Stuff in General

Google App Engine

Kent J. Chen — Sat, 12 Apr 2008 18:00:35 GMT

Huge...this is my first reaction when I first saw it a few days ago. Yes, I missed the release day so I wasn't able to enroll in to the first 10,000 candidate to get the first hand experience. That's ok, because I have no experience of using Python either.

Hosting web apps in Google would really hurts those small web hosting companies or whoever doing this type of business. Who wants to run their critical websites on higher downtime percentage while there is a better one out there like Google? Google manages the uptime, backups, and more, it hosts your sites virtually across hundreds of servers so you don't need to care if one of them are down. How often do you see this offered by many other web hosting companies? You either have to share the resources with many others for lower cost or exclusively use one dedicated server but without back-up standby.

However, in order to gain all these benefits you will need to over a few gotchas, as Bex Huff pointed out.

It only supports apps written in Python. No Java, no C, no .NET. Although, Python rocks...
The best web application framework option is Django... which is an awesomely elegant framework, similar in philosophy to Ruby On Rails. Existing Django apps can be ported in minutes.
You cannot write to the file system, you have to use the Google Datastore API
If your web request takes more than a few seconds to respond, Google will kill the process, and send back an error... so I don't know how they do batch processes...
Google owns your ass even more.

I am a .Net guy so it would be quite a bit of work to switch around. And first of first, I need to pick up Python if I want to go this direction. It's still in Preview Release right now and I am in the waiting list at the moment but will see how it goes later.

Domain Name Horror

Kent J. Chen — Fri, 11 Apr 2008 06:44:00 GMT

I am not a creative person at all. My brain just goes plain blank every time when I need to think of something nice and full of imagination. That's why when I decided to register a domain for myself I couldn't think of anything but my name, initials, and computers. However, at least the name I finally picked, KJCTech.net, doesn't fall into the worse name everyone needs to avoid category.

This Top 10 Worst Domain Names and 20 More Unfortunate Domain Names are absolutely a no-no. Take close look at these awful names so next time when we are doing brain storm for the new domain name make sure the name we pick doesn't follow their steps.

Manufacturer of instruments for monitoring temperature, humidity and pressure Dickson didn’t think twice when they choose: www.DicksOnWeb.com

A company selling CAD software and Learning CDs was called ViaGrafix - quite innocent until a blue pill hit the market. The company is now called Learn2 but was www.ViagraFix.com

The small town Winters’ local newspaper is called Winters Express and can be read online at: www.WinterSexExpress.com

An eBay competitor was considering the name Auctions Hit, but found it to be a shitty name: www.AuctionShit.com

And the worst of the worst is Experts Exchange, a knowledge base where programmers can exchange advice and views at www.ExpertSexChange.com. This site always comes in the no. 1 from Google but I never noticed they are actually expert on that.

HackerSafe and ELMAH

Kent J. Chen — Fri, 11 Apr 2008 06:22:40 GMT

ELMAH, the Error Logging Modules and Handlers, is a error logging system that I used on every website I made to capture every exceptional error page. It's very easy to plug into your web application, just throw in the DLL file into the bin folder and put a few lines of code in web.config file, and works like charm. It's extremely vital when launching the new website but also very useful and handy to have on the go.

However, it becomes not so useful when HackerSafe, an online service that tells people the site with its seal on it is bullet safe, joins in. Because HackerSafe needs to scan your site and do a series of automated security tests every day, it sure generates tons of errors from the website. If the ELMAH logs the error in database, the errors HackerSafe generate eat database space like crazy. Worse, if your database has the quote assigned, it will be shutdown pretty quick and the website that rely on this database will be down the same time too. And more, if you set up to receive the notification when every error is generated, your email box soon will be full and stopped working pretty soon too. It's absolutely nightmare.

And yes, I just had been through this nightmare not so long ago. Because HackerSafe has more value to have on the site at the moment, I have to say good-bye to ELMAH for the time being until I figure it out a way to accommodate these two the same time.

Canada's own Do-Not-Call registry .. with a bonus

Kent J. Chen — Sat, 29 Mar 2008 06:36:38 GMT

My assistant forwarded this to me today, well he actually forwarded to SPAM. And yes, we have a distribution group called SPAM in our office for this type of purpose.

