tech

Thoughts on Google App Engine

Thoughts on Google App Engine: I’m more than a little concerned, though, by how much vendor lock-in there is with App Engine.  At first glance, it doesn’t look like the apps will be portable at all.  If I want to switch providers, or add in other providers so I’m not relying solely on Google, I’m outta luck.  

I’m hopeful other languages get supported, too.  I think Python is great – don’t get me wrong – but we have a lot more experience with other languages, so there’ll be a learning curve.

Finally, I’m dying to find out what pricing for an application of our scale will look like.  I can see some immediate, obvious things I’d like to try to do on App Engine, but the beta limits aren’t gonna cut it for us.  :(

[snip -ed]

My favorite bit?  In theory, Google has solved the data scaling problem.  I don’t mean raw binary (blob) storage, which S3, SmugFS, MogileFS, and plenty of other things have solved, but the “database” scaling problem.  Every popular web app runs into this problem, and it’s typically solved with a combination of memcached, federation, and replication.  But it’s messy.  In theory, Google has automated that piece for us.  I can’t wait to play with it and see if that’s true.

I also can’t wait to see who else is going to wade into this fray.  Sun?  Microsoft?  Yahoo?  IBM?   [More info from the field…]
Source: SmugBlog: Don MacAskill

Coda Confidential (The birth of RSD)

Coda Confidential: We had just recently finished Coda, and with one hour to fill and a lot of Coda-related things still swirling around my mind, I pretty much just started talking. What followed was a whole lot of hyper-warp thoughts about all things Panic. [So what caught my ear was the story of the first product they did which was an early version tracker which got shelved because they realized they’d either have to have access to “version tracker” or the like, or maintain their own database of latest versions.

This was kind of how RSD got started. I had a docs page which discussed the settings Archipelago (the blog editing software I had authored) needed for several of the major blogging platforms. As I was updating it for the millionth time with yet another engine I realized that I could write a document that Archipelago could use for setup, and the customer service emails (which is what caused me to update the page) would probably go away to a great degree. All I’d have to do is keep, say an XML file on my server up to date, and having done it once all Archipelago users could benefit.

Happy with the thought, I was dissatisfied with how this wouldn’t reduce the problem to near zero because while I had all the major cases covered, it would always be my problem to keep “database” up to date. I looked for an existing format so that I wouldn’t have to sell anyone on a format and found really dense hard to understand formats that were very general and didn’t seem to cleanly fit the use case. I floated a couple of versions past the indie developers I know, found some support initial support from two vendors I cared greatly about, and the rest as they say is history.

It was a nothing to lose story in that if I had received a big yawn, I could have hosted the file for my users, and they at least would have had a better experience most of the time. But this result was far better since everyone has benefited, and we all continue to benefit from the support of the blog engine folks.

Anyway, years later it comes as little surprise that a lot of software small and large have similar birthing stories…]
Source: Coda author

Camcorder Brings Zen to the Shoot

Camcorder Brings Zen to the Shoot – New York Times: Careful, though; even these enhancements are complications: more moving parts, more things to learn, more elements to track. Each additional feature nibbles away at that sense of mastery, that mental comfort zone. Same with digital cameras, whose movie modes also take good video: anything with modes is necessarily more complicated. [Simplicity rules. I have to sell that in the next week or so.]

Bike Network 2.0

Bike Network 2.0: Her team created a modified Google Map that enables cyclists to log on and trace the routes they ride every day. Watch the data pile up, and voila — sensible bike routes. “We found out where the actual desire lines are,” she said. “Using existing technology was great.” [Most excellent! Notes on how they did it here.]
Source: StreetsBlog

Persuade Google To Map Bike Routes

Persuade Google To Map Bike Routes:

We are asking Google Maps to incorporate a bike travel as an equal option  to automotive and bus transportation.
This would be very cool and useful, especially with the new tracing algorithms they have recently implemented.
Pass it around to all the cyclists you know.  Google responds quite well to these things.
http://www.petitiononline.com/bikether/petition.html

[Cool. Ya’ll go!]
Source: the Practical Pedal Blog

What’s This Crap About a Ruby Backlash?

What’s This Crap About a Ruby Backlash?: Zed’s rant triggered some patently false anti-Ruby memes that have now been bouncing around the programming blogsphere echo chamber for a few weeks. Disturbingly so. It’s time to put a bullet to the head of the idea that Ruby is experiencing a widespread backlash, that it was just a fad, or that it is inferior to competing technologies such as Groovy. As far as I can tell, the originators of these ideas are people that betray agendas against the success of Ruby and/or Ruby on Rails. Specifically, I’m calling one of them out by name: [It’s never dull ’round these parts.]
Source: Obie Fernandez

Five whys – Joel on Software

Five whys – Joel on Software: After some internal discussion we all agreed that rather than imposing a statistically meaningless measurement and hoping that the mere measurement of something meaningless would cause it to get better, what we really needed was a process of continuous improvement. Instead of setting up a SLA for our customers, we set up a blog where we would document every outage in real time, provide complete post-mortems, ask the five whys, get to the root cause, and tell our customers what we’re doing to prevent that problem in the future. In this case, the change is that our internal documentation will include detailed checklists for all operational procedures in the live environment. [Joel ran across the checklist article in the New Yorker and is putting it to use. Smart. So is understanding the value of service and where it makes sense to live on that continuum. Anyway, all this ties in nicely to the thoughts about system failures and people, with further proof that you cannot engineer out the occurrence of a collapse.]

My Year of Living Dangerously

My Year of Living Dangerously: Being consistently broke this year has given me a great perspective though. I’m fascinated and disgusted at the same time by the people who use sites like Wesabe or Mint to tally, organize, count and recount their money over and over again. I mean, do you realize that more than half of the U.S. doesn’t have any savings beyond a 401k, and the bottom third has no savings at all and heaps of debt? From reading the echo-chamber on the blogs you’d think everyone would find these sites useful. They’re not, especially to the 100MM people in the U.S. that aren’t in the middle or upper class. Seriously, where are the online financial services that will let me schedule out a bunch of bills, and pick and choose among those I can afford to pay this month based on an income that’s less than the total debt payments? That’s what I – and the other 1/3rd in the U.S. – would like to see, believe me. [I had serious conversation about a product like this, although the focus was savings not bill schedule displacement. However, the important difference I see is that it is hard for that bottom third to gain enough access to computers to make the service worthwhile, and of course, they can’t pay for it directly, it would have to be ad based or collect bounties for steering people to other useful credit tools/services/etc. Not simple. I should add that I spent quite a few years being poor when I worked as a musician, and can feel his pain quiet acutely to this day.]