Yousef Ourabi

I’m following the “Best Practices – Building a Production Quality Application on Google App Engine” session at Google IO. Ken Ashcraft is giving this presentation.
movie = Movie()
movie.title = self.request.get(‘title’, None)
movie.director = self.request.get(‘director’, None)
movie.put()
Possible Errors:
Out of Memory
Deadline Exceeded
OverQuotaError
Server Crash
DataStore Crash
Indentical Entity Already Exists
Use logging module: logging.error, logging.debug — which shows up in Admin Console
This is called [...]

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I’m at the Google IO conference, currently in the “What’s next for OpenSocial” presentation. I’m going to try and live blog this:
Speaker: How to balance dictatorship and anarchy…
OpenSocial 0.8 has been release, see http://opensocial.org
Enhancements to JS and XML definitions, RESTful APIs, Templating language
JS/XML:
Main thing: Cleanup and convenience (Gadgets XML, gedgets.* opensocial.*)
InlinedMessage bundles (languages, [...]

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The internet archive is trying to reach out and connect with the crawling / harvesting community that uses its open source crawler Heritrix
The first call will occur via a ‘Skypecast’, at the following time:
1500GMT Wednesday May 28th
(8a San Francisco / 11a WashingtonDC / 4p London)
The call will open with a brief overview of what’s new [...]

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It is currently possible to associate multiple URLs with your App Engine instance. However, the administration interface doesn’t permit configuring any redirects.
However, the Administration interface doesn’t allow you to configure any redirects, which could lead to major search engines associating your domains with duplicate content.
I’m going to cover how I enabled canonical redirects in [...]

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Josh Nichols wrote a article describing his experiences playing with Heroku and this got me thinking about Heroku vs App Engine — I had mentioned in my April 8th post (“App Engine and Django For the Win“) that it would be interested to see how the competitors played out (Heroku, AWS vs App Engine)
It will [...]

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An Introductory article I wrote for the Free Software Magazine several months ago has just been published. The article is an introductory walk through of an “hello world” FreeBSD Kernel module, and also all the steps required to compile a custom FreeBSD kernel (which isn’t strictly necessary to follow the Article).
The article is published in [...]

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I’m really about to geek out on you — I’m going to (complain) compare the Google App Engine configuration file (app.yaml) to the Django setting.py.
Simon Wilson of OpenID and django-openid fame wrote a post on logging in Django and got me thinking a long these lines.
App.yaml sucks. Why? Because it’s not really “pythonic” and [...]

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Just stumbled across Bloog a blog written in Python on Google’s App Engine. The code is open source, released under the MIT license and currently hosted by GitHub: here
It will be interesting to watch the number of open source app-engine centric applications blossom — a blogging tool is a good first step.

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Thanks to Marzia Niccolai from the App Engine Team for posting these on the App Engine Blog. I’m in two of them!!! Internet famous at last — especially now that CNET is getting bought my CBS — this is just the beginning of my media career — just wait and see.
http://picasaweb.google.com/appengine.hackathon/SanFranciscoHackAThon

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The Amazon web services blog has a link to a new eclipse based product that makes it easier to manage common Amazon AWS tasks (launching instances, creating security zones, assigning elastic IPs)
You can download Cloud Studio or watch an introductory flash video at service-cloud
I think it’s great that people are jumping in and creating solutions [...]

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Gawsh is the Google App Engine Web Service Helper (mini framework).
Also featured at the Google Apps Hackathon in San Francisco

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Mirrorrr is a cool App Engine example — type in a URL and it will fetch and mirror any page.

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Just arrived at 345 Spear St (4th floor, aka the Google floor) for the San Francisco App Engine Hackathon. I’m going to make a best effort at updating this throughout the day, and a more concerted effort to reconcile my notes at the end of the day.
More updates soon, things are starting to roll.
10:03: Google [...]

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Blekko — allegedly a search engine has just scored another round of funding according to Mike Arrington at Techcrunch — Blekko raised 3 million at a 23 million post money valuation.
Mike is (implicitly) comparing Blekko to Cuill. Cuill (pronounced “cool”) also in stealth mode claims to have a much cheaper, and more efficient way of [...]

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I’m throwing up Disqus comments on posts that don’t already have comments. It will be interesting to see how it panes out…
consider it a short term experiment

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Powerset finally came out of private beta this Sunday with a search product around Wikipedia, and Freebase.
It will be interesting to see how competitor Hakia responds.
I’m a little underwhelmed with powerset, especially since it is searching semi-structured data where some of the relationships are more explicit than out in the wild.
http://20bits.com/2008/05/12/powerset-launches-verdict-meh/
http://venturebeat.com/2008/05/12/powerset-opens-to-everyone-now-whats-next/
http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/05/11/powerset-launches-showcase-for-user-search-experience/
http://gigaom.com/2008/05/11/powerset-is-live/

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Courtesy of news.com
Sun has announced it is partnering with Amazon’s EC2 cloud computing service to offer (Open)Solaris on EC2 instances… I wonder if this will pave the way for BSD (Free, Open) derivatives to be officially supported by Amazon…

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