After our small “unavailability” on Du networks, we’re back online!

It seems that places.ae is currently blocked if you are accessing the Internet using Du. All Etisalat customers dont’ seem to be affected (yet). We raised this with Du, and hope it will be resolved soon.

We apologize for this inconvenience. Guess somebody left a less-than-perfect remark on one of Du’s customer service shops

Edit: It seems multiple websites are blocked.

Thank you,
Michael

Put on your lederhosen, and join Dubai’s German community in this year’s October Fest. Below is a list of participating places:

• Hofbrauhaus Grab your pair of Lederhosen or Dirndl and celebrate with the German female singers Sylvie and Sonja who will get you going with an exhilarating rendition of the ‘birdie dance’!
  1 – 31 October 7 PM – 11 PM
• Grand Hyatt – Air-conditioned Tent Look forward to the renowned traditional Oompah Band, long benches and cold steins – all in an air-conditioned tent in Grand Hyatt Dubai’s beautiful gardens.
  13 – 23 October
• The Irish Village Traditional German festival: a buffet spread of German specialties, including the so popular sauerkraut, grilled sausages, herrings, pretzels etc. washed down by german ale among other choices and for the entertainment an Oompah band, The PIK AS specially flown in from Germany.
  13 – 14 October 7 PM – Late
• Healey’s Bar & Terrace Celebrate Oktoberfest the year in Healey’s Bar and Terrace. German specialties, including roast chicken, homemade sausages, sauerkraut, freshly baked bezels
  14 – 17 October 6 PM – 2 AM
• Der Keller Traditional authentic flavours from Berlin, Bitburg and Burgdorf are highlighted on a menu most assuredly ‘made in Germany’. A selection of german beers smooths the palette for enjoying a German Riesling with your meal
  6 PM – 1 AM Daily, closed on Saturday and Sunday.
• Brauhaus Brauhaus presents an authentic Bavarian experience where guest can savour mouth-watering traditional German specialties.
  19 – 23 October
• Dusk Terrace Live entertainment will be provided by The Munich Musicians and Yodeling Queen Lissi. Their repertoire of traditional melodies and jolly Bavarian dance music is fantastic and world renowned
  12 – 15 -October
• Bridges Sports Bar Visitors will be able to choose from the full range of international yeast beverages.
  1 – 31 October 6 PM – 1:30 AM

We hope to see you in one of these places!

Ein Prosit!
The Places.ae team.

This morning, the web instances of places went down for little over an hour. We restarted them and are all up and running again. The issue was due to a memory leak in our application pool, but all is smooth again. We also decreased the session lifetime from 2 months to 2 weeks, this would put a bit less stress on the session management bits.

We apologize for the inconvenience.

Thank you,
Michael

Hi all,

Seems we had a small error with facebook logins, due to an HTML encoded access token which we didn’t escape properly.

This is all fixed now, sorry for the inconvenience.

Thank you,
Michael

Dear all,

It seems that the Google Maps API is broken, and some places could show up without any maps. We can’t do anything about it, but please wait until Google fixes this (which I’m sure they’ll do very soon).

Thank you,
Michael

The places.ae team wish you a happy ramadan to all Muslims around the world.

Quick one, now you can use facebook to login to places.ae. This way, you don’t have to create another set of credentials.

Hi all,
We updated the comments engine. With following changes:

• if there’s a large number of comments, these will be hidden from the initial view.
• the order of comments is reversed, the latest comments are now on top
• No more anonymity, you can set your name even when not logged in so it won’t show “anonymous” for all comments anymore
• The captcha is easier to read

We had have great brainstorming sessions and you can look forward to interesting changes in places.ae in the next few weeks. In the meantime, hope you like the new way of commenting.

Thank you,
Michael

You shouldn’t have noticed a thing (aside from a very embarrassing HTTP/500 Error that came up for a few seconds), but we migrated the site to a new source code versioning system.

All is up and running, smoothly!