Developing Upwards

The Chrome Development team is talking about how much faster Chrome is at loading your tabs when you restore from a previous session. This is a totally welcome improvement, especially compared to Firefox's long superior handling of session restore by on-demand loading tabs only when you switch to them. Chrome, by contrast, has already penalized you for every extra tab you had to restore by loading them all at once and immediately. But, something is missing from these announcements about improving the speed. On the forthy-fifth  release of the Chrome browser, I would have expected and been happier with finally improving the plain experience of restoring a previous session in the first place. Chrome doesn't even prompt  you to restore your tabs or even tell you there is a session that could be restored, if you don't explicitly go looking for it. Hidden behind the main menu button that many users don't even recognize and know is a menu , and then within the "Hi...

After a couple days trouble with the Youtube Data API and the provided Python wrappers around it, I thought it would be good to collect my findings on what works and doesn't and to fill in the gaps that I see in the docs. I really hope this series will be useful to some others in my position. Some Doors Are Locked and Some Doors Are Ajar A lot of the APIs use requires no authentication, not even a developer key. This makes a lot of the most common, read-only integrations a snap. However, I think this makes it more difficult to adjust when the need to authenticate for other integration comes along. This did some damage to my schedule, so I'm going to help others avoid the problem. Public operations are simple. Youtube gives us resources in the form of feeds and images and other things at API locations, like http://i.ytimg.com/vi/ FedVhnHYn-Y /0.jpg to get the first thumbnail of a video. Just plug in your video ID and go. When you get into the realm of authenticated requests, yo...

UPDATE: Fixed 'Response' to 'Respond' in title. Sorry about that. We all have to do it, so I might as well take my turn. First impression: no surprise here. There are expectations in two forms here. We can expect certain things to come of this and we can expect certain things to disappoint us about this. There is a third, external expectation that techies will divide into a camp of people who think its Rilly, Rilly Important and a camp who thinks you're all wasting your time . I mean, gosh, its almost like this is exactly like any other topic we split down some arbitrary middle about. Get over it. I Expect To Like: Cheaper netbooks Installing Chrome OS on old hardware I Expect To Dislike: Feeling like I have an OS that won't let me install anything but a browser Not being able to install Android Apps Not being able to run real Chrome on Android Having no way to persist the state of a Javascript VM, so that I can close applications or save memory on long run...

Yeah, AppEngine has been around for a while. That doesn't make my general AppEngine article less timely. Hey, I don't just write about stuff because its hip. In a few months, I'll announce what Google Chrome means for the web landscape. Seriously. Although a lot of people believe Google App Engine is a very big thing and extremely important to the landscape of the web, I get the strong impression from outside the camp that its more of a toy, and I want to address that. As with my quick review of App Engine itself, its hard to make real calls when everything is still beta, but we're working with what we've got here. The people who see the real potential of App Engine feel it and the people who just think its neat Just Don't Get It . What is there to get that so many developers are missing and why would those of us that do think its important enough to be evangelical about, as I'm doing right now? Once again, making any claims or arguments in this discussion h...

Most of the buzz about the App Engine has died down, except among the developers actually using the platform. When the first public announcements were made, I was a part of the original group of developers first given access. This privilege was wasted. I did nothing with it. This has changed, which is a topic for a different post. I thought I'd take a moment to make my mark on the "What I think about Google App Engine" wall. A proper review is difficult, for a number of reasons. Namely, there is a very vague understanding of the difference between this "Preview Release" and what we'll have when it launches with all official status and commercial potential. We can only hope that any big changes won't interfere with our existing applications. If that does happen then existing players might turn to AppDrop for help, although any mass migration is highly doubtful. In any case, what everyone is talking about is what App Engine is now , not what it might turn...

