New Project

I'm currently working on a big project, which has the potential to grow into a very profitable free service if given enought time. I'm working in conjunction with affiliatejunction to offer...... well, I won't spoil the surprise by telling you now! You'll have to wait and see. :) Hopefully the "beta" will be ready by next week, so keep posted for updates soon.

AppEngine Apps

I've made my first AppEngine apps now. I plan to do a few more, but for now, here are the URLs:

pi.appspot.com
http-get.appspot.com

I've got a Google AppEngine Account!

Yes, I've finally got it. After waiting 40 minutes, I got my first Google AppEngine Account. But unfortunately I don't have any time to test it here and now. All I had time to do first up was find their first broken link: http://code.google.com/appengine/docs/tools/configuringanapp.html. Try it - they seem to have made at least one mistake!

What languages are supported by Google App Engine?

What languages are supported by Google App Engine?

Currently, Google App Engine allows you to write your applications with Python 2.5. For security reasons, some Python modules written in C are disabled in our system. Also, since Google App Engine doesn't support writing to disk, some libraries that support this and other functionalities are only partially enabled. Our developer documentation gives a good overview of the Python runtime environment. A description and full reference of Python libraries that are disabled or partially disabled can be found here.

Additionally, your website templates can include Javascript along with your HTML. Among other things, this allows you to write webservices that make use of Ajax web development techniques.

From the Google FAQ

Google AppEngine

What is Google AppEngine?
How to get a Google AppEngine Account
Google AppEngine Accounts giveaways
Free Google AppEngine Account
Account details: username and password for a Google AppEngine Account
Date and Time of Google AppEngine release account register

Do these words make you excited? They do for me. Here's why.

Google just launched a new service, Google AppEngine. Google App Engine lets you run your web applications on Google's infrastructure. App Engine applications are easy to build, easy to maintain, and easy to scale as your traffic and data storage needs grow. With App Engine, there are no servers to maintain: You just upload your application, and it's ready to serve your users.
Here is the official announcement:

Today we’re announcing a preview release of Google App Engine, an application-hosting tool that developers can use to build scalable web apps on top of Google’s infrastructure. The goal is to make it easier for web developers to build and scale applications, instead of focusing on system administration and maintenance.

Leveraging Google App Engine, developers can:

• Write code once and deploy. Provisioning and configuring multiple machines for web serving and data storage can be expensive and time consuming. Google App Engine makes it easier to deploy web applications by dynamically providing computing resources as they are needed. Developers write the code, and Google App Engine takes care of the rest.
• Absorb spikes in traffic. When a web app surges in popularity, the sudden increase in traffic can be overwhelming for applications of all sizes, from startups to large companies that find themselves rearchitecting their databases and entire systems several times a year. With automatic replication and load balancing, Google App Engine makes it easier to scale from one user to one million by taking advantage of Bigtable and other components of Google’s scalable infrastructure.
• Easily integrate with other Google services. It’s unnecessary and inefficient for developers to write components like authentication and e-mail from scratch for each new application. Developers using Google App Engine can make use of built-in components and Google’s broader library of APIs that provide plug-and-play functionality for simple but important features.

I'm still waiting - it's apparently not release time in America yet, so I've been put on the waiting list. I can't believe that 10K accounts have gone in such a short time, so I'll still hope that it's not release time yet!

Microsoft Visual Studio 2008: First Impressions

Well, I tried out VS 9 today. Microsoft just released this new tool, with over 250 new features including inline SQL queries. But I didn't have a very good first impression: it crashed upon creating a WPF project! I'm running it on Vista, so there really shouldn't be any reason. Well, back to my comfortable MonoDevelop!

Blogger in Draft: New feature: Scheduled Posts

Blogger in Draft: New feature: Scheduled Posts

Finally! This is exactly what I have been waiting for. Now I can schedule posts like in Wordpress. This is what Blogger needed to keep me!

KDE4 Released!

Well, I'm a bit late with this one, but KDE 4.0.0 has now been officially released. Right now I'm trying to get it installed, but it seems that the openSuSE download mirrors are down or something. I can't download the ISO.

Anyway, I'm trying to download KDE4 from an FTP repo, so hopefully I'll get to see it soon..... :)

KDE 4.0.0 Tagged Ready for Release!

Today KDE 4.0 was officially tagged for release. Now the tarballs will be prepared, and pre-released to the big distros. In about a week (next Friday to be precise) the announcement will be made to the public and the tarballs and packages will be released. But I'm going to see if I can get hold of the svn version first...... ;)

Goodbye, Netscape.

