I've got two new articles up the App Engine site, one on Paging, and the other on Sharding Counters. The Sharding Counters article is fun because it highlights some of counter-intuitive solutions you apply when working with the kind of datastore that App Engine supplies. I worry that your paging article promotes the terrible (but seemingly standard and unquestioned) paging model of counting up from the present — the content on every page is constantly changing.

My Dopplr Annual Report for 2008 is available. Highlights include my CO2 consumption (0.6 Hummers) and my speed (about that of a duck).

Time Machine for every Unix out there is a great tutorial on how to get Time Machine like backups using rsync and cron. I don't need it as an external backup, but just for the ability to go back in time, you know, when I forget to add a file to a repository and blow away the directory believing everying is safe in subversion, or when I edit and overwrite an original photo, or, or .

The title of this article is actually misleading as the code isn't ported, but altered to run on both App Engine and under CGI. App Engine exposes a CGI environment that your requests run under, so the real challenge comes from the differences in the runtime environment. Imaging The first big difference is that PIL (the Python Imaging Library) isn't available on App Engine, and it's not possible to add C extensions to your App Engine project, so we will have to find a pure Python substitute.

The prospects for Seed and Gjs look good, the idea of having a scripting extension built in at such a low level is awesome. One of the things I've been looking at lately has been Gio and GVFS; you see, I had this idea of trying to build a text editor based on Acme in GTK+, but the stumbling block came about from the limited implementation of FUSE, which doesn't support non-blocking I/O on your filesystem, which would be required if the editor were to have any fidelity to the original Acme implementation.

This is a DecimalProperty class, which will allow you to add Python decimals as properties to your App Engine models. If you want to create your own property types then I strongly suggest reading Rafe's article on Extending Model Properties, which is what I followed when creating DecimalProperty. Just a bit of code I needed for a project. Posted here if others need it: from google.appengine.ext import db from decimal import Decimal class DecimalProperty(db.

When trying to port Robaccia to App Engine the hard part has been finding anything to do. If you remember from my previous write-up I started with choosing the components to build on, but in the case of App Engine the model classes are already provided and the development kit already provides Django templates, which have become a favorite of mine, so there's little to choose except for a library to dispatch incoming requests.

I had to write some Automake and Autoconf scripts from scratch yesterday and came across this in the documentation: Automake is a tool for automatically generating Makefile.ins from files called Makefile.am. Each Makefile.am is basically a series of make variable definitions, with rules being thrown in occasionally. The generated Makefile.ins are compliant with the GNU Makefile standards. The GNU Makefile Standards Document (see Makefile Conventions) is long, complicated, and subject to change.

Caden, looking over my wife's shoulder as she is watching a video she just took on the camera: Reilly, come see this, mommy made a YouTube!

I have, for reasons that will become obvious in a week or so, been looking at text editors and what happens when you save a file. For example, if we are editing the file filename.txt, different things will happen when you save the file depending on which editor you are using. VIM is fairly straight forward in that it renames the original file to filename.txt~, writes the modified contents to filename.

I'm writing, not in seeking pity (well, a little pity wouldn't hurt), but as an explaination of why you may not have gotten a response from me for the past few months, or why if you did get a response it may have been weeks or even months in coming. It all started three months ago when Lynne started having some health problems, which became a cancer scare, which it turns out she didn't have, but still ended up in her having two surgeries.

The Algebraist by Iain M. Banks My review rating: 4 of 5 stars This was a really wide ranging book filled with lots of interesting ideas and musings, some on what a species that evolved in a gas giant would look and act like, how an interstellar civilization would operate, etc. The downside was that most of the aliens weren't very alien, you'd see larger differences between different groups of humans than what you saw between the differing alien races.

Computer Science, at a deep and fundamental level, is broken, and that applies not only to software but to hardware. One of the reasons that I have this feeling is that after programming for the past 25 years the field hasn't really changed. The conversations aren't any different. You could substitute 'Windows API' or 'Borland CGI' for 'HTML and CSS' and you'd be having the same exact conversations I had 15 or 20 years ago.

Yogurt Oreo Do we now see the dawn of SSEO: Speech Search Engine Optimization? "Speech" Posted by Zac on 2008-11-18 D'oh. Fixed. Thanks. Posted by Joe Gregorio on 2008-11-18

App Engine Fan: Last month, I wrote I would not post the sql connector's source code until it was a little more functional. Guess what? I changed my mind: you can find all the code at http://code.google.com/p/gae-sqlite/. From the code.google.com project page: This is a module that will allow you to run Google's App Engine development server with an SQLite backend. The concept is intended to be generic enough that other databases (mysql, SQL Server, Oracle.

I will be at the Google offices in Ann Arbor, MI for the App Engine Hackathon on Nov 17th. Here's the details and the signup page if you can make it. Oh, hey - right in my backyard! I'll have to make sure to come out. Posted by l.m. orchard on 2008-11-07 Right in my backyard as well - but I'll be in California that week. Wish I could make it.

I've just started as a Developer Advocate for Google App Engine and there's been a lot of talk of "lock-in" recently. Google will have more to say officially in the future, as obviously my blog isn't the place to read about Google's official position, but I would like to point out the following things that have come up in conversation that people didn't know: The development kit is open sourced.

Things I have done for the first time this election season: Donated to a campaign during a primary Donated to a campaign during the general election Put a campaign sign on my blog Put a campaign sign in the yard Put a campaign sign on the car Canvassed Many people have put the case for Barack Obama more eloquently that I ever could, so I'll simply ask you to get out and vote.

New York Times: After losing $18.8 billion in the first half of this year and facing more red ink for months to come, G.M. is now trying to salvage its future through a possible merger with Chrysler, another deeply troubled American automaker. I wonder if raising CAFE standards five or ten years ago would have avoided this situation. We can all rest easy knowing that all the money spent by GM on lobbying has paid off so handsomely.

I haven't really commented on the financial meltdown except to point out the failure of the Free Market Fairy believers, but now it appears that even they themselves are pointing out the obvious, including Alan Greenspan: "Those of us who have looked to the self-interest of lending institutions to protect shareholders' equity, myself included, are in a state of shocked disbelief," he told the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform.