DBS Bank has just launched the first regional Facebook Places and Check-in Deals campaign in Asia (Singapore, Hong Kong, Mumbai, Jakarta, Taipei).

• The campaign is open to anyone who owns a supported mobile device (Facebook App On iPhone/Android/Blackberry or Facebook Mobile through your mobile phone browsers).
• Users just have to visit the DBS Facebook Fan Page to get started.
• Users checking in to “DBS Places” Facebook App will be able to earn points and redeem merchant deals throughout the campaign.
• At the end of the campaign (5th September 2011), the highest point earner of each country will earn a 3 days 2 nights vacation of their destination (Singapore, Hong Kong, China, India, Indonesia or Taiwan) of choice.

It may sounds complicated at first (which is how I felt when I first read it) and hence I have put up a tutorial on how to participate in this campaign using Facebook App on iPhone.

Registration Stage

• Step 1: Go to DBS Facebook Fan Page and “Like” the page.
• Step 2: Go to “DBS Places” Facebook App and allow the app to access your Facebook details like all other Facebook Apps.
• Step 3: Register your details like last 4 digits of your NRIC number and mobile numbers with DBS.

Check-in Stage

• Step 1: Launch Facebook App on iPhone
• Step 2: Tap On “Places”
• Step 3: Tap On “Check In”

• Step 4: Search For “DBS Places”
• Step 5: Select The “DBS Place” you want to check-in
• Step 6: Tap “Check In”

To see how much points you have accumulated and how many check-ins you made, you can go to https://apps.facebook.com/dbsplaces/ using your desktop’s browser. The statistics should be updated in real time.

Every check-in to a DBS Place may allow you to redeem some rewards, like for example, checking-in to “DBS Places – Spinelli Coffee” will allow you to purchase a fresh brew of coffee at SGD$1.50. Of course terms and conditions applies!

Terms: Valid until 4 Sept 2011, from Mon to Fri 3pm – 5pm only. Check-in to “DBS Places – Spinelli” to redeem deal. Valid at Orchard Central, Heeren, Forum, Suntec City, Great World City & Velocity @ Novena Square. Not valid with other promotions, vouchers & Friend’s Card. Payment with cash only

At the end of the campaign on 5th September 2011, the highest point earner of each country will win! As mentioned earlier, the winner will win a 3 days 2 nights vacation of their destination (Singapore, Hong Kong, China, India, Indonesia or Taiwan) of choice.

Below is the breakdown on the points system.

• Check-In Points – Earn 5 points when you check-in to a new DBS Places location in Hong Kong, India, Indonesia, Singapore or Taiwan.
• Refer A Friend Points – Recommend DBS Places to your friends on Facebook and earn 3 points for every successful referral.
• Network Points – For every Facebook friend in your network participating in DBS Places, you get 1 extra point just for being so connected!

Facebook Page: DBS Places
Facebook App: DBS Places

Thanks to DBS, I will be giving away SGD$10 Spinelli Vouchers to 10 lucky readers/twitterers.

All you have to do is retweet this post using the Twitter button located under the “Social” box below this post!

Fine Print

• This Giveaway is open to all readers of lesterchan.net who are based in Singapore.
• I will search Twitter.com for tweets and retweets to tabulate the data and randomly pick the winners using MySQL RAND() function.
• Winners will be contacted via Twitter’s Direct Message (DM). Make sure you are following @gamerz on Twitter.
• Winners will receive the Spinelli vouchers via snail mail.
• Details of winners such as name and blog URL may be posted on lesterchan.net.
• My decision on all matters related to this giveaway is final and no correspondence will be entertained.
• I reserves the right to amend these terms and conditions at anytime without prior notice.
• This giveaway ends on 11:59pm (23:59), Wednesday, 31st August 2011 (GMT+8 Singapore Time).

Thanks to SingTel and HTC for organising the Most Checked-in Party at Zouk . It was awesome! I was slightly late for the party due to work commitments but better late than never arrive at all!

First thing upon reaching Zouk is for you to register for the party. There are a few computers outside for you to login to your Facebook account, upon logging in, you need to like SingTel’s Facebook Page and then allow SingTel & HTC Event Facebook Application to access your Facebook details. This is to allow the RFID tagging to work.