AOL is officially discontinuing Netscape. I'm sad to see it go, as I was one of the oldies who used it before Firefox and Mozilla, but it's the logical move as it's hardly ever used now.

Here's hailing the original web browser, from the ashes of which emerged Firefox!

Linux GUI difficulties

Sometimes you encounter problems with the Linux user interface that you just don't get on Windows or the Mac. Today I was downloading my photos with digiKam, when the process suddenly came to a halt. The reason? "digiKam could not import the file 'dsc.......'". Not really a very good explanation. I tried restarting digiKam, and re-plugging the camera. All to no avail.

As it turns out, the problem was simply a full disk. On Windows, you would have had countless annoying messages saying "You are running out of free disk space on drive C:" long before the disk was full, but on Linux the program just stops functioning all together. You're not even told that the disk is full, and there are no easy tools to empty your trash and clean up unused files like there are on Windows. It's a pity when your favourite operating system lets you down like this, but I have to admit that most users are not likely to think of typing "df" at the Konsole terminal when their program stops working. Let's hope KDE4 solves this full disk problem.

Google's acquisition of DoubleClick is cleared by the FTC

Google has just got the approval of the FTC for their upcoming acquisition of DoubleClick, a leading online advertising company, for $3.1 billion in cash. Apparently the transaction was cleared with no conditions, leaving Google free to innovate in the advertising field.

"In its clearance opinion released today, the FTC explicitly rejected any current or potential competition concerns. Google and DoubleClick are complementary businesses and do not compete with each other. Google's current business primarily involves the selling of text-based ads, while DoubleClick's core business is delivering and reporting on display ads. DoubleClick does not buy ads, sell ads, or buy or sell advertising space. Rather, it provides technology to enable advertisers and publishers to deliver ads once they have agreed to terms, and to provide advertisers and publishers statistics relating to those ads."

This is good news for Google, as they will now have access to the huge market share and consumer base of their own service combined with DoubleClick. The acquisition will complement their recent offerings of Video and Image based ads, and will offer advertisers and publishers new, integrated ways of managing, showing and creating ads.

Read more: Official Google Blog: Analysis: The FTC clears our acquisition of DoubleClick

KDE 4.0 release draws near

KDE 4.0 is now nearing completion, with the release event scheduled for 17 January 2008. The desktop interface is being finalized now, and the 2nd Release Candidate has already been released, providing an early look at the new Plasma interface.

Although the background APIs and data structures underlying KDE4 were finalized a while ago, Plasma is only nearing completion now. From the various previews around, it looks as if KDE 4.0 is going to be the introduction to a new era in the evolution of the Linux GUI. Plasma looks really smooth, and the APIs behind it are just as neat.

Unfortunately, I can't seem to build the RC2 properly. I keep getting a segmentation fault. So I can't give you a first hand account of KDE4 (yet!), but for more info check out the official announcement - it's got heaps of screenshots.

Google Highly Open Participation Contest - GHOPC

Recently Google launched a new program called the "Google Highly Open Participation Contest", or GHOPC. This initiative allows younger developers (13 and above) who could not join in the Google Summer of Code to help work on open source projects such as Apache and GNOME. For every 3 tasks that an individual completes, Google will award USD$100, up to a total of $500 (15 tasks). The tasks vary from simple ones such as "Create a short slideshow of distinctive plone websites", to highly advanced tasks such as " Implement WorldKit.org Mapping as a Joomla! v 1.5 Extension". So far there has been a huge amount of work on behalf of the developers, especially in the tasks of well-known projects like Joomla.

At the moment I have temporarily paused my Android development in order to focus on the GHOPC. I believe it is more suited to my abilities at the present time. So far I've completed 2 out of 3 tasks, so I'm looking forward to the completion of the next one! It also means I may not be around much on the blog, as the tasks have fairly strict deadlines.

Here I see yet another example of Google's support of the open source community. Regardless of whether you like Google as a company or not, you have to acclaim them for continuing a good work here. Now, with the Google SoC, and the GHOPC, open source projects have a commercial backing, even if only once a year, which encourages upcoming business leaders to contribute to open source, and reaps huge benefits for the projects involved.

Update

As you've probably noticed, I haven't been very active on this blog lately. A combination of real-life events and my other blog have conspired to rob me of the time I was using to develop The Big Byte. Hopefully I should have a little more time now, but I still won't be able to research and write articles as much. I hope you'll be able to put up with my ramblings about my current projects, at least until my other tasks sort themselves out. :)

In the meantime, any feedback on the site is appreciated (as always!). In particular, does anyone have any ideas about whether I should change the theme again?