Town on January 15 and 17 respectively from 17:45 pm onwards at the Microsoft offices. These events will bring developers in South Africa together to share experiences and learn about social networking applications. We will present best practices, and the infrastructure and technology required to develop the best applications.

Speakers for the night include Juan Franco, CEO of Mentez coming from Miami; Jason Hoffman, CTO of Joyent, a company based in San Francisco that host more than 4,000 Facebook applications; Eben De Wit from Microsoft South Africa; Armand du Plessis from Agilisto South Africa, and Joey da Silva, an Online Business & Web Technology 'Fundi'. Tyler Reed from Younique South Africa will be leading a Q&A session with a panel of experts at the end of the event.
 
The final agenda is still to be confirmed and we will send details soon. As spaces are limited make sure you reserve yours now through the links below.
 
Johannesburg - http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=6343189089
Cape Town - http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=6962582950
 
This is an event organized by Mentez for developers in South Africa. If you have any problems requesting an invitiation please contact us at info@mentez.com.
 
About Mentez
 
MENTEZ’s primary objective is the promotion and development of successful internet applications, mainly geared towards social networks, with the potential to become tremendously popular and therefore economically valuable. Given the synergies and advantages, the main brainpower source of the company comes from developers and programmers in emerging regions and developing countries."

 

PS. If you are looking for reliable, scalable hosting for your Facebook application check out Joyent's offer for a year's free hosting on one of their accelerators.

Facebook Developer Garage - Johannesburg

The inaugural Facebook Developer Garage Johannesburg Meetup is happening tomorrow (2007/11/15) at the Internet Solutions Chill Room at The Dimension Data Campus in Bryanston, Johannesburg.
It's an opportunity to connect with developers in and around Johannesburg and discuss, share and extend your knowledge on designing, developing and marketing Facebook services and apps.

There is some great speakers confirmed for the event :

Tyler Reed (Younique)
Grant Fleming (Fontera)
Juan Roldan (Mentez)
Eben de Wit (Microsoft)
Guys from M-Net New Media

For directions to the venue check out the Facebook Event and to be keep informed of future Developer Garages in the Johannesburg Area you can sign-up for the Facebook Group.

[ Add To Calendar ]

ASP.NET MVC Framework

This would be very heartening news for anyone dreading the prospect of having to back to ASP.NET Webforms after working with RoR or MonoRail.

Scott Guthrie's team is working on a proper MVC Framework for ASP.NET. Some of the goals of the framework (lifted straight from Jeffrey Palermo's blog) includes :

• Natively support TDD model for controllers.
•  Provide ASPX (without viewstate or postbacks) as a view engine
• Provide a hook for other view engines from MonoRail, etc.
• Support IoC containers for controller creation and DI on the controllers
• Provide complete control over URLs and navigation
• Be pluggable throughout
• Separation of concerns
• Integrate nicely within ASP.NET
• Support static as well as dynamic languages

After seeing the last point I had a quick look at what is included in the current ASP.NET Futures download and I see support for hosting the DLR is already there. At the moment it's limited to IronPython and Managed JScript but when IronRuby support is added and combined with the ASP.NET MVC framework hopefully it wouldn't be long before there's a full Rails like stack available for .NET.

With support for the MonoRail Views engines etc planned already this will be a good time for creating a dynamic ActiveRecord implementation for .NET, it will fit in nicely with MonoRail and I can certainly do without all the typing of mundane domain model code.

Looking forward to the CTP.

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High Scalability Architectures

Got sent an interesting link to http://highscalability.com yesterday. It's worth checking out if you are interested in the design decisions and general approach taken by some of the really high-traffic sites on the web. Some examples:

• Amazon Architecture
• Digg Architecture
• YouTube Architecture
• Flickr
• Scaling Twitter

While I'm all for innovative non-monetary ways of rewarding outstanding performance, like Scott's "Thanks a Bunch Cabinet" I'm not sure how I'll react to Amazon's approach to rewarding exceptional work:

Don't pay for performance. Give good perks and high pay, but keep it flat. Recognize exceptional work in other ways. Merit pay sounds good but is almost impossible to do fairly in large organizations. Use non-monetary awards, like an old shoe. It's a way of saying thank you, somebody cared.

Ye see that barnacle-covered Nike sneaker bin got here, that's fer launchin' Amazon Flexible Payment Services. Aarrr! (Posted on this day)

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IRB Rugby World Cup Calendar

Found this useful iCal export with all the IRB Rugby World Cup Fixtures. The calendar is updated with results as the fixtures are played out.

Now you can safely schedule meetings without worrying about RWC clashes.

[iCal Link]

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Official Support for Moonlight

Yesterday Microsoft released to the Web Silverlight but in the same press release announced support for Mono's Moonlight project as the official Silverlight implementation on Linux.

This shows quite a significant commitment from Microsoft to really make Silverlight a true cross platform solution and the biggest official support for an open source project to date. It's also a very promising sign to see Microsoft choosing to partner with Novell/Mono on realising their vision of a true cross-platform, cross-browser browser plug-in for delivering richer user experiences on the web instead of providing their own implementation. This is certainly a big boost for the Mono Project who has put significant effort into the Moonlight implementation over the past couple of months.

Now developers can develop Silverlight content with the assurance that their content will run with official support on Windows, Mac and now Linux.

For some examples of Silverlight in action see this post by Scott Guthrie, in particular Jose Fajardo's iTunes implementation series of posts.

[Update:See Miguel de Icaza's announcement for more information] 

[via Scott Cate on Twitter]

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Visual 2008 / C# 1.1 Compiler

It happens. Some of us have to do it. In this modern age taint the Visual Studio 2008 IDE by having to compile .NET 1.1 C# code.

As this is pretty much a quick once-off thing I didn't go to the full extend of creating 1.1 project templates like back when Visual Studio 2005 was released.

Instead here you'll find a small msbuild targets file that will allow you to compile a .NET 1.1 assembly (C#) from Visual Studio 2008. (The old project templates might still work though as the format didn't change)

1) To use create a Class Library project from Visual Studio 2008 as usual.

2) Open the project file in your favourite text editor and find the line below:

   1:  <Import Project="$(MSBuildBinPath)\Microsoft.CSharp.targets" />

3) Replace with:

   1:  <Import Project="everett.targets" />

Making sure that Everett.targets is in the same directory as your project file otherwise include the path in the import above.

After reopening the project you should see .NET 1.1 listed as a new platform option in the Configuration Manager. Selecting this will use the retro compiler and class base class libraries.

[Download]

Paterva Evolution

I'm usually a little skeptical presentations about internet security. Not because it doesn't concern me but typically these talks revolve around not handing out your credit card details to strangers, avoiding lengthy email exchanges with foreigners who claim to be keeping millions for you and in general just the same common sense warnings your typical internet user gets bombarded with.

However Monday evening's 27Dinner, the first in Pretoria, was a completely different kettle of fish and very unlike the boring security talks we typically see. Below the short blurb cut from the 27Dinner site...

Roelof Temmingh - Attacking and Defending your privacy on today's internet.

Born in South Africa, Roelof studied at the University of Pretoria and completed his Electronic Engineering degree in 1995. His passion for computer security had by then caught up with him and manifested itself in various forms. He worked as developer, and later system architect at an information security engineering firm from 1995 to 2000. Early in 2000 he started the security assessment and consulting firm SensePost along with some of the leading thinkers in the field. During his time at SensePost he was the Technical Director in charge of the assessment team and later headed the Innovation Centre for the company. Roelof spoke at various international conferences such as Blackhat, Defcon, RSA, Ruxcon, Hack-in-the-box and FIRST (2003). He also contributed to books such as “Stealing the network: How to own a continent”, “Penetration Tester's Open Source Toolkit” and was one of the lead trainers in the “Hacking by Numbers” training course. Roelof also authored several well known security testing applications like Wikto, Crowbar, BiDiBLAH and Suru. At the start of 2007 Roelof founded Paterva in order to pursue R&D in his own capacity. Paterva will be a vehicle for exploring a new train of thought in the information security industry.

