Despite my previous recommendation post about how to publish a blog for free, and due all the inconveniences, lost data, lots of server downtimes, this time I payed a decent hosting.

Yeah, reliability is not for free, at least in hosting solutions.

till next posts pals!

L.-

First, create a game concept…

The game is about a dude that sends Cvs to consulting firms. Will earn point only if he sends the CV to Snoop Consulting (the place I work). If the CV reaches any other firm (logo), he will loose money.  Gets extra point if he catches any technology partners that are thrown by Snoop .

Here is a simple diagram, that sketches the concept.

From the concept to the basics!

Ok, now that we have an idea, lets deliver!

I’ve chosen flash as the platform, and flixel as the framework.

• What is flash??… shame on you if you dont know.
• What is flixel??… is a game engine framework that easily alows you to create flash 80´s arcade-like games.  ( www.flixel.org )

Cooking code …

I used Flash Builder 4 as the IDE to create the game. To start I took a sample from flixel, to see how a game looks like. This is a very good place to start, even more, if this is your first game venture. Since my concept, was a space-invaders like game, I use that one to kick start my project.

Remember, to add flixel source code to your project!

You can check the code in my google code project, here…

http://code.google.com/p/cvs-invaders/

….Tada!! (the finished product)

After a few hours cooking code and images (this is probably the most time-consuming part), the result is this…

Hello!, today I am going to be presenting a new small project called foursquared-desktop-api about an API that lets you interact with FourSquare.com . This project that takes advantage the work made by the authors of  foursquared , an excelent opensouce mobile app, originally made for android. I decided to release a Java version since I could not find anything like this arond.

Some of the best features are…

• Complete class model of foursquare objects and messages.
• Json parsers for all the messages.
• Version #1 of the api is supported.
• It identifies as a mobile app (by default)
• Nice and clean coding.
• Able to use both Http and Oauth.

Project Summary:

• URL: http://code.google.com/p/foursquared-desktop-api/
• JAR File : http://code.google.com/p/foursquared-desktop-api/downloads/detail?name=foursquared-desktop-api.jar&can=2&q=#makechanges

That’s all folks by now! Next time I probably will be introducing some of the work I am doing with this API.

Thanks for reading and feel free to send me any comments. Below I pasted a short Junit (sample code) with basic usage of this api.

Sample Usage :

Resumiendo las recomendacioes son …

Cuando hace algunas semanas recibí el aviso de que en pocos días más debería renovar el contrato por el servicio de hosting, en un principio y sin pensarlo demasiado en renovar directamente por otro año más con www.dattatec.com.ar .  Aunque las necesidades tecnológicas del sitio actual son reducidas  un amigo comentó acerca de otros proveedores que podrían ofrecer esto de modo gratuito.

Precios Dattatec

Si bien el servicio de dattatec es bastante bueno, tengo sí un argumento bastante fuerte para dar de baja el servicio que es, que aumentan los precios anualmente alrededor de 25% . El primer año cotraté por cerca de 80$ (27 U$S) , el segundo a $120 (34 U$S), y este costaría cerca de $180 (45 U$S).

Nuestras necesidades actuales son…

• Hosting con 100mb de disco.
• Acceso a una db de mysql
• 6gb transferencia mensual.
• 2o cuentas de email.
• FTP

Servicio de Hosting

Ante esto comencé a evaluar que alternativas existian en el mercado de free hosting en internet. Luego de hacer un test de velocidad y comparar features la lista de candidatos se redujo entre estos dos.

• www.awadspace.com
• www.freehostia.com

La verdad como la oferta es similar, me decidí por el primero ya que contaba con más referencias directas, aunque el segundo según comentarios parece ser tan recomendable como el primero (awardspace).

Una limitación menor que apareció fue la de no poder subir archivos comprimidos (zip, tars, etc), pero como no los uso no tiene demasiado impacto, y de necesitarlos podría utilizar rapidshare o alguno similar.

Servicio de DNS

Entre los reisgos que evalué, el que más me importaba mitigar era el de uptime del los servicios, especialmente el de email. Luego de investigar que se podía hacer al respecto, descubrí el servicio de DNSs gratuitos de www.zonedit.com .

En resumen lo que permite hacer este servicio es manejar la asociación de un nombre de dominio (en nuestro caso lemil.com.ar) con el proveedor de hosting (a través de su IP) . Además te permite configurar a distintos proveedores por cada uno de estos servicios, algo que resultó muy util para el email y algunos otros labs que estaba trabajando.

Servicio de Email

En cuanto al email, adherí a la suscripción de Google Apps Standard (versióon gratuita). Este servicio provisto por Google  ofrece una versión customizada de Gmail para tu sitio, además de otras talk, docs, calendar, etc., con la confiabilidad de las de uso  masivo. Con esto logré evitar usar los pesimos web mail y pop3 ofrecidos por los hosting, sin perder ningun feature.

