Google's AppEngine

Google's AppEngine was released Monday night at a campfire session at Google. Google has introduced a lot of serious applications over the years, but AppEngine may be the most important application most people will never hear about. From a developer perspective, this is huge. When I have a big idea, I am perfectly capable of writing the code to create the application. But to make that code run, I'd have to buy servers and bandwidth to run the code. I'd also have to spend a lot of time, or hire somebody to spend a lot of time configuring and maintaining those servers. Any time (or money) spent on configuration or maintenance is time that cannot be spent improving the application.

With AppEngine, Google is providing their scalable infrastructure to the common man. No longer does a developer with an idea have to worry about configuring a firewall and SAN, or worry about mundane details like Apache configuration. Developers get to write code and push it to an instantly scalable platform.

We don't know what they'll actually charge for this, but I expect it will be quite affordable, based on the prices the competition (Amazon EC2) is providing. Amazon charges 15 cents per hour for their EC2 instances, but they are not providing the same level of service that Google is providing. With Amazon, you get a virtual machine in their data centers, but you still have to configure, administer, and maintain that machine. The biggest drawback I see to AppEngine right now is that they only provide a python runtime. Python looks like a cool language, but it's not one I've had any experience with. With Amazon's additional responsibilities of configuring and maintaining the server, you also get a lot more flexibility.

Google made the announcement Monday night that 10,000 developer accounts would be made available to the first people who signed up on their website. When I filled out the form on Tuesday morning, all 10,000 accounts had been given away. A friend of mine, Kevin, was lucky enough to get into the first beta.

I look forward to my trial account!

101 Great Computer Programming Quotes

I haven't read them all yet, but number 37 had me rolling.....

101 Great Computer Programming Quotes

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Family photo with Santa

This is classic!

Parenting for Peace

I recently had an e-mail conversation with a friend who had been an inspiration and a companion in the struggle for justice and peace.  She now has two small children and has become joyfully immersed in parenting.  She says: "I sometimes feel that I would like to be more immersed in the needs of the world, but I am stretched to my limit at present.   I am being gentle with myself.   As the children grow, I know that we will find ways to build compassion for the world into our family way of being."  

I really can relate to her words.  Since being a parent, it is hard to impossible to be actively involved in organizing marches and forums.  It's even a challenge to find time to keep up to date on current events and issues.

But make no mistake.  Even though we aren't leading chants at marches, we are very actively working for peace.  Here are some ways that we, as parents, can choose to work for peace:

• Buy a house near public transit and vote to support/increase public transit.


• Have only one car.


• Simple birthday parties


• Pray for the workers who made the clothes worn today.


• Pray for the farm workers who worked the fields for the foods we ate today.


• Don't shop Walmart or McDonalds


• Eat vegetarian.


• Don't go crazy at Christmas.

In the coming weeks, I'll address each of these points and explain in a bit more detail how these activities stand for compassion and against war and oppression.  It is our hope that writing them down will help us to act more truly on what we believe.

Tofurkey Day!

As vegetarians, for Thanksgiving, we celebrated with Tofurkey this year. Our review is that it tasted and had a texture too much like real turkey. The real feast was lasagne, sweet potatoes, a pumpkin dip, and a wonderful weekend visit from my brother Tim.

Karen's Walking

In case you haven't heard, Karen is walking all over the place now!

New Blog!

Hello,

We're going to try having a blog again!

The old blog can be found at http://archive.mattjones.org/

Peace,

Matt, Susan, and Karen