Game g = new Game();

startups.yeebase.com features my interview on their landing page today.

After pondering for a while, I finished installing Piwik as our secondary web reporting / analytics tool.

I’m quite happy with Google Analytics so far, but the fact that you don’t own the data coming from your users on your website (along with some remarks from our lawyer about exporting usage data into the US being not the preferred solution, especially in Germany) was enough to start looking around for other solutions.

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I never got around giving Flex a serious try.

The most interesting features, like the Live Cycle Data Services, allowing server push-based RIAs, are very expensive, and I did not had the need for anything else that I could not handle using some simple (Y)UI thrown together and hooked into a DB using Grails.

Now, the current implementation of our Atlantis backend polls every n seconds from the server and new messages are added, via AJAX. This led to some browser stability problems and a general bottleneck if several AJAX-”windows” are opened and each of them refreshed every n seconds, respectively.

Affter some research, I stumbled across BlazeDS, which might solve this problem – another part of Adobe technology that was released open source, and should provide the basic functionality needed to access hibernated Java objects from Flex, plus allowing push subscriptions and notifications from the server to the client.

I will check out this tutorial about getting Flex, BlazeDS and Hibernate to work together.

Also, there is a great post about the differences of the various flavors and licensing details, as well as another one.

I will post my findings here.

OK, I admit it – I’ve been there before, a couple of times: Ordering something cool, just to let the initial sensation and motivation to actually do something cool with it quickly fade away…

The next chapter in this will (hopefully not) be this thing – introducing the DIY Meggy Jr RGB handheld:

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Idea: put a couple of these babies next to each other, and have them show the current number of open Jira tickets.

Hmm might be a bit pricey though, at $52 per digit.

Maybe I will write a Chumby widget to display various stats.