ShaunGish.com

So - first trip to Seattle went very well… I had a great time and I really liked the city. Something cool about being able to get coffee on any corner that isn’t “fourbucks”…

Brit and I had a good time at the Google Hack-a-thon, although we both have decided that App Engine still has a lot of growing to do. The guys at Google mentioned that they’re going to eventually support languages other than Python so we’re probably going to hold off on developing Brave New Fiction further until they start supporting PHP.

Lots on my plate for the next couple of weeks so I’ll be posting less frequently - but here’s something I will do - play-by-play fantasy football. Jaime and I have won our money league the last two years in a row (thanks to a quick thinking Romo pickup and Tom Brady’s amazing year). So - in our 14 team league we picked 6th this year and here’s who we ended up with:

Tony Romo
Vince Young
Joseph Addai
Lendale White
Matt Forte
LaMont Jordan
Andre Johnson
Calvin Johnson
Anthony Gonzalez
Donte’ Stallworth
Chris Henry
Brandon Stokley
Dwayne Jarrett
Donald Lee
Mason Crosby
Philly Defense

I tried like hell to land another Johnson at receiver but both of em got swept up before our pick… Surprised that Addai fell to us at 6th (a guy in our league took Stephen Jackson @ 2) and we traded our 3rd and 5th to get Romo (could’ve had Reggie Bush and Chris Chambers). My roommate actually had the 14th pick (our draft is serpentine) and ended up picking Randy Moss and Terrell Owens back to back… the room let out a collective ~gasp~.

Oh well - we’ll see how we do - playing on house money for the next ten years anyway.

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

Gotta love marketing on the ‘net…

A couple months ago Brit put together a tech demo using Google’s App Engine so that we could wrap our heads around how it fits into our ever expanding toolkit.  Brave New Fiction spawned from a few hours of Python wrangling and has led to some very interesting conversations.

It’s funny how a small little app can take off on the Internet… The app instantly conjures up visions of Twitter, but the only real similarity is the 140 character limit imposed on it’s users.  BNF has gained a decent following and garnered a lot of exposure from some interesting crowds.  We were recently interviewed by MIT Technology Review for the Sept/Oct issue about our experience with App Engine and how we planned to use it in the future.  Google even featured the site on it’s featured application list.

All of this free exposure from something as simple as a tech demo.  Rock On Internet!

Just so it’s out there - we plan on using app engine for some of our passion projects, mainly because we both really like working in python and we hope people get passionate about the projects we work on and test the scalability of google’s systems :)  The lack of signed certificate SSL support is still one of the main factors limiting us using it for our commercial projects but I’m sure it’s coming soon.

Update: Erica Naone (Asst Editor @ MIT Technology Review) posted a brief review on her blog - maybe this is enough to get us off our butts to continue development?  Time will tell…