Posted
Tue, 08 Apr 2008 22:28:01 GMT
to Posted in Programming, Ideas
Tags app engine, deployment, development, google, integration
Today Google announced Google App Engine, a free (within certain limits) deployment environment in which people can develop, deploy and host web apps. Currently, the offering is for python only, and you are kind of tied to Google’s data store, but in return you don’t have to worry about server management, infrastructure, or paying money. Additionally, they have a pre-packaged SDK to give developers an identical development sandbox, as well as a method to deploy local code to the production environment.
However, I think they missed a way to make it even MORE awesome. Imagine, if you will, that they had integrated this package with Google Code. Suddenly, developers have an entire managed development and deploy framework. Develop on your workstation with an environment that is identical to the production environment, check in code so that it is managed, have a web interface that manages deployment from the repository so that you could deploy specific revisions/branches to either a staging area for testing or the production environment, with easy rollbacks if a problem is noticed…... since one of App Engine’s goals appears to be to lower the total cost of entry into the app development world, this just seems like it would make sense and work so well.
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Posted
Fri, 14 Mar 2008 14:00:39 GMT
to Posted in Reviews
Tags review, showdown, social, sushi
This is the Sushi Showdown of Ultimate Destiny
Good rolls, bad rolls, and assorted pieces of sashimi
and only one will survive, I wonder who it will be
this is the Sushi Showdown…
this is the Sushi Showdown…
this is the Sushi Showdown…
of Ultimate Destiny
It really just started off as a joke. Kate was torn between going to two restaurants (she had a gift certificate for one, but liked the other better), when I suggested the obvious solution: eat at both and compare the tastes! Better yet, eat at other sushi restaurants too and do a comparison across all of them! And thus the event ‘Sushi Crawl 2008’ was born.
Quickly, however, people began to think that a sushi analog to a pub crawl was not the greatest of ideas, due to amount of time sitting around for food preparation, and the fact that we would be ordering very little from each place in the grand scheme of things (you don’t want the sushi places you will potentially populate in the future to be mad at you). The event quickly evolved into a sushi potluck. Everyone would be responsible for a take out order from a restaurant, which would consist of no fewer than 4 items; spicy salmon roll, tuna sashimi, house roll, and whatever other item you wanted. Targets were selected, participants gathered, and we went off to do battle.
The original roll of opponents:
- Hamachi House (Eventually skipped)
- I Love Sushi
- Sushi Nami
- Dharma Sushi
- Sushi Shige
- Ichiban Sushi (Eventually skipped)
- Minato Sushi
- Doraku
- Momoya (Dismissed due to ‘suckitude’ long before the day of the event)
The day of the event, we ran into a few minor problems, such as a torrential downpour, last minute decision of who goes where, dead phones (which hampered ordering), power losses (Hamachi lost power due to the storm), restaurant closures (Ichiban doesn’t do dinner in March), and potentially sick people. Despite these issues, the event was oh so good. 10 participants * ~4 items * ~6 pieces per item = ~240 pieces of sushi to be delectably savored and compared. Long ago, friends of mine told me that the best way to eat sushi is to gather a group of people and all order various things on the menu and share, and I have to say, it certainly has its benefits. A healthy amount of ‘safe’ selection (that is, items you have tried and enjoyed previously), along with a variety of new stuff without the disadvantage of being stuck with additional rolls if you don’t like it.
At the end of the night, Sushi Shige was declared the overall winner. The sashimi was moist and rich in flavor, the spicy rolls weren’t overly spicy, the pieces were all well proportioned. Of course, Sushi Shige was also the most expensive overall, so you are paying for what you are getting. For more budget concious sushi goers, it was generally agreed that Doraku was also a very solid choice for a reasonable price. Ironically, the two places are just a block a part.
The overall loser of the night was I Love Sushi, which was generally below the quality of everything else. Whether it is the worst of all in Halifax is debatable, however, since Momoya is apparently so bad that it wasn’t even worthy of ordering from, and since Hamachi House (from my own experience in the last year) has been more of a hit or miss situation.
Obviously, this event needs to be repeated (for a proper data comparison set of course) and I am already looking forward to the next one.
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Posted
Mon, 27 Aug 2007 19:29:56 GMT
to Posted in
Tags error, javascript, telus
Every so often, a friend of mine asks me why I don’t have a cell phone. I usually tell them how most cell phones cause feedback with my implant, either when I try to talk at them (feedback with the headset), or when placed near the processor (rare, but it recently happened with a Blackberry. Funnily enough, I could make calls with the Blackberry) and then the conversation moves on. Recently, however, a friend of mine came up with a solution (of sorts). He asked why I didn’t just get a phone and a text message plan. Then it doesn’t matter if I can’t make a call, I can still text people on the go.
Armed with this idea, I started to look around a bit. Shopping around on Telus, I stumbled upon the following while trying to add a service to my package: http://www.mytelusmobility.com/sslerror.html
Wow, interesting reccomended browsers. IE4? Netscape 4? AOL 4? Also, consider that Opera has had 128 bit encryption support since 3.0 (which I believe was before the year 2000), and Telus isn’t recognizing it. I wonder just how Telus is deciding if a browser supports 128 bit encryption. Seems to be a Javascript function….. (http://www.telusmobility.com/js/webapps.js) Hmmm…. looking at mytm_crosslinks (which is the function being called) it seems to check SSL compatibility based on browser version. And completely ignoring anything not IE or Netscape.
