Google Plus has been hot, we all want to be the first to test it out, the problem is the Invite option have been taken out.

This morning, a friend pinged me for an invite, and I found out that the easiest and fastest way just takes two steps:

1. Go to the Stream section on your sidebar, then enter a status update message
2. Click on +Add circles or people to share with…, enter your friend’s email, and click on Share

That’s it you are done, your friend will get a status message, something like this below, clicking on Learn more about Google+ button, and he’s in. Tested and it worked.

There has been some steps featured on TechCrunch. One by creating an extra circle and the other without. So seems like without creating the circle works as well.

Cheers.

UPDATE (7 Jul): Invite seems to be back in action after Facebook video call and group chat launch. Please do not enter your email address in the comment box to avoid spam. I know what’s your email from the Email field when you enter the comment. Cheers!

I just got my iPad two days ago. I bought iPad primarily because I wanted to read eBooks and save the environment (actually my bookshelves kind of full). The Cloud-9 feeling of owning an iPad does not live long when I could not find Amazon Kindle app in iTunes App Store.

After some Sherlock-Holmes investigation, I found out that Amazon Kindle app is only available in iTunes US store and some other countries – definitely not in Singapore. Well, your dad probably ever told you that you should not give up on your first attempt, thus we all are looking for another way.

And I found a way to get it installed, but only to find another major problem. I couldn’t buy any Kindle books from Asia Pacific region. If you are like me, that’s probably another moment you utter the word, “Sh*t!”

With a little bit of common sense and luck, I worked my way out; a happy man I am, I bought The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and Delivering Happiness. Let me share with you the steps, and hopefully it will work for you, so the excitement of working your fingers like in Minority Report - on the iPad, lives on.

How to Install Amazon Kindle on Your iPad

Ignore this step if your iTunes account is already a US account.

• Create iTunes App Store US Account, follow Apple’s instructions on how to create an App Store account without a credit card (Remember to select United States for the country, and google for a US address).
• Then go to your iTunes application, sign out from your current account, click on Store>Sign Out menu, then click on Store> Sign In again, once signed in with your US account, it should prompt a message to redirect you to iTunes US App Store, click OK to continue (Don’t worry the apps you have purchased using your Singapore account, they can still be sync-ed with your iPad)
• Go back to iTunes Store, search for Amazon Kindle, and you should see it now, and install it right away (Tip: You may be interested with other US only apps, like Google Mobile App, Last.fm, and Yahoo! Entertainment).

How to Purchase Kindle Books

• Create an Amazon account if you do not have one, enter your Singapore address and your Singapore Credit Card information as well.
• Next, go to this page, change the country to be associated with your Kindle account, scroll down a little bit under Your Country heading. It should be empty. Add a US address (Google for one if you have no idea).
• And now you are ready to purchase, search for a Kindle book and click the Buy button. If it prompts for payment, choose your Singapore credit card, and it works like charm. The book will be automatically downloaded when you start your Amazon Kindle on your iPad, pretty neat.

And just in case if you are wondering if you can use the same trick for iBook purchase, I’m really sorry, you can’t, cause it checks for a US credit card. If you know of a way, please let me know.

I’m happy with Kindle Store for now. By the way, what are you reading? I may be able to get some inspirations from intelligent people like you. And well, you can check out mine as well at BookJetty.

Happy reading, and I freaking love my iPad.

UPDATE:

• A friend suggested that you can use US Unlocked service to get a US credit card. That could be an answer to your iBooks purchase, but it charges an nominal rate if you do not mind.
• After purchasing the book, you may be getting an email from Amazon asking you to verify that you are a US resident. If you are, that will be easy, if you are not, there is nothing you can do but to stay status-quo by not replying.
  
  I am not very sure of the implications as well, a quick google search bring me to one of Kindle threads in Hardware Zone, it doesn’t specifically mention what will happen, and I just did not have the time, to go through all of the links in Google.
  
  My advice would be, please do not go with a purchase spree, as the worse-case scenario your account may be suspended (that will be very cruel for Amazon to do that), or future Kindle books purchase will no longer be allowed, or nothing may happen all. I take my chances, one or two books at a time, and get the best of what I can get at the moment.
• After purchasing 4 books, I was not able to purchase another Kindle book, Amazon.com kept prompting me to contact the sales support team, or change my Kindle address, which I already did following the step above. I found out that now the IP detection check seems to be in-place now, so I login to my company’s Virtual Private Network (VPN) in the US, and using the same account, lucky me, I was still able to purchase more Kindle books. After that subsequent purchases work just fine without using the VPN.
• If you downloaded the Kindle App from iPad, then syncing it to your iTunes on your computer, iTunes will prompt you to authorize this computer, just click on Authorize and enter your US account iTunes ID and password.