After you registered, you proceed on to pose for photos in front of the giant Facebook wall mock up and after that, you are in Zouk!

I found a total of 5 RFIDs Machines at the party:

• Giant Facebook Wall (Photo Taking)
• The Bar (Free Flow Drinks)
• Toy Machine (Catch Free Android Figurines Using UFO Catcher)
• Farm Story Zone (Free Ben & Jerry’s Ice Cream – Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough)
• Angry Birds Zone (Play Life Size Angry Birds Game)

Giant Facebook Wall

Free Ben & Jerry’s Ice Cream

Angry Birds Zone

GNASD???

There are also 2 contests that took place, 1 is abbreviation challenge and the other is imitating the Android bots dancing. The abbreviation challenge is tough! There are some abbreviations that I never used before like LTNS (Long Time No See) and GNASD (Good Night And Sweet Dreams).

Door Gift – Facebook Stickers

Li Xiang and I enjoyed ourselves at the party, hope to see more of these type of geeky/social party happening!

If you are into computer engineering, this video is for you. Watch the full video (52:41). It is definitely worth your time!

Snippet

Every work day Facebook is safely updated with hundreds of changes including bug fixes, new features, and product improvements. Given hundreds of engineers, thousands of changes every week and hundreds of millions of users we have worldwide, this task seems like it should be impossible. In this tech talk, Chuck Rossi will dig into the tools and processes built by our Release Engineering team that make it possible to push daily updates to the site.

Summary

• They cut from trunk to RC on Sunday 6pm
• Tuesday 4pm is where they push it live
• They uses SVN for their central repo and git for development
• They do releases every weekday
  • Monday – Small daily pushes
  • Tuesday – Release push
  • Wednesday – Larger daily push
  • Thursday – Regular daily push
  • Friday – Careful daily push (mentioned that developers always slack on a Friday aka Friday you are most likely drunk)
• Facebook has slow traffic on Friday, but lots of traffic on Sat/Sun
• Facebook has 500 core engineers divided into 15 teams
• All users who works in Facebook does testing. When employees within the company type “http://facebook.com” they will be redirected to “http://latest.facebook.com“. Latest is defined as the merge between current Facebook production and what is going up on Tuesday
• Facebook does bug filing via email as well. If you send an email to a pre-defined address, it will be tracked by the bug tracker
• There is a Facebook Bugs Groups which all employee is a member (Similar to ours)
• Facebook.com is not a sandbox, strictly no testing on production
• Only 3 core release engineers
• 60 engineers on standby when a release takes place
• 3 phrases of pushing
  • A1: http://inyour.facebook.com aka staging, last chance to check what you are pushing. Looks good, moving on to A2
  • A2: Small % of machines, a couple of 1000 machines
  • A3: All
• Every developer, either develop against mock datasource or production database. Yes, you heard me right- Production DB. (And they have an army of DB admins to take care of that)
• Staging a.k.a. inyour.facebook.com and latest.facebook.com point to production database
• Facebook has oncall engineers for different teams with regards of different aspect of the website like Like Button, Feeds, Search, etc
• Automated infrastructure
  • IRC bots
    • They communicate via IRC about 300 to 500 people and 3 release engineers
    • They don’t talk to people, rather they ask people to talk to bots
      • Are we pushing today?
      • Can I get revision been merged?
      • When is my revision going out?
    • All this questions above can be answered by bots
      • /msg request_bot rt
  • Test automation
    • Test engineering team
    • Test console
      • Unit Test
      • Water Test
  • Shadow branch
    • Shadowing the production branch + changes that is requested
  • Error tracking
    • Per PHP error
    • Stack trace
    • SVN Blame
    • 1 button file as bug to the person and to the person who reviewed the code
    • How often the error occurs (like Google Analytics but for errors)
  • Gatekeeper
    • Console to change who can see the feature
    • Conditional statements within the code itself
    • Able to filter via Employees, US East Coast, US West Coast, Datacenter, Age, IP White/Black List. Able to bump to show only to 1% public then slowly increasing
  • Push Karma
    • General request page
    • How many files, LOC is being changed, risk ratings
    • Abstraction of discussions, call for changes are all being pulled
    • Magic Push Karma
      • Everyone starts with 4 stars
      • From there you go down
      • Private shaming
  • Perflab
    • Every SVN checkin is being plotted to a graph
      • Difference between production trunk and production+release trunk
      • Eg: A fix is make in trunk but did not get to release
  • HipHop
    • Everyone hates PHP, it is crappy and slow
    • They compiled PHP
    • Transformation Process
      • Parser -> Static Analyzer -> Pre-Optimizer -> Type Interface Engine -> Post Optimizer -> Code Generator -> G++
      • 1 GB binary is Facebook.com. Static, web resources, everything
      • Takes 8 to 10 minutes to build
      • faster by compiling PHP
  • BitTorrent
    • 1GB of binary file push to thousands and thousands of servers using torrent
    • Push 1GB of binary to all servers within 15 minutes
• Tools alone won’t save you, you need the right company, right people and right culture
• From Q&A
  • Robust backup and recovery system just in case someone did something stupid
  • Must be backward compatible, they might be a chance a few hundred machines does not have the new code in
  • While pushing to A3, automated test are still being run on A1 and A2 to detect potential problem
  • You write your test for your code
• phabricator – Phabricator is the Open Source release of Facebook’s internal tools for code review, repository browsing and change management. It contains two major applications: Differential, a code review tool, and Diffusion, a repository browser
• HipHop – HipHop for PHP transforms PHP source code into highly optimized C++. It was developed by Facebook and was released as open source in early 2010

