keeping the community informed

It is hard to believe that we are in June already, and another month means hundreds of new members joining the DaniWeb community. In fact, as I write this, the community stands at more than 341,500 souls. Which is great, but when you start talking telephone number membership figures it becomes increasingly difficult to ensure that we remain a vibrant community rather than just a collection of folk looking for the answer to some obscure IT conundrum. Which is where the Community Introductions forum comes in, providing a kind of virtual lobby where you can say hello and get a friendly welcome in return. This is one of those 'the more you put in, the more you get out' type arrangements, so if you give a little of yourself here, explain who you are, where you come from, what interests you and why you have found yourself aboard the Good Ship DaniWeb the chances are that you will soon find yourself engaged in conversation with any number of friendly members. Don't think that the Community Introductions forum is just for new members, it's actually for anyone who has not introduced themselves before and that could be you even if you have been a member here for months but just never got around to saying hi. Speaking with my administrator hat on for a minute, could I ask that you help the moderators out by not posting technical support questions in this forum, nor advertising your website or online business in your introduction.

helping us to help you…

Did you know that Dani has been tweaking the user interface again? This time we have brand new navigational menus which includes some rather swishy drop-down lists for all the forums that are contained within each sub-category. It really does make a difference to ease of use when getting around the DaniWeb site, and the menus are no longer enormously long affairs either. Of course, some of you might be thinking 'what new menus' at this point. Which brings me to the main reason for including this update in the user tip of the month section: clearing your browser cache. Without wishing to get all technical on you, the menus are JavaScript powered and in order to force a re-download of the script that handles the menu operation you need to clear your browser cache. This is really easy to do, in Internet Explorer 7 for example you go to Tools|Internet Options|Delete Browsing History|Delete Temporary Internet Files and the job's a good 'un…

get certificated…

People come to DaniWeb for a lot of different reasons, some stay just as long as it takes to get their immediate problems sorted and then come back again when the next IT disaster strikes, while others hang around for the great sense of community spirit and to become a part of the DaniWeb family. Whatever the case, and we welcome everyone with open arms, one thing remains constant: DaniWeb is a no fee operation. Yes, we welcome donations but we do not insist upon them. Yes, we encourage members to help others by sharing whatever their own technical expertise might be. However, we understand that not everyone has the technical skill nor confidence to do this, so how can you give something back if you are knowledge and cash poor? Could the answer sit with certification? We think it might do, and you can find out more here where member certificates are explained in detail and all the cut and paste code required to publish yours on your blog or website is available. Every member of DaniWeb has a certificate, a small banner or large icon depending upon your viewpoint, which details their membership of the community. These interactive certificates can be seen as an interactive membership badge if you like, one click takes the viewer straight to the DaniWeb home page. So here's our idea, if you want to give something back to DaniWeb why not pop your membership certificate on your web page or blog to encourage others to use the service which you have found so helpful yourself? It need not stop there, of course, say you have a blog which is focused on video game development. Why not publish the certificates of those DaniWeb members which have proved helpful in solving your problems in the past, giving them some kudos, yourself some karma and DaniWeb some credit in the process? The point being that these membership badges are there to be used, and we would be truly honored if you were to use them by way of giving something back…

every month one member makes the DaniWeb hall of fame…

Please welcome our newest member of the DaniWeb hall of fame, darrenw89 who has been part of the DaniWeb family for almost exactly two years now. In that time he has become 'practically a posting shark' with more than 800 forum posts spread across DaniWeb. You can most often find him posting in the Geeks' Lounge including the Posting Games sub-forum, as well as the Techies' Lounge but darrenw89 is not just a lounge lizard, he can also be found helping out in the Networking Hardware Configuration forum. Here's what we discovered about our latest proud recipient of the Featured Poster badge when we decided to probe that little bit deeper…

Where are you from and how old are you?

St. Albans, Hertfordshire which is in England, and I am 19 years old.

What is your occupation?

Currently I work as a Customer Service Manager for a DSG (consumer electronics) store.

What is your favorite computer and why?

That would have to be an Acer because they tend to be good value for money and pretty reliable - although who could turn down an Alienware (providing they weren't paying?) My current travel rig is an Acer 3610, Windows Vista Home Premium, 1024mb ram + 1770mb virtual ram, 80gb hard disk, tv tuner, wlan, dual layer dvd burner…

What first brought you to DaniWeb?

To be perfectly honest I can't remember as it was a couple of years ago, but I certainly don't regret joining.

What makes you stay here?

There is such a good mix of people, and I especially like how so many people from different nationalities and backgrounds can all get on so well here.

What is your favorite forum and why?

The Geeks' Lounge mainly because it is so chilled, and chilled is good! But there's so much of interest here it is hard to choose.

What are your interests outside of IT and outside of DaniWeb?

I have a few, and used to do a bit of rifle shooting at a proper range may I add. I have also been a sound technician for a local theatre, but mostly I enjoy spending time with family - especially the ones you don't tend to see much of.

Name the best thing about DaniWeb, and one thing you would change if it were in your power?

That would have to be the people, there is so much knowledge here. I would probably come up with specialists for certain areas if I could change something.

How long do you spend, on average, on DaniWeb every day?

Not enough! In fact I only recently rediscovered DaniWeb - so at the moment I'm lucky if it's 1/2 an hour a day, but I do still post the odd message from my phone or iPod.

Any fascinating facts about yourself that you would like to share with the DaniWeb community?

Yes! I am off to cook some Pasta!

by EddieC

Gentlemen, start your engines. Google App Engines, that is (and ladies, too). That was the word from Google tech lead Kevin Gibbs in his keynote speech at the annual Google I/O conference today at the Moscone Center in San Francisco.

The company in April introduced App Engine to the first 10,000 developers to take it, a program offering the ability to run applications on Google’s worldwide server farms at essentially no charge. Today it removed the waiting list, which had topped 150,000 names, according to reports.

Google’s slogan for the App Engine program was and is “no assembly required, easy to scale and free to get started.” The program gives developers free access to dynamic Web services, 500MB of persistent storage via the Google File System with queries, sorting and transactions, load balancing and automatic scaling and its Python-based development environment. App Engine also includes access to BigTable, Google’s home-grown high-performance database that works atop the GFS and was designed to automatically scale to hundreds or thousands of systems as additional resources become available.

There are other limits to the free version. Developers are limited to three registered applications. Applications are limited to 5 million page views per month, 200 million megacycles of CPU processing and 10 GB of bandwidth per 24-hour period. Charges would apply after that, which according to most reports would be roughly comparable to competitive services from Amazon and Salesforce. The company also is expected to publish a pair of new APIs in coming weeks that will introduce image manipulation and memory caching capabilities.