Tiempos de Setup

Todo el trabajo , incluyendo aprender a usar todas las herramientas / servicios, llevó algo así como 5hs, para el primer site y cerca de 2hs más para los sitios siguientes ( www.mobilestudios.com.ar , www.leomilmanda.com.ar )

Also has a complete set of common 3D stuff like shapes, simple objects, textures, particle emiters, cameras, lights, video in 3d, etc. The API is available on their web site.

An interesting example that came with the API, is the trends example. Originally it show the earth with a beam (like the sun) coming out form random places over the surface. I changed that beam to a particle emitter and put a sequence of images of the profile of a location aware (fake) social network. Basically, it shows now who is where in the world (watch the video).

Another great example is a GAME I’ve found, a kind of wonder boy style called Infinite journey form LargeAnimal.

That’s all for now, next time I will be posting more of my work. Appreciate any comment, Cheers!

Cheers!, and don’t be shy and write comments below!. *this time I will read them all, promise!.

I used to spend a couple of hours a week  in sites like eBay, Amazon or MercadoLibre trying to find interesting stuff, sharing content and reading comments. .. Did that last phrase sounded familiar to you?,  that’s the same thing we still do, more days and hours a week in such sites as Facebook, mySpace, etc, etc?. Apparently, instead of spending money in things we barely need, now we spend more time (= less money) reading stuff, comments / tweets, pols, playing online, etc. This slow decay could be associated to several factors like international crisis, inefficient search, new competitors (mercadolibre (AR), craiglist, olx, and so…), among others, but at the end the Real and simple reason is that is not fun anymore.

Over the years we changed the way we use and have fun with internet, and fastest connections allow us to get more content, streamings, and realtime communications. Finally facts of our daily life and history became reflected and published.

This is a rank that describes the average user behaviour for US on 2004.

And this is for the year 2006

As a verification to my point I mashed up a couple of trends graphics, showing a comparison about searched terms in ecommerce and social. (source: google trends)

- Argentina

Here, in Argentina,  Mercadolibre.com (local ebay and ex affiliated to them), was crushed by facebook before october 08.

- All regions

Same thing for all reagions 6 month before.

Leandro.

Technorati Profile

If you pay attentio to the chart in the lower part shows how “news about” twitter eclipsed any other thing on the web, at  least for a couple of days (the kutner effect).

Cheers!

Leandro Milmanda Perez

Something changed, we did? I guess…. the use of social network is here for good.

If you are interested in being part of social networks or want to build your,  own leave your comments or contact me.

by Leandro Milanda Perez.

As I twitted last week I am testing an early version of Google’s App Engine in Java flavor. If you never got the chance to try it, or you are just curious about it, I wrote a few tutorials about how to do regular things, including: java patters, servlets, data access, etc.

Use this command to anonymously check out the latest project source code:

Example 1 – Using DataStore nad JPA

I created a POJO calle SimplePojo and stored un DS using JPA. Below is a copy of the persistance.xml file I am using…

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" ?>
<persistence xmlns="http://java.sun.com/xml/ns/persistence"
    xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
    xsi:schemaLocation="http://java.sun.com/xml/ns/persistence
        http://java.sun.com/xml/ns/persistence/persistence_1_0.xsd" version="1.0">

    <persistence-unit name="transactions-optional">
        <provider>org.datanucleus.store.appengine.jpa.DatastorePersistenceProvider</provider>
        <class>com.gae.tutorial.pojo.SimplePojo</class>
        <properties>
            <property name="datanucleus.NontransactionalRead" value="true"/>
            <property name="datanucleus.NontransactionalWrite" value="true"/>
            <property name="datanucleus.ConnectionURL" value="appengine"/>
        </properties>
    </persistence-unit>
</persistence>

Note the the hardcoded appengie value from the connection URL. Below the Poj file…

import javax.jdo.annotations.Column;

import javax.persistence.Entity;

import javax.persistence.GeneratedValue;

import javax.persistence.GenerationType;

import javax.persistence.Id;

import javax.persistence.NamedQueries;

import javax.persistence.NamedQuery;

import javax.persistence.Table;

@Entity

@Table(name = "simple_pojo")

@NamedQueries( {

    @NamedQuery(name = "getLast", query = "SELECT p FROM SimplePojo p ORDER BY p.id DESC")

})

public class SimplePojo {

    @Id

    @GeneratedValue(generator="generador",strategy=GenerationType.IDENTITY)

    @Column(name="ID")

    private Long id;

    @Column(name="VALOR")

    private String valor;

    public Long getId() {

        return id;

    }

    public void setId(Long id) {

        this.id = id;

    }

    public String getValor() {

        return valor;

    }

    public void setValor(String valor) {

        this.valor = valor;

    }

}

To fully understand this example I recommend you to checkout the SVN source repo and open it on eclipse. One important thing is that you need to install the App Engine SDK for Java and the eclipse plugins from App Engine too.

Also recommend you to get an account and start uusing it.!

Cheers!

Leandro.