Aral Balkan

Take a sneak peek at the new Singularity web site on Google App Engine. You can sign up for the site, which will go live in July, and register your interest in the conference and help me test out the deployment environment. (And yes, Singularity is inverting its colors for the second half of the year.)

The current teaser is a glorified "coming soon" page but with one important difference: You can pre-register for the new site using your Google account.

If you have a moment, please sign up for the new site and help me test the deployment environment before we open up the actual site in July along with ticket sales.

I would really appreciate your feedback if you notice any issues (especially quota-related errors). I hope that Google will be removing the quotas for our application but I haven't heard anything definitive back from them yet.

The registration process currently asks you for your name, your email address (if you'd like to use a different one to the one on your Google account), and for your location.

The location data is really important for us as we create the schedule for the conference. The conference is going to run for 48 hours straight, over three days and be attended by people from around the world so the more location and timezone data we have, the better we can create a schedule that meets your needs. You can give as little or as much detail as you like for your location (country/city/town/even postal code) and we do our best to calculate your timezone based on that and on what your computer tells us your timezone is. (I'm using the Yahoo GeoPlanet API for much of this and I am _very_ impressed by it.)

Check out the new Singularity web site teaser and sign up to join the Singularity community.

Comments

• Hello Aral, Thanks for your comment. When I found out you came to Geneva and realised I missed completely the event I was...quite disappointed. Anyway keep up the good work. I signed up in the teaser site and haven't noticed any bug at all btw.

  by Nicolas on 2008-06-23 13:21:07

• Thanks, Colin! :) Tommy, thank you so much for reporting this. I will look into it ASAP and post a response here once it has been fixed. Ah, nothing like testing with real data is there? :)

  by Aral on 2008-06-20 13:07:48

• Extended Latin characters should now be displaying correctly in the sIFR headlines (with tiny filesize increase -- the sIFR SWF is now 32KB). Next: to disable the sIFR headlines for Japanese, Chinese, etc. A good reference on that topic: http://wiki.novemberborn.net/sifr3/Tricks

  by Aral on 2008-06-20 17:20:04

• Hi Saleh, thank you so much for reporting this. I _just_ saw something very similar to what you're experiencing while testing the system out a few moments ago. Can you please send me the exact data you entered to aral@aralbalkan.com Thank you again for your time and for helping make Singularity better! :)

  by Aral on 2008-06-21 11:56:59

• Hi Saleh, I've fixed the issue I was seeing, which I believe is the same issue that is affecting you. Can you please log in to the site and visit your profile. It should automatically be fixed for you. Thank you again for reporting this.

  by Aral on 2008-06-21 19:19:12

• Hi Aral, i just tried to registere, but the application have som problems with the special danish letters (æøå). it show a unicode error. looking forward to see what you will present at Flash On The Beach this year.

  by Tommy Kjær Andersen on 2008-06-20 12:42:33

• Hi Aral, the registration process worked fine for me, looks great. Very much looking forward to the full application and obviously the conference itself. Colin

  by Colin Schlueter on 2008-06-20 12:28:38

• Hi Tommy, I just fixed the issue you ran into. It has to do with the mail API in Google App Engine choking on Unicode messages as mentioned on this thread in the GAE forums. Darn thing is, I'd read that message ealier (I basically read through nearly all the posts on the forum) and had forgotten so thank you so much for bringing it up. I also noticed that unicode characters are not showing up correctly in the sIFR text at the moment to I'm on to fix that.

  by Aral on 2008-06-20 15:24:05

• Hello Aral, I'm having problem in the registration process. I logged in using my Google account; however, after logging in, it asks me for my name, country and city/postal and I'm having problem in that last field. I selected Kuwait as my country and entered my postal code, then clicked submit. After that it asks "Which POSTAL NUMBER" and nothing appears in the drop-down box. I tried writing the city name in the city/postal field and again it asks me "Which CITY NAME" with an empty drop-down box. The problem is that the drop-down box is empty and if I don't select anything I can't register. I'm reporting this problem so others can register. I can easily enter a random address I can find in the web and register, but I'm guessing you are asking those questions for statistics purposes. Thanks

  by Saleh Al-Saffar on 2008-06-20 23:17:38

• Hi Aral, I got a 500 error :( after I set my name and location... I keep getting it if I go back.

  by Rob on 2008-06-27 15:24:24

• Hi Rob, Thanks so much for reporting this. Apparently, Yahoo! changed its GeoPlanet JSON API and broke existing applications. I've fixed it now -- apologies for the hassle -- can you try it again? I blogged about the API breakage here: http://aralbalkan.com/1393

  by Aral on 2008-06-29 10:24:45

• This is very hot info. I'll share it on Delicious.

  by How to Get Six Pack Fast on 2009-04-15 13:46:23