Before mentioning the meetups and the people (SF Bay Groovy and Grails Meetup Group, SF New Tech, SFDUG – San Francisco Drupal Users group, The San Francisco Java User Group, WebMapSocial Silicon Valley Meetup Group, Web 2.0 Expo, Google I/O, and some other), I briefly want to talk about my thought on the community around bay area (actually mostly around San Francisco (sf)).

There are many (many) things (meet-ups, breakfasts, book clubs, expos, ignites…) that can consume all your time easily.  I wonder how people focus on anything around here. (The best way can be disconnect from internet so that you don’t see invitation emails that rain all day.)

the people. They are very very welcoming, and really interested in your story if you can explain it in 15-20 seconds. Really, if it exceeds this threshold, they start to think something else (probably because they are bored) in their mind, and try not to show it to you. But you can see it on their face

Another thing is you can instantly tell whether the person in front of you is a technical guy or a marketing guy, or a guy with money and time (these are the categories I come up  so far). Tech guys mostly either very geeky and friendly (like the one in TBBT) or very tense like the ones mentioned in Rework in the chapter about burn outs. Marketing guys seems to be really talkative even if you stop listening them, they keep talking. The guys w/ money seems to be very relaxed and cool (this is the nice way of saying high ego).

For the time being, this post will be a prologue.

At the end of May, I will turn back to Turkey, and hopefully I will have more time to write about my observations.

If you are reading this far, let me advertise my latest project to you.  An usability testing tool which creates click analysis tests; REMOTESPOTS. See the 4 minutes video to see what it is about.

]]> http://doganberktas.com/2010/05/12/meetups-around-san-francisco-and-random-observations-from-a-foreigner/feed/ 0 http://doganberktas.com/2010/05/04/google-apps-mail-setup-on-eapps-com/ http://doganberktas.com/2010/05/04/google-apps-mail-setup-on-eapps-com/#comments Tue, 04 May 2010 03:34:07 +0000 dkberktas http://doganberktas.com/?p=270 For our last project Remotespots (which is an online click analysis tool), we chose eApps as the virtual hosting solution which is so far very good indeed.  For mail server, since we trust the big brother Google, we use Google apps. Following is the simple steps for setting up the Google Apps Mail on eApps. (by the way, this is the case if you let eApps machine as your DNS server.)

A simple process as it should be but still worth documenting,

• Register an Standard Google Apps account (so far this version is enough for our needs)
• Open eapps control panel and go to system tab

• Scroll down to All My Domains and select it
• Here you will see the domains that you added, select the one that you want to add mail functionality.

• Delete the existing MX records
• Add the ones Google Apps ask as the following (leave the first field empty!)

And of course give some time for the propagation of the new MX records to all caches on planet earth!

Memcache provides convenience to store a frequent query in memory, so that you don’t have to make the same execution over and over again. For the iPhone application I build (Fragman), I build a GAE/J backend for managing movie names, IMDB URLs, thumb images, video files, etc. It interacts with the Obj-c code via calls encoded in JSON.

Since the categories are updated so frequently (new trailer, top 250 , soap opera trailers), every time the user starts the application from her iPhone, the corresponding categories Id(key) lists are  created which includes all the aspects mentioned above,

what I see, after people start to use the application that, most of the time, the application got stuck with the time constraint of GAE and this causes inconvenience, so I decided to hold the category lists’s JSON in memory. Following is the code ,

this is the servlet for creating the JSON which is called after say upcoming movie list is changed. This servlet updates the memcached list

        List keyList = new ArrayList();
	static Cache cache;
	static
	{
		try
		{
			CacheFactory cacheFactory =

CacheManager.getInstance().getCacheFactory();
			cache = cacheFactory.createCache(

Collections.emptyMap());
		}
		catch (CacheException e)
		{
			// ...
		}
		//.....
                public void doGet(HttpServletRequest request,

HttpServletResponse response) throws ServletException, IOException

	        {
                       //................
                       if(cache.containsKey(mode))
		       {
			     cache.remove(mode);
		       }
		       cache.put(mode, keyList);
	        }

                //........

          }

And this is the servlet that fetch the Fragman beans from the datastore with the given keys (key list is got from the memecached list)

          keyList = (List)cache.get(mode);

By doing this, I reduce the time that the servlet that creates the JSON takes.