For those of you who are aware, Canada will soon (or already does) have an official Do-Not-Call registry, whereby you can register your phone number and telemarketers are not allowed to make unsolicited calls to you anymore. There's a catch with our version of the Do-Not-Call registry, and that's that many companies are exempt from it. Lots of telemarketing companies, charities, etc are all legally allowed to make cold-calls to you even if you register with the Do-Not-Call list, simply because they lobbied hard when the law was up for discussion.
Now we have a solution...
Dr. Michael Geist (yes, THE Michael Geist) has come up with a website (http://ioptout.ca) that allows you to sign up with your name, phone number, and email address and then lets you pick which companies to opt out from. When you're finished, you submit your info and the site generates an email for each company stating your info and the fact that you'd like to be removed from their cold-call list. This is the ultimate Do-Not-Call registry because companies that are exempt from the usual law are still required to remove you from their lists if you specifically ask. Now you don't even have to ask, the website does all the work.

I had my home phone number changed three years ago because of the spam calls. I wish and hope this would work out and finally stop these annoying, sometimes rude, calls. But meanwhile, I a bit doubt if it would. Remember the unsubscribe or remove me from the list link in the spam emails? Did it ever work if you went and asked to get your name off the list? It had welcome more spam if you did it. Will it happen the same if we provide our info to them and beg them for not calling? Always think twice every time when handing out your personal information.

Heroes happen {here} - Microsoft Launch Tour 2008

Kent J. Chen — Fri, 07 Mar 2008 05:10:59 GMT

I missed the last big launch tour about two years ago in year 2005 for SQL 2005 and Visual Studio 2005 but I made it this time when the new big launch tour was held here in Vancouver on Tuesday to launch the big three products from Microsoft, Windows Server 2008, SQL Server 2008, and Visual Studio 2008.

The seminar overall is pretty good, especially the keynote in which three different presenters demonstrated some of the cool features from these three new releases. And both sessions I attended in the afternoon were good too. It talked about the new security features in Windows server 2008 and the virtualization things as well. It looks like there are a lot of new features and ways of doing stuff on the server side with these new releases, and badly it also means that I will have to spend more time to learn these things in order to keep the pace with the industry. :(

Alongside the good part, I was quite disappointed about the manager session that I attended right after the keynote. It was supposed to talk about something that brings the existing infrastructure to the next level but I just heard the voices from three different vendors talking about the stuff that I already knew. I was also quite disappointed the place they picked for the big event like this. Westin Bayshore is nice and it's right beside the beautiful Stanley Park in downtown Vancouver, but considering the convenience and how cozy the seats are, I missed the ones they had in Paramount Theater, in where at least I can enjoy the nap if the presentation is boring.

And alongside the good and bad part, there are also some fun part. There are booths there where you can get nice light-blinking pens, T-shirts, and watch some the new products brought to you by various vendors. But the most fun part is this. I got a personal drawn portrait from Dell's booth where they have two young girls just sitting there and drawing portraits for anyone interested. Yes, that's the one, a "lofty" version of me. Do I look like a hero in big smile there, by the way? :) Nice work, Tiffany.

And of course, the best part of this launch tour is the software Microsoft gave away. All attendances who filled up the feedback sheet got a package in a paper bag including Vista with SP1, Visual Studio 2008 standard, SQL server 2008 CTP, and Windows Server 2008 Enterprise edition (1 year evaluation). However, what happened to me after I got all these software was totally un-expected. I was just so excited about the copies I got, especially the Visual Studio one, that I can't wait to open the package when I was in the elevator down to the parking lot. The package with 3 DVDs in it was just slipped away from my finger when the door opened and it managed itself to go right through the slot to the darkness where I had no way to get them back. Sad, they didn't just want to stay with me. Both my friend and I just couldn't believe and stop laughing. What an end to the seminar like this!! Fortunately, my friend doesn't need Visual Studio and generously gave hers to me.

Adobe Air is now released

Kent J. Chen — Mon, 25 Feb 2008 07:48:35 GMT

"Air" is getting very popular recently as another hot air was just released by Adobe. What is Adobe Air anyway? I am not so sure honestly but one of the features they offered enables Ajax developers to build rich Internet applications that deploy on the desktop. It runs across operating systems but ultimately is still a desktop app. One of the demos listed on Adobe Air website is eBay Desktop that looks very cool indeed.

As an Oscars night, having the following included in the post was so appropriate and fun.

What's your backup plan?

Kent J. Chen — Wed, 20 Feb 2008 08:52:14 GMT

"There are two kinds of people in the world: Those who have experienced catastrophic hard drive failure, and those who *will* experience catastrophic hard drive failure."