So this is my obligatory start-of-2008 post. I know I haven't written much lately, but work was busy and then there was the holidays, and I'm making a commitment to really revitalize my blog. Part of that may be that my adsense, after years of blogging, as only hit half the required minimum balence for payment . But, I'm not in it for the money. Not unless there was a lot of money in it! For 2007 this means... that I need to wrap up the last year We moved back to North Carolina when the Pennsylvania winter cleared up, and I'll admit that the summer was a bit rough. I lost my most steady contract when funding went sour, shortly before the movie, but you know what? Staying home with the family was great without a lot of work to be done, and we got by OK. I enjoyed the time. After a while, I started CharPy, the Charlotte Python Group. We're still small and growing, but the first meeting gave me a lead on a full-time position at SocialServe.com, where I'm now happil...

So, I didn't see any opening for contributing in any useful way to the discussion about Google's new Chart API , until I read this post . How dare they call this service open. They should have been clear that their greed has lead them to secretly hide abilities of the service from the public, in an obvious attempt to corner the market on really cool graphs in web sites. My theory is that they hope everyone uses their "Open" Chart API, which doesn't include the full service's abilities, so that their own charts, using the entire breadth of charting power, are inherently better than yours. Beware the wickedness of the corporate greed, my friend. My sarcasm drips onto the floor. Now, I mean no disrespect to Marty, but this kind of post really does get under my skin from time to time. Maybe it just struck me at the wrong time. So what if Google has features they didn't document? So what if they use a different URL to access the API? Maybe the undocumented feat...

Google is rolling out storage services for their products , and I just wish they'd take my Amazon S3 keys, instead. Go figure.

Google is building fact mining into the search engine. Coming across a little article over at The Best Article Every Day, I got wind that Google Spreadsheets can do lookup of certain statistical and financial information. You can have formulas that include things like the latest Microsoft stock quote or the boiling point of sodium. This seemed interesting, so I played with it a bit, but changing the formula quickly to play with it was awkward. "Can I just Google this stuff," I thought? Yes. Read on for my findings. The documentation for the Spreadsheet function, GoogleLookup, talks about entities and attributes . "Pluto" is an entity and "mass" is an attribute. As it turns out, you can just search for "mass of Pluto" or "birth rate in Canada" and are presented with a new type of search result. We can see that Google seems to be pulling facts from the websites they index. They are structuring the information into subjects and pr...

I always have one tab to the same page: http://www.google.com/reader/view/ So, the more it does, without stepping outside its boundries, the better. I have it there already. One fallacy I've seen already is the Google Reader handling of podcasts. The embedding flash app to play the MP3 for me is nice, until I want to read more while I listen. Google Reader Team: Add a feature that lets me queue these tracks to be played in a player outside the reading area, so it sticks around while I do other things. Even better, expose its playlist as an RSS feed so my other online music players can knock them into the playlists between their own tracks!

Google and Yahoo are facing each other on a lot of battle grounds, and some of them are less public than others. Research is key to the long term survival of both companies, and lots of information is the bread and butter of the two. Without effective technology to burrow through unheard of volumes of data in record time, neither will make it. Some of the things coming out of this struggle are interesting. New languages are under development by the research teams at both Yahoo and Google. Sawzall is a the topic of a research paper from Rob Pike , Sean Dorward, Robert Griesemer, and Sean Quinlan. Pig , with a much less elegant name, is an working language from Yahoo Research. Off the bat, note that Sawzall is a paper, and you can download Pig's source today. If Google has an implementation of Sawzall, they are not making it public at this time. Both are based around respective implementations of the popular concurrency algorithm, MapReduce, originally a Google creation. Yahoo suppo...

Yet again, I find myself wishing I could say I like what Google has done with something, only to be forced into admitting: they disappoint me. Well, add one more to the list of things Google can't get right, even with an army of PhD holders and more money than you can shake a redwood forest at: Google Reader has gone from simple gold to contorted crap. The original version was a great excersize in simplicity in design that let me jump in, read, and get on with my life. The "upgrade" is a mess of a noisy interface for me to get lost in as my browser slows to a crawl with far more JavaScript than a simple reader needs, and even the occassional forgetting of everything I haven't read yet. I was a little late in the Blogscene, which is a relative statement given that most of the world doesn't know what a blog is, despite the fact that most bloggers think otherwise. I started with my trusty KDE's Akregator, which is admirably usable, and then looked for a web-solut...