Social Quorum Is Out!!

Social Quorum is a Facebook application for social game creation. There are 6 available games at the moment.

You can create  polls, quiz games, personality tests, lotteries, contests and much more. The statistical service is very interesting especially for the multiple choices questions.

Try it out and tell us!

Fireworks Say: A facebook app to send messages written on fireworks

Today I released a simple Facebook application: Fireworksay.

You can write a message that is displayed with  nice fireworks (a flash animation), you can choose the color and after saving you can post the message to friend's walls and page's walls.

For more information just try it!
This is the url for accessing inside facebook

If you prefer you you can go directly to the web site

I used Django non-rel for the back-end and Flint for the flash animation.

El proyecto sensografia gana un Sol de Oro, Sensografia wins a golden prize!

El proyecto "Sensografia"  gana el oro en la sección viral y experimental del festival iberoamericano de la publicidad.
El proyecto se compone en un software para la creación de arte generativa y un microsite  en As3/PHP.
Yo he participado en la fase creativa y desarrollado  la solución.
Clientes: Grupo Solmelia
Microsite: www.doscielos.com
Info: sensografia.org

Brand new project running on GAE. What to choose?

I have to build a web project in a very short time (3 weeks)

Features:
Google service integration (spreadsheet, authentication, probably Picasa)
Great template language as non-programmers will add new features using functions in the template context.
Monitoring and controls of the state of the CPU load, data, caches, singletons, etc.
Hight traffic, low cost high availability, that's why we want GAE
I cannot deal with bugs for time and health (:-)) reasons

1) Java, Freemarker, AspectJ, Scala

Advantages:
Fastest environment, a lot of open source libraries (maybe too much), I can choose between three interpreters (Groovy, Scala, Jython)
Disadvantages:
FreeMarker template seems buggy as in GAE the reflection package is not the standard one, I don't want to use Velocity or JSP. Any other great template engine candidate?

2) Jruby
Advantages:
Very productive, vibrant community
Disadvantages:
It is starting to be mature now on GAE and I still do not know anybody that professionally delivers Jruby solutions on GAE, any high traffic web app use Jruby on GAE?


3) Django Solution
Advantages:
Native on Google, Django template engine is lovely
Disadvantages:
I never delivered a project with Django

I also tried Grails but it seems to be slow and buggy on GAE.

After 3 days testing and reading forums of Java technologies, now I am making the demo I prepared in Django, let's see....

Another scrum joke about the Pig and the Chicken

One day the Pig (Adobe) meets an old friend the Chicken (Apple) and says:

Pig: Hey broth what's up? My ham is ready to be served with your funky eggs. Let's set up a party on the beach! everybody will love our old dish in the new style!!

Chicken: hi, you know ... I am not sure ....  my eggs are bio and your second hand ham will not match.....  one thing more ...  I didn't  like the commissions that you charged for the last party!! so I thing you better go to other non-bio chicken to set up your business!

Bug in Picasa web album python client library

I write it here because I did not find any clear resource on the web.

I have found an error executing the first line of code in the API documentation (after the authentication section) of Picasa python library:

try to get the albums:
albums =  self.gd_client.GetUserFeed().entry

this code:
def AnyFeedFromString(xml_string):
   tree = ElementTree.fromstring(xml_string)

fire:
 tree = ElementTree.fromstring(xml_string)
  File "", line 85, in XML
SyntaxError: syntax error: line 1, column 0


Workaround:
Some problems with SSL:
self.gd_client.ssl = False

Baking desktop applications using As3 and Zinc.

Zinc 3.0 is an alternative to turn Flash/Flex applications to full portable desktop applications.

As3 and Zinc 3 is the standard to develop desktop applications (often called widget) in the advertisement industry: it is easy and cost effective.

It is possible to style the window (I had transparent mode).
There is a very interesting library that extends the capabilities of flash.

The Mdm Zinc forum is very helpful.

Bug using Pyamf with Google App Engine templates

It seems that Pyamf conflicts with the Google App Engine template library.
You may have this error loading a template:

AttributeError: 'module' object has no attribute 'defaulttags'

Perhaps Pyamf includes an older version of Django library .
To workaround write the imports in this order:

from google.appengine.ext.webapp import template
from pyamf.remoting.gateway.google import WebAppGateway

It seems odd but the problem disappears.

A new version of Blogger is coming!

Blogger starts to be interesting with the new version in draft.

To use the new tool go to draft.blogger.com after logging in.

What's new in draft.blogger:

Use of the maps
Use of Picasa Albums
Creation of pages
Nicer aspect

There are also interesting functions for collaboration with other writers.

Unofficial terms of use for demo applications

This document is not meant to be a proper legal terms of use but just an acknowledgement for who finds my demo applications over the web:

This application is intended to be just an experiment, please take it as a free service without any expectation of results.

I do not use your personal information for any kind of business, furthermore I make some statistical analysis on the data.

I attempt to destroy the sensible information about you as soon as you will finish to use the demo.