May 24, 2010

MapReduce Support for GAE

It seems Map Reduce support is coming to App Engine although no official anouncement yet, except what is available on code's Wiki page (http://code.google.com/p/appengine-mapreduce/wiki/GettingStartedInPython)
Well done App Engine team !

May 20, 2010

10 things we do not love in Ubuntu 10.4

There was an article on techrepublic today titled "10 things you'll love about Ubuntu 10.4"
And what about those 10 things we do not love in Ubuntu 10.4 ?
Well ... make it just 1 - moving the window controls to the left  I think it is a damn wrong move since It creates a lot of confusion especially to new users converting from Windows and quite a lot of ambiguity since some windows still have window controls on the right i.e. Chrome browser.
Of course you can move the controls back to the right using the configuration editor but this is not a solution for newbies.
I believe Canonical's first priority should be targeting Windows users coz there are much more  of them  and more easy to convert compared to Mac users.

May 13, 2010

Google Maps API quotas and App Engine

There is a lot of talk in various forums that I follow about Maps API quota limits.
To summarize: there is a limit of  2500 requests per day per requesting IP (see: http://code.google.com/apis/maps/faq.html) , if your application issues those requests from any server you can reach this limit quite fast. The situation is much worst if your application is based in GAE then it has to share those quotas with any other application in GAE that happens to use the same  API since all those applications are served from a limited number of google IP's making the API useless.
So far so bad except ...  there is a solution, delegate the job to the client using JSON & JS. This way :
a) quotas are calculated against your user's IP and more probably than not he will never exceed those.
b) you offload some workload from your server.
c) save some bandwidth.
Practically  I can't see a scenario where we can't use client side, since whatever we do we have to use the results only in connection with a Google map according to Maps TOS para 10.12 (unless of course you opt for the premier edition).