Jason Calacanis, can’t be thanked enough for an exclusive event like this. Because he put his own time and efforts to pick handful angel investors that are ‘real’ investors that we know and follow on TechCrunch, and he selected the best companies to pitch to them.

Event was great, everyone was genuine and honest, it wasn’t a crowd of people who weren’t interested in each other, on the contrary, I think everyone was able to talk to and meet with everyone, if they wanted to. Angels and entrepreneurs weren’t charged a cent. If you were ever approached by Keiretsu people, asked $6,000 just to pitch to investors that are not even known, you know why we love Jason and Tyler for doing this.

I strongly advise and encourage all entrepreneurs to apply to Open Angel Forum and try to make it there. I have never been to an event that was better than this one. It is simply the best thing that can happen to your company after TechCrunch50.

Instead -Google says-, you can set your DNS Servers from your Control Panel/Network Settings (Windows) or Network Pane (Mac) to Google’s DNS Servers 8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4 and Google gets you to wherever.com faster.

Here is the official bit from Google:

“As web pages become more complex and include more resources from multiple origin domains, clients need to perform multiple DNS lookups to render a single page. The average Internet user performs hundreds of DNS lookups each day, slowing down his or her browsing experience. As the web continues to grow, greater load is placed on existing DNS infrastructure.

Since Google’s search engine already crawls the web on a daily basis and in the process resolves and caches DNS information, we wanted to leverage our technology to experiment with new ways of addressing some of the existing DNS challenges around performance and security. We are offering the service to the public in the hope of achieving the following aims:

• Provide end users with an alternative to their current DNS service. Google Public DNS takes some new approaches that we believe offer more valid results, increased security, and, in most cases, better performance.
• Help reduce the load on ISPs’ DNS servers. By taking advantage of our global data-center and caching infrastructure, we can directly serve large numbers of user requests without having to query other DNS resolvers.
• Help make the web faster and more secure. We are launching this experimental service to test some new ways to approach DNS-related challenges. We hope to share what we learn with developers of DNS resolvers and the broader web community and get their feedback.”

Somebody had to do this, I’m happy that Google did.

Performance benefits: http://code.google.com/speed/public-dns/docs/performance.html

Security benefits: http://code.google.com/speed/public-dns/docs/security.html

Announcement : http://googlecode.blogspot.com/2009/12/introducing-google-public-dns-new-dns.html

Here is my few hours turned into an application: http://dyasar.brinkster.net/findit

And yes, it is open source: http://code.google.com/p/craigslist-home-search/

Currently works in Manhattan (where I live). Let me know if you want to extend it to where you live…

Enjoy..

Ah, almost forgot.. I was here sometime ago.. I want to believe that camera broke my english

<?php $object = json_decode(json_encode(simplexml_load_string($xml))); ?>

This will give you a wonderful stdClass object, which you can then turn into an array… Neat isn’t it?

It’s just that I see people writing hundreds lines of code for this…

Main problem is that we come from different schools. Designers and engineers. They see the world from totally different angle. It is very hard to find a designer that meets the deadlines, understands the backend code and mingles with the rest of the team. And it is equally hard to find a developer who can also design.

Well, some may agree some may disagree, but the fact remains that in order to make one web application you need to make 2 applications written in totally different languages. You choose one for the backend, and you choose Javascript for the frontend.

Not anymore. Not long ago, i had a look at Google Web Toolkit and I made the mistake of thinking that it’s just a JS writer for non-JS people, I was terribly wrong. And very recently I found out Vaadin, and I fell in love with it.

It unifies the whole process of developing a web application. All you ever need is Java developers. You write Java code, using their wonderful components, it compiles it into a web application using Google Web Toolkit, for all the browsers (no browser compatibility CSS/JS is needed).

Your application is ready without ever touching DOM elements. You can deploy to Google App Engine, where up to 5 million visits per month will be free of charge, so you are totally free of deployment worries too.

I’m looking forward to developing my first Vaadin App, and I am seriously considering porting Kodingen to Vaadin.

Let’s see. I hope my feelings won’t change after I actually use it!

Ps: here is an idol of the designer type that I’m talking about, Stephan Sagmeister. As beautiful as that logo is on the video; engineer can’t make a software that takes  points, rotate a logo and be satisfied that they have solved an actual problem knowing those precisely generated points are as good as random points!

Google App Engine Overview:

Google Web Toolkit :

To be honest, I didn’t like him seeing a CEO video on his site a year ago. I cancelled my Mint account when they made their password screens in a way that it seemed like you are logging into your bank account OpenID style whereas they were simply saving your passwords, in their database.

However, watching this video I see an honest person (‘$170M it’s not a cash deal’), modest and genuine. This video is really worth your time if you are up to make your dream come true.

Mint CEO Aaron Patzer on Startups from Techcrunch on Vimeo.

Believe it or not, this is Microsoft 7 official launch video.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=1cX4t5-YpHQ

If you made it this far, here is a songtastic (TM) experience for you…

www.youtube.com/watch?v=3oGFogwcx-E

“Microsoft huh? So, it’s pretty easy to use?”

What we needed was reasonably priced (not Jira, not $25/user) just a simple wiki with google code functionality. I mean the one that costs virtually nothing if anyone had made it.

Finally have decided to deploy Trac, although it was little hard to get it going, it was well worth it. Now we have full fledged issue tracker, with iCal and rememberthemilk integration, Time-tracking, svn browsing capabilities and so much more. Check it out here : http://trac-hacks.org/wiki/0.11

So I got what I needed. Let’s get back to why there isn’t any sensible issue-tracking system on our poor planet. How much did it cost me? $20 dedicated server on VPS . If I make a template out of this, and sell it for $50 per company with resources limited to the server it is running on, and give them the option to increase it ? And increase my revenue proportionally with it ? Yes, it’d be a promising venture and just today, I’d have turned two companies into my clients.

No I’m not saying it is the most brilliant idea of all times. I am just surprised at the fact that our precious time along with such a big and very obvious demand (=opportunity) is being wasted.

• people make a fuss about everything that is going to be forgotten (e.g. today’s news)
• we don’t have mysql sync tool for a reasonable price
• nokia bh-905 is not out yet
• they still haven’t brought wireless electricity to the market
• I am not making a perendev motor
• Kodingen is still offline
• Betterfly is suffering from designer absence
• I am writing this blog

I guess wondering and thinking are things that I’m good at. Just watched Techcrunch, saw the excitement on the faces of contestants who are as nervous as the jury is ignorant with their uber-boosted ego and driest humor possible.

Fluidhtml.com comes up with a great product and with a wrong business plan (that’s gotta be open source gentlemen, languages are given not sold), when I watch the video and see the jury, I just feel sad for those humanoids who are convinced somehow to act and behave in certain way that they are not. They seem to think that just because they sit on the right side of the table … anyway. Here is fluidhtml and their great product, http://www.ustream.tv/recorded/2162267 and the ‘they put me here, therefore i am’ jury.