Sport of Software Development, notes from the Google TV Hackathon

You may wonder what brings people together to work all weekend (nights included) writing code instead of spending time outside on these beautiful weekend? Do they have nothing else to do? Are they here for prize money or junk food? Any logic it it?

I think that the answer is outside of logic - people get together to Google for the emotional experience, dream of building next Google, experience of been around people like themselves. In my opinion, this is exactly what brings people to sport competition and this is yet another invention of Silicon Valley - making a sport out of software development. Looking forward for the time when it becomes part of Olympics and having people watching the competition (on Google TV?) voting for the wining team.

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Posting to FaceBook feed using Graph API

Graph API was announced at F8 with a promise to dramatically simplify the FB API. I checked the read access over the new interface during the presentations and to my big surprise it worked flawlessly and from the first time. When I tried https://graph.facebook.com/facebook , JSON-formatted info about the FaceBook page was returned (as expected). Then I tried OAuth 2.0 way of accessing the API to post a message to the feed. And to my even bigger surprise it worked too! Here is what you need to do to access Graph API over OAuth: 1. Create a FB app, store app properties to a file: $appkey = '7925873fbfb5347e571744515a9d2804' ; $appsecret = 'THE SECRET' ; $canvas = 'http://apps.facebook.com/graphapi/' ; 2. Create a page that will prompt user the access permission (I am prompting for the publish_stream and offline_access permissions at the same time) //http://apps.facebook.com/graphapi/ require 'settings.php' ; $url = "https://graph.face...

Freebase Hack Day

Amazon Simple Email Service (Amazon SES) and PHP

This morning Amazon announced availability of a bulk email delivery service called " Simple Email Service ". Anyone who knows how much pain is it to set-up scalable email solution (and it is not just spammers who need it!) should celebrate the occasion. I know of a company that spent several years cleaning ip addresses it sends email and found itself locked into the contract with internet provider since it would take forever to reach required level of email deliver ability anywhere else. Anyway, this evening I decided to check the Amazon claim that the service is "simple". Found out that it is indeed simple! Since there is not much in terms of the documentation yet, here is my code where I used AWS PHP library : // Enable full-blown error reporting. http://twitter.com/rasmus/status/7448448829 error_reporting (- 1 ); // Set plain text headers header ( "Content-type: text/plain; charset=utf-8" ); // Include the SDK require_once '../sdk.class.php' ...

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