Let your avatar free on Google Wave

The most common question I received about Google Wave is how to enabled the user's profile picture. To begin, obviously you need to have a Google Wave account. If you don't have one, you can come for our BoF session this Sunday. Or you can head on to http://wave.google.com and apply for one.

Go to your Gmail account settings. You can find the link at the top right hand corner of the Gmail UI. Then you scroll down and look for "My Picture" setting. As pictured below, allow your picture to be viewed by everyone.

Now go back to your Wave and voila, you can see your profile picture & so can everyone else. Cheers!

OktoberFOSS!

They have OktoberFest with free beers!

We have OktoberFOSS with free open source software! Malaysia boleh!

FOSS Malaysia 2009

FOSS Malaysia conference 2009 is the premier Open Source event in Malaysia for open source software developers, users, enthusiasts and you! It's happening this October 24th till 25th. They have Richard Stallman, father of Free Software Federation movement in attendance this year. They have MySQL co-founder in as speaker. There will be other sessions on Drupal, Android, Fedora Linux & many more.

You can listen to Ditesh & Yoon Kit talking about FOSS.my 2009 on BFM Radio earlier this week.

Curious? Why don't you check out the schedule to find out more what's happening in FOSS.my.

GTUG Kuala Lumpur & CodeAndroid Malaysia meetup

For GTUG KL, we're holding our meetup this month at FOSS.my 2009. I know it's a paid event, but if you register by today, you will get to attend all of the talks for 20 bucks! Today is the last day for this awesome deal. Register now!

CodeAndroid Malaysia, a developer community for Android developers & users, is launching at FOSS.my 2009 with a Birds of Feather session!

Together with CodeAndroid Malaysia, we'll be talking about the Android software platform and how to start building apps for Android. We'll also be talking about Google Maps API, App Engine, OpenSocial & anything that you can throw at us. If we don't have the answers, we'll find someone who does. There will be demos from local Android developers & users from the community during our session. So, come and visit us while you're there!

On top of that, we will also be giving away a couple of books from Oreilly & a bunch of Google Wave invites from our community :-))

Join us for CodeAndroid Malaysia BoF session & RSVP now at Facebook.

See you guys there!

Using Multiple Email Addresses With Google Account

I guess many people own a Gmail account. All gmail account comes with a Google Account. With a Google account, you can sign up for a number of Google services (e.g. Blogger, Picasa Web Albums, Youtube, ...). Did you know that you can sign up for a Google account without a Gmail address? Suppose you have a Yahoo mail account, you can still use your Yahoo email address to register for a Google account.

Why would I want to do that? Well, managing multiple accounts can be a hassle. I have separate Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo Mail, Twitter, company email, ... accounts. Sometime 1 single inbox/email address is all I need. I feel that the world will be a better place if I can just maintain a single acount for all services. Projects like OpenID also provide similar convenient.

Google gives you freedom. It does not force you to use Gmail. In fact you can even forward all emails, sent to your Gmail address, to any other email address you want. You can use your existing (non Google) email address to sign up for a Google account. And this Google account can be linked to multiple email addresses.

From Blog

Settings for various Google services can be found at https://www.google.com/accounts/ManageAccount. You might have noticed I have associated my Google account with 5 email addresses. When I arrived at any website (e.g. Youtube) that requires login with my Google account, I can just type in any 1 of the addresses associated with my account.

Suppose you have bought a domain name (e.g. mydomain.com), and created a Google Apps account to manage it. You already have a Gmail address and used it to access your Blogger, Youtube, Picasa services. This is how you can use you existing Google services with your new domain name:

1. Create a new personalized email address (e.g. myname@mydomain.com) through the Google Apps Dashboard. 
2. (Optional) Forward all your mail from myname@mydomain.com to your existing Gmail inbox. In this way, you only have to maintain 1 inbox.
3. Associate this new email address to you existing Google account (as shown in earlier picture).
4. Now you can sign in to your existing Google services with the new email address.

Reference:

• Alternate Email Addresses: Adding alternates