ShaunGish.com

Google's HQ in Seattle, WA

My first trip to Seattle has been fun so far… although getting here wasn’t the easiest thing in the world…

I missed my first flight out of Dallas, pushing my arrival time from 2:51pm WA time to 10:30pm.  Ouch!

But, now that I’ve arrived I’ve fallen in love.  This city just exudes energy.  Sitting in a coffee shop near Google’s Seattle HQ, I’ve heard 4 pitches to potential investors over one cup of coffee.  I’m staying on the south side of the harbor and I decided to walk the 4 miles to Google this morning.  It was one of the most refreshing experiences I’ve had in a long time… Everyone here is biking or walking to work… the scene reminds me of a hipper, more urban Boulder with a little New England flair.

I’m planning on looking for a house boat on the way back to my hotel…

Brave New Fiction was mentioned in an article for MIT’s Technology Review… thanks Erica!

Software developer Brit Gardner, cofounder of Dallas-based Figaro Interactive, tested App Engine’s capabilities by beginning work on a demo application soon after the service came out. Though he didn’t know Python, the programming language App Engine requires, he says he was able to build his application in the space of a few days. Gardner says that he sees App Engine as significantly different from Amazon Web Services, in that it’s a framework for application devel, rather than merely a place to rent processing and storage ­capacity. He says that his site isn’t close to hitting Google’s page-view and storage limits, and he doubts that many other sites will be, either, since there are a lot of sites out there and only so many users.

We’ll be in Seattle on the 28th for the Google Hackathon working on new features for the site and generally hob-knobbing with other Google Geeks.  You should join us.

Recently my MacBook Pro’s hard drive went kaput…

Rather than just doing a restore from Time Machine like an sane human would do, I looked at it as an opportunity to “start fresh” - I’d only install stuff as I needed it as I went along.

Right off the bat I installed all of the usual suspects: Photoshop, Illustrator, Final Cut Studio, Blender, Billings, iRC, Skype, Flex Builder, all of my Eclipse Plugins… hmm…

I use Flex Builder as my main install of Eclipse… I use Apatana Studio/PHP for my web IDE and Subversive for Subversion-ing… Those were no big deal to install.  But the renewed interest in BraveNewFiction means that I had to get Google App Engine back up and running which meant installing PyDev again… yay!

I forgot what a pain in the butt PyDev was to install - if you don’t get the exact path to your python interpreter right a huge warning pops up and Eclipse crashes… fun fun fun.  Oh - and on top of that - on OSX your python interpreter is really not your python interpreter… you want what’s inside of your python interpreter

So - for anyone out there looking to make so App Engine apps in an OSX dev enviornment here ya go - the correct path is:

And here are some useful resources to get you started:

• Installing App Engine, Python and all the essential Eclipse steps
• Vivisecting Media’s Post on OSX and Python’s True Path
• Using the App Engine Helper for Django