Blue Sky On Mars

• Google App Engine for developers
  The best high level overview (with some details thrown in) of App Engine that I’ve seen.
  (tags: google appengine)
• From Al Gore’s Chief Speechwriter: Simple Tips for a Damn Good Presentation (Plus: Breakdancing) | The Blog of Author Tim Ferriss
  good tips on giving presentations. Covers the words and ideas of a talk.
  (tags: presentation tips writing)

Linkage

• Battle at Kruger
  Lions, buffalo and crocodile in an amazing amateur video.
  (tags: animals youtube video)

Linkage

• 07:54 @ianlandsman: AOL won’t force Yahoo to run Windows #
• 09:35 just commented on using Vellum as a Capistrano (and Rake)-like tool in Python: tinyurl.com/642xkw #
• 09:39 @jakemarsh appears to be trying to test Twitter’s limits (he’s following 54,146 people, now including me!) #

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Isn’t quoting out of context great:

I hate computers.
[From Ian Bicking: App Engine: Commodity vs. Proprietary]

More seriously, though, in saying “I hate computers”, Ian is actually talking about the opposite of being a Luddite. He’s dreaming of a world in which much of computing just works in the background, so that we can spend our time doing more important and interesting things in the foreground.

I’m linking to Ian here because he’s said exactly what I have been thinking about App Engine: from a Python programming perspective the APIs are simple and clear. I can easily imagine a ZODB-based implementation of Google’s data store API. Just change your imports, and you can be off of Google’s infrastructure and on to your own.

Of course, for a great many people there won’t be any reason to be off of Google’s infrastructure. App Engine is just so darn easy. Amazon Web Services is impressive because it makes scalability affordable and available. App Engine interests me because, for its broad-but-still-limited set of use cases, it makes scalability a no brainer. “Build your app like this, and you never have to think of scaling” is a nice thought. I’ve been around enough to know that people using App Engine will still have to think of scaling some, but not nearly as much as with just about any other solution.

Back to the lock-in aspect, though. I still see App Engine as likely to be utterly unsuccessful with large businesses. That is, until a new Google Appliance comes out. I’ve been predicting such a beast since Google Docs was first introduced, and I think App Engine makes it all the more likely. I still believe that there will come a time when Google will sell boxes to big companies that those companies can toss into some racks on their networks and deploy App Engine apps locally, as well as run Google Docs on their private nets. Things will get even more interesting at that point.

You can bet that Amazon is studying App Engine closely and considering their own high-level service as I write this. From a developer’s perspective, this competition is going to be awesome.

Python, Software Development app engine, aws, google

• 06:59 video I was working on is temporarily on hold. So, it’s off to the other pile of things to do. #
• 07:58 caught up on blog commenting. whew. time for some real work. #
• 10:14 Vellum is starting to look interesting. zedshaw.com/projects/vellum/index.html #
• 15:45 @sillyevar no TurboGears in Google App Engine yet. Lots of Python stdlib not available, so no Mako or Genshi yet. Not to mention minor t … #

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It occurred to me just now that Google App Engine and Amazon Web Services are only barely in competition right now. If you want an infinite storage system like AWS S3 in App Engine, you need to code it yourself (ignoring the preview limits App Engine currently has). If you want to deploy apps as easily as you can with App Engine in AWS, you need a bunch of infrastructure that AWS does not provide.

I’m happy to see that App Engine’s datastore is transactional, unlike SimpleDB. I didn’t see anything in my skim of some docs about whether App Engine has eventual consistency or if you can immediately pull out data that you stuff in. My guess is that you can immediately pull out the data you shove in. This is a win over SimpleDB, in my opinion.

App Engine is just tons higher-level than AWS. Of course, you can host anything you want in AWS. But, by trading away a bunch of that flexibility, Google has made a service that allows people to build apps that scale well with a minimum of fuss.

Python, Software Development amazon, app engine, aws, google

Google’s App Engine has been released. This is much cooler than just opening up BigTable for outside access (which is what TechCrunch reported over the weekend). One big difference between App Engine and Amazon Web Services is that the The Development Environment lets you build an app locally, including Google’s auth API and datastore. That’s very clever. You can build up an app completely and then deploy it when ready.

Or, in the case of the preview period, when you get an account… which, sadly, I didn’t. I rather wish there was a bit more information about when more developer slots will be opened. It would be a shame to create a cool app and have to sit on it for months. It would also be nice to know what pricing will look like, but given what they are giving away for free, I’m guessing it will not be unreasonable.

Overall, I’ve got to say that it looks like a great service on the surface.

Python, Software Development app engine, google

• 13:46 done with meeting. time for some video work! #

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It’s kind of a weird thing to want to do, but I’d like to be able to “flip” the screen image on one of my displays on my Mac, in real time. The Mac lets you rotate the image (in 90 degree increments), but there is no way to make it like an image seen in a mirror. Does anyone know of software that lets you do that?

Technology mac, mac os x

Interesting rumor, and totally plausible. Just as Amazon has thought “why not make some money off of all of this great infrastructure we’ve built”, it looks like Google is going to do the same thing: Source: Google To Launch BigTable As Web Service

Google may be releasing BigTable, its internal database system, as a web service to compete with Amazon SimpleDB, according to a source with knowledge of the launch.

This will be one more non-traditional database among the many interesting choices that exist today.

Python, Software Development bigtable, google