Instead of focusing on statistics and theory Roelof's talk used actual examples from the crowd visually represented in Evolution to demonstrate just how much information is available about someone on the internet. And unlike some of the people search engines like Spock etc the tool focused on a much much broader spectrum of information to build up a complete picture of what is available out there about you. The only information I found lacking was that it didn't pick up my favorite beer from coastr.com but I'm sure this was just an oversight in the current version.

There's been a lot of talk on the internet lately about social network portability and decentralized community owned social graphs generated from information publicly available about you. While we're all enjoying this openness and convenience that comes from being so socially inter-connected online there is also darker side to having all this information about you freely available. It makes social engineering and identity theft a whole lot simpler and the possibilities for this is very well illustrated with the Evolution tool.

In the example below starting with only my name, and limiting results to 5 per query, in a couple of minutes I was able to very quickly build up a visually where I work, my phone number, sites I'm involved with, email addresses and people I know and the connections (or transforms in Evolution) between all these entities. Someone interested in using this maliciously would very quickly be able to see that to get close to me, based on the 5 friends returned, their best bet would probably be to start with JP and work their way closer to me through him as that seems to be the strongest link in this small set.

I think most people are aware of the fact that a lot of information about them is publicly available on the internet but seeing this graphed visually helps form a much better picture about what exactly is out there that someone can potentially use to get closer to or spoof you or your company's identity.

The tool is available as a free download from the Paterva site and I would really recommend anyone looking to understand their current exposure download it or have a look at the web version.

There's also a very interesting article "Social Engineer Social Networking Services: A LinkedIn Example" on O'Reilly that is well worth a read.

Unified C# Language Specification

The Unified 3.0 C# Language Specification which combines the 1.1, 2.0 and 3.0 evolutions of the language into a single volume is available for download. This document covers every aspect of the C# language and apart from being free is also a better reference than any book you can buy. 

Here you will find the definitive technical description of the C# language in the words of the engineers who created it.  It is the single most authoritative reference for the C# language. [Link via Charlie Calvert]

This version of the specifications includes everything from the basic language constructs to more recent additions like partial methods and everything in between.

Direct download here or more information available on the C# Language page.  

Windows Live ID CardSpace Support

Finally you can sign-in to sites that support Windows Live ID i.e. any Microsoft site, using an Information Card. Hopefully after this kind of commitment from Microsoft we will start seeing more sites add support for Information Cards. Like OpenID it would only be really successful once there are enough consumer sites (or relying parties to be specific) that supports the technology.

The next step would be if Windows Live would become an Identity Provider and allow users to download Windows Live based Information Cards so we can start maintaining our identities in only a single location. Self-Issued cards is fine but ideally I'd like to maintain my profile in only one place, that place not being my own machine.

[Link via Christian Arnold]
 

As a side note, I plan to add Information Card support to Identitu.de (A small experiment in Facebook/OpenID integration) in early September which will allow you to download Information Cards backed by your Facebook profile.

Hitting the Rails

I'll be giving a talk about Ruby on Rails at the SADeveloper User Group on Wednesday 15th August 2007 at 18h30. We'll be covering what Rails is and then run through an application from "the napkin to the cloud". i.e. We'll be covering a full Rails application from design through to taking it live on Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) service. Hopefully in the process illustrating some of the productivity gains of putting your development on Rails.  

What is Rails? To borrow the definition from the official Ruby on Rails website - "Ruby on Rails is an open-source web framework that's optimized for programmer happiness and sustainable productivity. It lets you write beautiful code by favoring convention over configuration"

When: 15th August 2007 18:30 - 20:30
Venue: Torque IT, Rivonia (directions)
Topic: An introduction to Rails - Web development doesn't need to hurt :)

You can either RSVP by leaving a comment or on the thread over here. (I believe they'd prefer if the RSVPs go in the thread but if you're not a member just leave a comment on my blog)

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FeedBurner FreeBurner

FeedBurner users, which basically means almost the entire blogosphere, got a little bonus in their feed readers today after the recent acquisition of FeedBurner by Google. Two of its previously for-pay services is now completely free, TotalStats Pro and MyBrand.

