Ryan Kanno: The diary of an Enginerd in Hawaii

Update

After finally getting time to play around with the Google App Engine Django helpers, here’s a few more steps to integrate nicely with the helper suite.

• Move the appengine installation from C:\AppEngine\ to where the Windows installer would have installed it to: C:\Program Files\Google\google_appengine (make sure to clean up your .pyc files)
• Add the following to your PYTHONPATH system variable: %APPENGINE%\;%APPENGINE%\lib;%APPENGINE%\lib\yaml\lib;%APPENGINE%\lib\webob;

After following the instructions, you should be good to go with Django + AppEngine! FTW! Whee.

I sense some pure, unadultered haterade. (j/k)

Since Python is one of those insert_any_synonym_for_fun languages that just works, here’s how to get the Google App Engine SDK working in Win2K.

• Download the Linux/Other platform package and unzip to somewhere neat.
• Add a System Environment variable called ‘APP_ENGINE_HOME’ that points to your App Engine installation. (Notice, I installed mine into C:\AppEngine)

  

• Add the System Environment variable to your System Path so the Windows shell can execute the included Python files.
• Make sure you have .py files associated with the python.exe executable located in your Python installation. (Check file types under folder options)
• Follow the tutorials: here and here, or learn with others - just to name a few.
• Oh, and before I forget, if you develop an application and realize that you can’t kill the development appserver (dev_appserver.py) by pressing Ctrl-C, I found a solution here. Basically, press Ctrl-C, hit the server with your browser one more time and voila, the development application server dies. Thanks Frank!

As an added bonus…

Last but not least…

Big ups to Mr. Fitz for solving all my Google App Engine issues and thanks to Mr. Harper for causing them.

Voila! (Enjoy)

Morning Tutorial

Technical Management of Software Development with Uber Technical Lead @ Google, Alex Martelli

Mr. Martelli covered a gauntlet of topics pertaining to technical management including empowering your team, optimal team size, time management skills, and test-driven development. Even though his tutorial regurgitated a lot of the obvious, it’s nice to hear it being preached by important people at large corporations. What I found most useful in Mr. Martelli’s presentation was his extensive list of suggested reading material about management. I’ll post them when I get a chance to go over his slides.

Overall grade: A-

Afternoon Tutorial

Introduction to Rails with Glenn Vanderburg

Unlike the Ruby presentation from a day ago, the Introduction to Rails was everything I hoped the Ruby talk was going to be (and more). Even though Mr. Vanderburg only had three or so hours, he did a great job of covering quite a bit of material. Topics he covered included the model, the controller, filters, flash, caching, layouts, views, the various helpers, form handling, migration, routing, and testing (*whew*). Though he didn’t get into great detail on each subject, I felt that he covered enough to pique my interest. I actually went back to the hotel itching to code a Rails app.

Overall grade: A

Stay tuned for more updates from OSCON 2007!

I’ve found that many bloggers with Wordpress installations seem to overlook the simple task of backing up their data. Rather, they put their blogging fate into the hands of their trustworthy web-hosting provider. Not that I don’t trust my provider, but I like to sleep knowing full well that my data is resting in a few safe places - rather than putting my eggs all in one basket. So you can either learn the hard way like here, here, and here, or you can follow the simple backup recipe below.

Backing up your Wordpress blog calls for the installation of two very simple Wordpress plugins, WP-DB Backup and WP-Cron, and a dummy Gmail account. After going through the painstaking task of downloading, installing, and configuring each plugin on my hosting provider, I come to find out that other users have reportedthat these plugins have stopped working for Wordpress 2.0.4, the exact version I have installed on my hosting provider. After searching around a bit (how did people live without Googs?), I found this blog posting that outlined the exact versions of the plugins you’ll need to get backups working with Wordpress 2.0.4. In any case, I’ll walk you through the procedure I followed to get my Wordpress installation backed up.

The setup

If you’ve somehow managed to SSH/telnet into your hosting account, you can issue the wget command to retrieve the two Wordpress plugins. I highly suggest creating a temp directory, then cd’ing into the directory to execute these commands.

wget URL/TO/LATEST/WP-DB-BACKUP.zip
wget URL/TO/LATEST/WP-CRON.zip

Note: I didn’t include the URL’s since they are likely to change depending on when this post is read.

The install

After downloading these two files, you’ll need to move them into your Wordpress plugins directory using the following command:

mv *.zip WP_INSTALL_DIRECTORY/wp-content/plugins

Cd into the directory and extract the two zip files using the following commands:

unzip LATEST_WP-CRON.zip
unzip LATEST_WP-DB-BACKUP.zip

Once these files are unzipped, click here to find the files you need to overwrite. This can be done by cutting and pasting the file contents from the blog over to the same files on your hosted account. You can even delete the files on your hosted site and create a new file with the contents from the aforementioned blog.

You pick your poison.