Someone quoted this in Jeff Atwood's What's your backup strategy, which is so true. Sooner or later, you will be facing the disaster caused by fragile hard drive. Knocking on the wood if you are trying to say you haven't. So if you don't have any backup plan yet, it's time to think about it very seriously. Even though you already have one in place, it's time to review to see if it's still effective. Or unless you are "lucky" like Raelyn Campbell who filed $54m lawsuit against Best Buy for losing laptop, you would be screwed if one day you so rely-on hard drive fails on you.

So what choices out there are available for us as personal use? Well, basically it's all based on what you need and how much data you want to be backed up. Some cost might be necessary needed in some cases.

First of all, buy an external hard drive, pick as much space as you can afford or pick the one like WD Passport that doesn't require power supply if you want to carry it around.

Then, configure your sync tool and either manually run it once a week or so or schedule it to be run regularly if possible. There are many sync choices out there but I am using and quite happy with Microsoft's SyncToy which is free, easy to use. It never failed on me. The con, though, is that it doesn't come with the schedule feature so I have to run it manually.

However, if you prefer to use tool that is more like backup, you might end up having to buy a commercial copy as Windows built-in backup tool usually doesn't work too good. The one in XP is ok but Vista is much worse. And I wasn't so lucky to find any good free ones either. Jeff's choice on Acronis True Image looks pretty good, which backs up the system to a bootable mirror image of the hard drive, that can be booted up later on when the primary one fails.

Going one step further, if you want to have a backup stored offsite, rather than at home, MozeHome is definitely the number one choice. It's free for under 2G data which should cover most of the cases, and it lightly runs on your computer and backs up your data without your attention once it's configured.

If you have more than 2G data, the chances are you might have a lot of photos included that you also want to back up. If that's the case, then you have to consider Flickr or SmugMug as your plan. Both are really popular photo gallery sites that offers so much rich features for photos but be prepared to pay to get the full services that you can store the full original size of your photos over there.

Right, we have yet covered Video. YouTube or sites that office the similar service seems to be the only choices at the moment. Getting your Videos backed up offsite will be a really time consuming job though.

Overall, MozeHome rules all, it's the best and easiest choice to the backup problem that everyone faces. Oh, how about emails? I will be covering it in my next post...haha...it's too late now.

Boost your laptop by DIYing your own CompactFlash-based SSD

Kent J. Chen — Fri, 15 Feb 2008 07:30:57 GMT

We all love SSD but hesitate getting one because it involves poking a rather large hole in your wallet. Any alternatives? I guess so. CompactFlash-based SSDs get tested in Engadget, and according to what they said, the results are pretty encouraging.

And I want one of these, to boost my crawling Vista.

Wondering what cool things big MS is making?

Kent J. Chen — Fri, 15 Feb 2008 04:38:10 GMT

Scobleizer claimed that Microsoft researchers made him cry but he couldn't reveal the secret until Feb 27. Hmm...this is very interesting. I am really wondering what real cool things the big MS is making that could really impact person like Scobleizer, emotionally.

While watching the demo I realized the way I look at the world was about to change. While listening to Wong I noticed a tear running down my face. It’s been a long while since Microsoft did something that had an emotional impact on me like that.
...

Imagine if Microsoft did 10 things a year like what Curtis and Jonathan showed me yesterday? If the innovation engine at Microsoft were working that well there wouldn’t be any pressure to buy Yahoo. Heck, and if there were a constant stream of stuff like what I saw yesterday Yahoo wouldn’t be resisting going to Microsoft. They’d +want+ to go to Microsoft. Yesterday is the first time since leaving that I wish I were back working at Microsoft.

I am damn curious now, seriously too. :0

<update date="Feb 27, 2008">
Ok, as Scobleizer promised, today he revealed what actually made him cry, the WorldWide Telescope. The site doesn't really have anything in it so can't really tell how awesome it is. But according to what Scobleizer described, it sounds very amazing, like magic indeed. Kind a bit of beyond my interest though.
</update>

Trick the Quickbook

Kent J. Chen — Thu, 14 Feb 2008 07:50:28 GMT

My friend passed me a trick today to fool the stupid Quickbook product line so you can get bypass the limitation in the standard edition to enjoy the features claimed only available in premium or business version. If you are the one like me who don't like Quickbook's recent business model and are looking for the alternatives, it might worth to give it a try.

Basically, based on what I was told, all features are existed in all editions. Quickbook just doesn't provide the easy tool to help you find out. For example, all forms for self-employment are also existed in standard edition but you will have to dig it out yourself.

However, no confirmation whether or not it is true. I wasn't willing to take my chance to buy the standard edition to give it a try but my friend generously offered her copy to me for free. So I will update here if it turns out true.