If you head over to the Analyze tab under your FeedBurner Stats page on your FeedBurner account you can now enable the Pro services without getting charged. Nice one!

See the announcement on the FeedBurner blog for more details.

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Mobile.rb

The power of Ruby in the palm of your hand. It doesn't get much cornier than that but here is two projects to get some Ruby applications going on your Symbian or Windows Mobile 5 device...

• Ruby for Symbian OS
  • An official release from Symbian to accompany their "Runtime environments on Symbian OS" series. They've released the source code (based on Ruby 1.8.5) and will also be shipping basic libraries for Rendering, Messaging and Persistence to accompany the release in future.
  • It installed without a hitch on a test Nokia E61 but the functionality out-of-the-box is still a little limited at the moment.   
  • While this release only support S60 3rd Edition and UIQ 3rd Ed support for older devices is promised. (There is also this project on RubyForge which offers a basic Ruby interpreter for S60 3nd Edition. Not related to the Symbian release though)
• Ruby for Windows Mobile 5 (ruby-mswince)
  • This was the release I was looking for that originally prompted this post.  I found the above mentioned site and it looked promising as the last build was 2007.05.31 but unfortunately the site is in Japanese? so I apart from clearly being for WM5 with a recent release there's not much more to make out on the site.
  • Luckily Andry Huzain detailed the entire process of getting it running on your Windows Mobile 5 PPC on his blog over here.
  • It depends on getting a console running on your device so unfortunately that ruled out getting it running on my Samsung BlackJack. If someone knows of a command shell for WM5 SmartPhone please let me know.

At present it seems that the tasks you can accomplish with Ruby on mobile phones is still pretty trivial compared to the features available in the .NET CF or J2ME but with the evr growing popularity of Ruby I'm sure we'll soon see more Ruby with richer libraries on device as well.

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TwitterGram Web Service

The past couple of days I've been following Dave Winer's Twitters on his progress with Twittergram - In a nutshell it's to the micro-blogging service Twitter what podcasting is to blogging. A 140k post linked to a 200k audio clip. His PuppyGram use-case sample illustrates a possible usage scenario for these mini voice chunks.

Here's an example use-case. You're driving in your car and thinking of your dog at home, alone, missing you (and you missing your bud too of course). So you pick up the cell phone, speed dial the TwitterGram voice service (it doesn't exist yet) and say some reassuring words to your pal.

Now at home you have a special PuppyGram client running on your MacMini or AppleTV or somesuch. Your picture comes on the screen, and the computer barks three or four times to get the attention of your best friend. And then your little message comes on screen.

Okay, that's a trivial example, but Twitter is all about trivial examples. It's the stuff of no importance whatsoever that make us feel nice about being human.

The Twittergram service is up and running today and the docs with sample code needed to get started available on his blog here. And Paulo Fierro whipped up a Twit O'Gram player to keep track of the Twittograms posted to the twitogram user on twitter. How many t's can one use in one sentence...

Here's a quick and dirty Ruby sample to post a Twittergram from your desktop :

require "xmlrpc/client"

class Settings
  Username = "twitterusername"
  Password = "twitterpassword"
end

class TwitterGram
  def newPost(username, password, mp3, postToMyAct, metaData)
    server = XMLRPC::Client.new("rpc.twittergram.com", "/RPC2", 80)
    server.call('twittergram.newPost', username, password, mp3, postToMyAct, metaData)
  end
end

begin
  mp3 = File.read("twittergram.mp3")
  client = TwitterGram.new
  metaData = { :title => 'Twittergram Test'}
  result = client.newPost(Settings::Username, Settings::Password, mp3, true, metaData)
  puts result
rescue Exception => e
  puts "Error:"
  puts e
end

Other Links - TwitterGram Web Service - A simple API for posting short MP3s to Twitter.

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