Once installed, login to your Wordpress admin site and find the Plugins link atop the administration panel. You’ll have to ‘activate‘ your plugins via the administration panel. Once you’ve activated both WP-Cron and WP-DB Backup, click on the Manage link atop the administration panel. In the sub panel, you’ll find a new link that reads ‘Backup’.

The config

I highly, highly recommend that before setting up your backup to execute nightly, immediately test to see if you can backup your current Wordpress installation. This can be done by selecting the ‘Email backup to:’ option (fill in an email address) and pressing the Backup button. Once you know that the backups are working (check your email address)… fill in the Scheduled backup section by selecting Daily and filling in an email address. Make sure to add any extra tables (if there are any) that you would like to backup.

You’re probably wondering what the Gmail account was for. Since Google mail offers a sweet 2 GBs of free storage, create an appropriately named dummy Gmail account such as ‘my-blog-backup@gmail.com’ and send all your backups to this address. Periodically, download the backups to your home machine by accessing Gmail via POP, but also leave a few backups sitting in the actual account. If you ever approach the 2 GB storage limit, log into your account via the web and delete the extraneous backups.

Voila! Blog on!

Now bloggers can rest assured that Googs, your hosting provider, and your local machine will have a copy of your current blog.

I’ve finally decided to switch my mail server over to Google Apps. Since I have all of ‘1‘ user on my domain - I figure it should be now or never. Seeing how my last Google experience was FUBAR’ed, I figured this would be another annoyingly painful process.

Yet, to my amazement, it was quite simple.

After signing up my domain, the first thing I had to do was verify that I was the owner. The verification process consisted of uploading a unique html document to the root of my domain. Contained within the document was a unique key that identified to Googs that I was indeed the domain’s owner. After FTP’ing the html document, I went back to Google Apps and indicated that I was ready for the verification process. Once verified, I was allowed to move my mail servers over.

Since my email was hosted on Dreamhost, in order to prevent an interruption in email service, the first thing I did was to create the exact same accounts I had on Dreamhost over on Google’s servers. That way, when my mail servers were finally switched over, all emails in transit would still be delivered to the right inbox.

To actually change my mail servers, I had to edit my Dreamhost MX record to point to Google App’s mail server. Googs even provided Dreamhost specific instructions to accomplish this task.

Nice.

After changing the MX record, I configured each account to allow POP access. Since I’m a Thunderbird user, I followed these instructions. After configuring Thunderbird, I clicked on ‘Get All Mail‘ and…

Voila!

On a difficulty scale of 1-10, with 10 being the most difficult, I’d rate this process of moving your domain over to Google Apps a 3. Not only that, but there were quite a number of other features like enabling Google Calendar, Google Start Page, and Google Talk for my domain.

Good job Googs!

I learned a thing or two about a business’ core competencies in my Business 660 Strategy course last semester. I can definitely say that Google Checkout is not one of them. Having been a Google-fan since day one, I really, really struggled to write this blog… but the truth must be told.

Google Checkout is a piece of crap.

You’d think that having a market capitalization of 145 billlllioooooooon dollars might warrant some half-decent software, but apparently, this is living proof that there is absolutely no direct correlation between the two (maybe proof of an inverse one).

Having been suckered by their ploy to gain market share (using Google Checkout meant another $10 off my purchase price), on December 7th, I decided to purchase a TMX Tickle Me Elmo doll from ToysRUs.com. Having purchased the item, I received a confirmation email in my Gmail account indicating that my purchase was “In Progress“.

A few days passed and the purchase status hadn’t changed. I called ToysRUs customer care, and they immediately recognized that Google hadn’t sent the order to them - hence, the invalid order number and static progress indicator. They indicated they would shoot an email off to Googs to see what the problem was. Satisfied with their answer, I sat and waited for an email from Google, aka recognizing how they fu$#ed up.

Three days later, and not surprisingly, nothing.

I decided to call ToysRUs once again, and their system indicated that an email had been sent to Google requesting the status of my order. I find it completely ironic that the ToysRUs back office software was more accurate than Google’s! Unable to even remotely contact a real person at Google (I know, I know, enginerds have no personality), I asked ToysRUs if they would still honor the Tickle Me Elmo price. Unfortunately, at this point, the toy was sold out.

So here I am, waiting for my order status to get out of “In Progress” without any hope of fulfilling my order, and worst of all, nobody at Google can tell me what happened. Actually, they probably could, but they just don’t have a customer presence to tell me what the f happened. I’m not sure who thought it would be a brilliant move to unleash untested software for the holiday season, but I can tell you I’m sticking to Paypal.

I honestly thought that maybe, just maybe, it was a server glitch and I was one of the unlucky few affected. But performing a simple search (using Google), you can find similar experiences like here, here, here, here, and here - for starters. I could probably spend all night aggregating these links.

Not to mention, as the last article points out, they now have my damn credit card, and I have nothing to show for it. I’m not sure if it’s because they have their hands in too many pots, but it might be that time to analyze and see what pots are actually worth stirring.