Video: Push: Tech Talk – May 26, 2011 [HQ]
Facebook: Facebook Engineering

kaypo.me is an interesting service created by my fellow NUS SoC graduate, Kent Nguyen. It allows you to update your Facebook status via SMS. Not many people are on smart phones with data plan but almost everyone has a mobile plan that comes with at least 300 free SMSes per month. Even feature phones will work with this service as well.

Currently receiving or replying status’ comments via SMS is in beta, hopefully it will be available for the public soon.

KPo /kay po/ is a service to bridge the existing gap that allow Facebook users to update their status via SMS. The service is not only meant for non-smartphone users, it does benefit smartphone users as it offers a very quick way to update status without having to wait for the Facebook app to launch. Not only the service will do updating from mobile to Facebook, the receiving and replying to status comment feature is soon to be released.

What’s different between KPo and many other services is that KPo’s philosophy is to keep it simple, we want to give mobile users the most intuitive experience via the primitive yet effective SMS channel. On top of that KPo runs on very low cost yet stable systems and we do have a sustainable business model in place for the long run.

This reminds me of TweetSG some time back where you can send a tweet via SMS. But unfortunately due to the high traffic (and thus high cost), they couldn’t survive as a free service and eventually they sort of become inactive. Let’s hope kaypo.me will be more successful than TweetSG.

Cool, didn’t know Edelman is the PR agency for Facebook Singapore. Personally I prefer Facebook Check-In than Foursquare for unknown reasons.

Singapore, 16 February 2011 – Facebook today announced the launch of Facebook Places in Singapore. Already available in some countries, Facebook Places allows you to “check-in” and share with your friends where you are and who you’re with, find friends who are nearby and discover new places your friends like – all in real time.

Facebook Places is available to users in Singapore with mobile access to the Facebook application for iPhone, Android, Blackberry, HP webOS, and Windows Phone 7, or to touch.facebook.com. When you use Places, you’ll be able to see if any of your friends are currently checked in nearby and connect with them easily. You can also check into nearby Places to tell your friends where you are, tag your friends in the Places you visit together, and view comments your friends have made about the Places you visit.

How to use Facebook Places?

• Go to the “Places” icon within the Facebook mobile applications or touch.facebook.com, then tap the “Check In” button, which will pull up a list of places near you.
• Choose the place that matches where you are. If there isn’t one already in the list, users can search for it or create a new one.
• Tap the “Check in” button to share that you are at the place. Users can also add comments and tag friends.

With Places, users are in control of what they share and with whom they share. They choose whether or not to share their location when they check in at a place, and only friends can see when they do, unless users choose to set their privacy setting otherwise. When users check in, they can tag friends who are with them but only if their settings allow it. When they are tagged, they are always notified.

Places is currently available in the United States, Japan, Australia, Canada, the United Kingdom, France, Spain, Italy, Germany, Switzerland, Denmark, Norway and Sweden.

For more information, check out: http://www.facebook.com/places/