I was looking a Prototype based carousel, so I googled and found a couple. I was not very happy with what I found, so I decided to write my own version.

Carousel is definitely one the most widely used Javascript widgets, you probably need to use it to show your photos, product/feature highlights, top stories, page navigation and etc. It comes in different look and feel, but I found that they all still fall into Carousel gene.

The idea is you should be able to use the same semantically structured HTML and Javascript initialization codes, and apply different skins (CSS styling) to create different look and feels of a carousel.

It should really easy to use just like Lightbox JS, throw in the HTML tags and Javascript, and it should just work. The default skin should simple yet look good; so it can be used out of the box for many different sites, while the skins should be re-usable. And that’s what I was trying to achieve with Pluit Carousel.

Click here to download and for the demo page.

Hope you’ll find it useful for your project as much as I do.

If you are using Amazon Web Services or Product Advertising API, Amazon probably had been bugging you to sign your requests by August 15.

If you have not, by now all your requests should have failed. Some of you who are using amazon-ecs have contacted me last week, if there’s a patch to solve this issue; yep there is, the latest version, amazon-ecs-0.5.6 is able to sign your requests. Thanks to Dan Milne for the initial patch; I have also applied a few small patches to ensure that it works smoothly.

sudo gem update amazon-ecs

To sign the request you would need AWS secret key, which you can generate from Amazon associate account page.

# Include your secret key
Amazon::Ecs.options = {:aWS_access_key_id => [your developer token], :aWS_secret_key => [your secret access key]}

# Or you can also set it through 'configure' method
Amazon::Ecs.configure do |options|
    options[:aWS_access_key_id] = [your access key]
    options[:aWS_secret_key] = [you secret key]
end

# Search like usual
res = Amazon::Ecs.item_search('ruby', {:response_group => 'Medium', :sort => 'salesrank'})

Some weeks ago, I heard about Redis from Chu Yeow’s tweet. Redis is a key-value database, similar with memcached, but with the persistence feature. And one of the first things that popped up into my mind was, this is going to be handy to extend Singapore National Library Board (NLB) catalog search on BookJetty.

So I stopped my adventure with iPhone for a while to work on this hack. After all, BookJetty was built to be a proxy to plug-in other catalogs easily. With the plug, all vertical features found in BookJetty such as importing books to your shelves, tagging, book reviews, ratings, the social networking features, Google Books preview, author pages, cross libraries search, and other vertical features will be immediately available for the catalog. Well, with just a plug or an adapter.

I was lucky that Redis 0.900 (1.0 RC 1) was just released, though not a production release, I took my chance. It was very Ruby to work with Redis; download the codes, read the documentation, bam bam and you got it working, one of the reasons why I chose Redis over Tokyo Cabinet (What a name!). More about the differences between Redis and Tokyo Cabinet here.

There is an issue with NLB search result, it does not return ISBN and some other information BookJetty needs to perform the matching and to display the information nicely. Thus, it needs a second call, and it is expensive. A fast database is required to cache this kind of information, and Redis is the answer.

Previously on BookJetty, you can only search Amazon catalog, and BookJetty will find matches in NLB catalog based on the book ISBNs. But due to data discrepancies, some books found in Amazon are not found in NLB.

As a library user myself, I had always wanted to search the other way round. And today, I’m glad to announce to you, and I hope you are as excited as me. We can now do the other way round; search NLB catalog, and BookJetty is smart enough to find matches in Amazon and probably from other sources in the future. I dreamt about this, and today that dream is fulfilled. Click image or here for a sample search.

There is one limitation though, the search API does not sort by the newest books as in NLB online catalog. Hopefully there will be an upgrade to the API soon, and we would be close in our quest to find the holy grail for our local library search. Meanwhile, let’s cherish what we have.

May the books be with you.

I have finally jumped into the bandwagon of Objective-C development with XCode, out of curiousity to develop an iPhone application. And the first thing that I usually did when playing with a new IDE or editor is to learn the shorcuts.

And thanks to Colin Wheeler for the cheat-sheet:
http://cocoasamurai.blogspot.com/2008/02/complete-xcode-keyboard-shortcut-list.html

The cheat-sheet is comprehensive, and out of those, here are of ones that I find I can’t live without.

Alt+Shift+Up      -> Switch between header and implementation files
Alt+Shift+Left    -> Switch to the previous opened file
Alt+Shift+Right   -> Switch to the next opened file

Cmd+Double Click  -> Jump to the file definition for the clicked class name
Alt+Double Click  -> Jump to documentation window for the clicked word
Shift+Cmd+D       -> Open file quickly
Shift+Cmd+C       -> Open Class Browser window

Ctrl+?            -> Open documentation window
Ctrl+Alt+?        -> Open research assitant window
Ctrl+1            -> Show opened file dropdown
Ctrl+2            -> Show methods drop down

Option+Escape     -> Edit completion list
Ctrl+Period       -> Move to next completion list
Ctrl+/            -> Select next placeholder in auto completion brackets
Cmd+/             -> Comment text

Strangely I couldn’t find the Delete Line and Duplicate Line shortcuts in XCode, miss the equivalent of ‘yy’ and ‘dd’ in vim or Ctrl+Shift+K and Ctrl+Shift+D in Textmate. Tried custom key bindings from TypeErrorStudios, but not working my MBP, let me know if it works on your end. Thanks.

