October 28, 2010

PinoyJUG November 3 Meetup


The Association of Filipino Java Developers (PinoyJUG) is now back on track again. PinoyJUG had "performance series" meetups before. It started with the February 27 meetup at Orange & Bronze Software Labs ("Introduction to JMeter" by Brian Tan Seng and "RMI Plugin for JMeter" by JM Ibanez). The second and the last was the April 27 meetup at the G2ix TechBar ("Profiling and Heap Analysis" by Franz See and "Client-Side Performance" by Alvin De Leon).

There will be another meetup on November 3 at 7 o'clock in the evening. The topics will be "Common Pitfalls Experienced in Java" by Julz Cutaran and "Dive Into Agile: What Your Scrum Master Didn't Tell You" by Mykol Mallete. It will be held at the G2ix TechBar (5th Floor Orient Square Bldg. F. Ortigas Jr. Road, Ortigas Center, Pasig City).

To register for the meetup, sign-up at http://signappnow.com/sheet/HyAHWMZz.

October 22, 2010

Google Technologies I'm using


Aside from the search engine itself, Google has a wide array of products, services and technologies which are unknown to some people. However, these are easy to use, efficient, and free. Here are the Google technologies I am using and have used:

Being used always Being used sometimes Have tried using
Google (web search, image search)
Blogger
Gmail
Google App Engine (for Java)
Google Apps
Google Buzz
Google Calendar
Google Chrome
Google Docs
Google Groups
Google Maps
Google Reader
Google Talk
Goo.gl
Google Code
Google MapMaker
Google Translate
Picasa
YouTube
Android (SDK)
Go
Google Blog Search
Google Charts
Google Friend Connect
Google Gadgets
Google News
Google Realtime
Google Sites
Google Trends
Google Wave
Google Web Elements
Google Web Toolkit
iGoogle
OpenSocial

I'm quite sure this list remains incomplete. Also, there are still a lot of Google Technologies I'll be using soon. And Google might release new products or technologies in the coming days.

October 14, 2010

Blog Action Day 2010:Water


Blog Action Day is an annual event held every October 15 that unites the world's bloggers in posting about the same issue on the same day with the aim of sparking a global discussion and driving collective action. This year, the issue is Water. Below is the official video for the event:

Here are the ways on how to support Blog Action Day:

  • Register your blog and create a post about a water issue or issues. The site has some suggested ideas here.
  • Sign the petition to encourage UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon to continue the UN's life-saving work bringing water and sanitation to developing nations. The petition can also be embedded in your site by adding a petition widget from here.
  • Donate money through their fundraising efforts.

October 6, 2010

The Week in a Post (09/30-10/06)


Another week has passed. And as expected, I have been busy due to some factors I have been expecting. However, I do not want to keep this blog unattended. So, I planned to do weekly posts summarizing what happened in that seven days. This is the first post, covering September 30 to October 6, 2010.

Last September 30, I attended a Google Chrome event at Peoplen's Palace (Greenbelt 3). I didn't realized what the event was until I reached the venue. The place, the food and the drinks are all Google-themed. Much of what was said about Chrome were already familiar to me. What's new to me are the Google Chrome Extensions and Google Chrome Themes that were made by Filipinos.

My first Facebook app, Post This, attracted a few new users this week. Maybe it was because I had successfully added it in the Facebook Apps Gallery. I also got my first official feedback ("Looks cool.") this day. Well, I never really have any goals (like having a certain number of users) for this app. It was just a personal project I am doing while studying the APIs of Facebook, Twitter and other sites. I feel happy that there are persons who try and use the app without me asking them to do so. (This excludes some few times when I ask a friend for feedback after she used the app and found some bugs/errors.) If they find the app useful, they can use it and if they don't like it, they can remove the app. I would also welcome feedback and suggestions.

I also have started in the new work assignment (new team, new project, new workplace). As of now, I still have a lot to learn and I am hoping to do it faster to be an asset to the team. Some other things that I did this week are creating an account in Delicious, and clarifying some matters about the open source project which I am about to make a customized implementation, hopefully.