So Google made a big push for QR Code usage in the US by sending window decals containing QR Code links to their top 100,000 business listings (via Favorite Places). This effort was covered by TechCrunch (TC) and Mobile Marketing Watch (MMW) among many other tech blogs / news sites out there. For the most part of the articles, they were only a rehash of Google’s original blog post, while the rest contained some original opinions from the authors, and this, along with some short sighted comments, was the part that bugged me.

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For the past couple of weeks, I’ve been trying various web framework stacks to be used with Google App Engine. The ones that I gave a go, and gave a pass for various reasons, were Stapler (the enchilada that powers Hudson), Spring, and RestEasy + htmleasy.

The search continued and I came across Sitebricks, still in its alpha phase but it looks really promising. Simple and straightforward, nothing too magicky, and I got it working with GAE/J in no time.

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I finished reading How Life Imitates Chess a few months ago, and finally had the chance to go through my notes this afternoon during lunch break.

Having followed the world of chess ever since I was a teenager, I’ve always been interested to know how great chess players think, to know their opinions about life, to know the things they went through to achieve their extraordinary skills… and this book offers exactly that.

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Continuing from my last Hudson Code Swarm post, this code_swarm video covers the last 7-8 months of activities in Hudson SVN repository (r14862 on 29 Jan 2009 to r21601 on 11 Sep 2009).

Hudson project has been very active during that period, and this video clearly reflects that fact with the number of commiters (names) and their activities (particle movements).

Hudson Code Swarm Part 2 from Cliffano Subagio on Vimeo.

And in case anyone is interested, I’ve uploaded the code_swarm config file I used to generate the videos to github.

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Update (06/10/2009): installation & usage instructions are available from ChuckNorris Plugin wiki page.

Me and some colleagues were yammering some Chuck Norris Facts-like jokes a few days ago (ChuckNorrisException can never be caught, only thrown :p), and that reminded me of ChuckNorris Plugin, a simple plugin I wrote when I first started learning about Hudson plugin mechanism a while ago.

This plugin displays a picture of Chuck Norris, instead of Hudson the butler, and a random Chuck Norris ‘The Programmer’ fact on each build page.

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First of all, my apology to Tony Lauria for making him wait for a long time and for not being able to upload these images earlier as promised. Life has been exceptionally busy, but I’ll save the details for another blog post.

It was a pleasant surprise for me to find out that Tony and some other Emptiness Theme users like to the header images from previous versions of the theme and requested their availability for download. Thanks so much for using the theme.

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About 2 months ago, Ronald Widha invited me to become a guest on Teman Macet, a weekly tech podcast in Indonesian language, focusing on programming, software development, and the IT industry. The discussion was done via Skype since Ronald was based in Dubai, UAE, and I resided in Melbourne, Australia.

The episode, #11 kontribusi ke open source project dalam waktu luang, was uploaded earlier this week. We discussed about my experience contributing to several small open source projects and various other tech-related topics.

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In this day and age, every little bit that we can do to help the environment makes a big difference.  Since the average person spends most of his or her time at work, maintaining an eco-friendly office lifestyle is a great first step.

Green Office Furniture

When it comes to office furniture, comfort is obviously key.  Many office furniture manufacturers are producing lines that are both comfortable and eco-friendly.  Herman Miller, for instance, a company that’s been around for over 100 years, has had its eye on the environment for quite some time now.  Herman Miller’s ever popular Aeron Chair not only adapts naturally to fit every body type, but it is also 94% recyclable.  The brand new Embody chair is 95% recyclable, made from 42% recycled content and contains no PVCs.

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Some of my friends must’ve been tired listening to my constant complaining about how slow it is for Australia to adopt QR Code usage. QR Code is what I believe to be the link between print media and the web. And contrary to popular belief, I think print media is not going to die anytime soon.

I spotted the first QR Code in Melbourne in July last year. Telstra has been campaigning the use of QR Code, mostly on their products and ads. There have been few magazines using QR Code to link to some pages on their own sites. I’m predicting that this technology will become much more mainstream in Australia within the next 2-3 years, providing steady adoption of smart phones with QR Code support.

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About a month ago I received an email from Andja Maric who was a global ambassador for wannabesociety.com . Andja came across Wish while googling for wishes, she explained that wannabesociety shared a similar idea of sharing your wish with the world (t-shirts in their case, binaries in my case).

Andja then mentioned that she liked the concept of Wish and kindly offered to send a gift as a token of appreciation. So the gift finally arrived in my mailbox yesterday…

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