Well, I guess at least they are descriminating against all alternative browsers equally… though I wonder why they decided to write their own browser checking function (complete with redundant checks) rather than…. use one of the wildly available ones. Actually, given that they reccomend IE/Netscape 4, I wonder just how old this function is anyway, and why they are still using it.
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Posted
Sun, 29 Jul 2007 13:36:54 GMT
to Posted in Projects
Tags conference, my.dsu.ca, presentation, tigerevents
Ah….. hard to believe it has been almost 4 months since my last post. There always seems to be just one more thing that needs to be done.
The most recent and exciting item was a recent conference. A few months ago, myself, Oliver, and Chris were invited to a local conference called The Student Edge. The conference was partially organized by an ex-DSU president, and he kindly gave us the opportunity to talk about our experiences building software for the DSU. The conference was somewhat different than other ones I have been to, with roughly a third of the time spent on ad-hoc information exchange sessions, where the attendees basically shared their own stories (Societies Anonymous!), and the other 2/3rds more traditional talks.
Our talk, titled “Help Societies Help You: Using the Internet to Build a Better Campus” was well received by about a third of the attendees. We tried to not only tell our own story, but to convey the message that if 3 students can build some applications for the DSU, then maybe they can leverage their own student population in order to do some cool stuff.
Read more...
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Posted
Thu, 29 Mar 2007 22:25:23 GMT
to Posted in Life
I heard a rumor that my.dsu.ca had been featured in this year’s Maclean’s Guide To Canadian Universities. Deciding to check this out, I came across the following in the “Campus Confidential: Straight from the Students” section of the Dalhousie University Entry:
What’s Hot
...Student union website my.dsu.ca for news and information about local events and campus societies.
...
It’s nice to know that something I have put a great deal of time into was worth mentioning by students to MacLean’s.
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Posted
Tue, 06 Mar 2007 14:02:32 GMT
to Posted in Programming
Tags freebsd, gems, ruby
The server I happen to host some of my stuff (ie. this site) happens to be running FreeBSD. In most cases, this doesn’t cause any problems. However, in the case of installing certain ruby gems, I would get an error when compiling native extensions. In particular, with the fastthread gem (I was trying to upgrade Mongrel), I received the output:
make install
/usr/bin/install -c -o root -g wheel -m 0755 fastthread.so /home/ssmith/gems/gems/fastthread-0.6.4.1/lib
install: /home/ssmith/gems/gems/fastthread-0.6.4.1/lib/fastthread.so: chown/chgrp: Operation not permitted
I received a similar error a while back when trying to install mongrel, and at the time I had asked one of the friendly admins to just install it as root. However, I like installing my gems locally, so they are easy to update, and this was preventing that. Additionally, I wasn’t experiencing this on another machine running Debian, so what was going on?
Some investigation showed that on Debian, install wasn’t being told to change the owner and group, while for some reason it was on the FreeBSD machine. So where was this being set?
Turns out that rbconfig.rb, a part of the actual Ruby distribution, was the culprit. A collection of configuration variables for Ruby, it had the following line:
CONFIG["INSTALL"] = '/usr/bin/install -c -o root -g wheel'
while on Debian we only had:
CONFIG["INSTALL"] = '/usr/bin/install -c'
Apparently, the FreeBSD Ruby port sets things a little bit differently, which causes pain for local installation of gems. I’ve currently had the problem fixed by having that line set to the same values as Debian. However, as that file is automatically generated each time Ruby is updated, hopefully the root issue will be fixed in the next version for FreeBSD.
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Posted
Thu, 25 Jan 2007 01:40:24 GMT
to Posted in Projects
Tags rails, ruby, tigerevents
So….. I have actually had a release version of Tigerevents for a long time now. 0.7.0 is actually powering my.dsu.ca now, but was never officially released. As I added several features since then, as mentioned a while ago, I decided to just increment the release number, and push it out there.
This decision was prompted by an organization other than the DSU contacting me, saying they wanted to use it, and if I could just add this one little feature enhancement…...
Needless to say, the idea of other people using this pleases me, and hopefully in the near future I can point out to other in production instances.
The code, as always, is available at the Sourceforge, and Rubyforge locations for download.
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Posted
Mon, 22 Jan 2007 03:54:31 GMT
to Posted in
Tags advertising, payperpost
Recently, PayPerPost has come up on several sites I monitor. Even more recently, several individuals and posts closer to home have discussed some of the issues, and as a result, I’ve decided to weigh in with my own two cents.
Read more...
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Posted
Wed, 13 Dec 2006 15:50:14 GMT
to Posted in Geek, Reviews
Tags analytics, google
Like other people I know, I have been testing Google Analytics. There are some good things about it, but overall I am not really impressed.
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Posted
Sat, 02 Dec 2006 20:36:24 GMT
to Posted in
Apparently there are requests for slides and demo code from all trhe DevEast speakers. As such, I’ve taken the time to post my own here. I don’t know if anyone will find these useful on their own, but if anyone has any questions, feel free to ask.
Halifax On Rails Slides
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