Hacheette Book Group is back with its free books giveaway on BookJetty. Halloween is around the corner, so it’s getting spooky this time with these collection of books.

And all are yours for free if you are a BookJetty member (sign up as one if you are not) and put at least one book on your bookshelf by end of November. Note that this contest is only open for those who reside in the United States or Canada, and remember to update your profile country in BookJetty.

Special thanks for Hachette Book Group, the last book giveaways have brought some surprises to the winners with a big box of books arriving at your porch.

1. THE HERETIC’S DAUGHTER By Kathleen Kent $24.99, 0316024481
   ISOLATION By Travis Thrasher $13.99, 0446505544
2. THE 13 BEST HORROR STORIES OF ALL TIME By Leslie Pockell $21.99, 9780446679503
3. THE MONSTERS: Mary Shelley and the Curse of Frankenstein By Dorothy Hoobler , Thomas Hoobler $14.99, 9780316066402
4. THE MYRTLES PLANTATION: The True Story of America’s Most Haunted House By Frances Kermeen $7.99, 9780446614153
5. GHOSTLY ENCOUNTERS: True Stories of America’s Haunted Inns and Hotels By Frances Kermeen $7.99, 9780446611459
6. THE TERROR By Dan Simmons $14.99, 9780316017459
7. DRACULA By Bram Stoker $10.99, 0316014818
8. WHEN GHOSTS SPEAK: Understanding the World of Earthbound Spirits By Mary Ann Winkowski $24.99, 9780446581189
9. THE HISTORIAN By Elizabeth Kostova $9.99, 9780316067942

I like Adium, but recently there were just too many spams from my MSN account, I tried finding the privacy settings under Preferences, only to find out later that it was not there.

The secret is it’s under Adium menu (on top left screen) > Privacy Settings (Alt + Cmd + P). Choose your MSN account, check ‘Allow only contacts on my contact list’, and it’s peaceful again.

But, I’m still wondering why can’t they just put Privacy settings under Preferences.

p.s. Trying out MarsEdit, saved me a couple of extra steps required to blog, trying to justify the reason why I only blogged like once every decade lately.

Yesterday Google Book Search officially launched a set of free tools to allow anyone to embed books from the Google Book Search Index. And it also introduces Book Search API for greater integration to its search index and readers’ ratings, reviews and book collections.

BookJetty is glad to be able to integrate with Google Book Search, by introducing a new list type that indicates if book previews are available, and the embedded book preview just makes it feel closer to having a real bookshelf.

I’m really happy for this new addition to BookJetty, find it very handy to check out if books are worth a read, and glad to have BookJetty mentioned as one of its case studies.

I’m glad to announce BookJetty first books giveway, thanks to Hachette Book Group USA, 10 best selling books offered for free to host Back to School Book Bonanza! For 5 lucky BookJetty users.

To be entitled, you just need to write one book review in the month of September, and winners will be picked up randomly. I’ll inform the winners through email on October 1.

There’s only one catch, according to Hachet Book Group USA, the giveaway is only for BookJetty users residing in United States and Canada, sorry guys. So do remember to update your country profile in BookJetty.

Here is the list of 10 best-selling books for the giveaway:

1. Dewey: The Small-Town Library Cat Who Touched the World
   By Vicky Myron, Bret Witter
2. The Book of Calamities: Five Questions About Suffering and Its Meaning
   By Peter Trachtenberg
3. Say You’re One of Them
   By Uwem Akpan
4. Bo’s Lasting Lessons: The Legendary Coach Teaches the Timeless Fundamentals of Leadership
   By Bo Schembechler , John Bacon
5. Knowing Right from Wrong: A Christian Guide to Conscience
   By Fr. Thomas D. Williams
6. Titanic’s Last Secrets: The Further Adventures of Shadow Divers John Chatterton and Richie Kohler
   By Brad Matsen
7. A Whack on the Side of the Head: How You Can Be More Creative
   By Roger von Oech (25th Anniversary)
8. Ethics 101: What Every Leader Needs To Know
   By John Maxwell
9. The Self-Esteem Trap: Raising Confident and Compassionate Kids in an Age of Self-Importance
   By Polly Young-Eisendrath
10. Roads to Quoz: An American Mosey
    By William Least Heat-Moon