http://kvdb.net/blog Software development and everything related Sun, 23 May 2010 07:42:59 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en The traditional approach to documentation in a technical company is setting up a wiki on the intranet. In my experience, it's not a good enough solution, because of these issues: A pain to maintain properly, i.e. extra ACL administration. A wiki comes with a default markup language, and it needs to appeal to ... http://kvdb.net/blog/a-developers-approach-to-documentation/ Here's my understanding of the Task Queue processes on the Google App Engine. A summary, so I won't forget. According to the documentation, there are 2 settings to a task queue: rate and bucket_size. On the left side of the picture, the 'token generator' adds tokens to the bucket a a certain ... http://kvdb.net/blog/tokens-and-buckets-in-the-app-engine-task-queue/ A simple script to start off any new GAE project. All exceptions raised in production will show up in the GAE Logs dashboard, but I prefer to be notified by email. To prevent email flooding, the same error will only be reported once a day. class SomeHandler(EmailRequestHandler): def get(self): ... http://kvdb.net/blog/mail-uncatched-errors-with-google-app-engine/ As the Google API for Android doesn't provide latitude and longitude for GSM, I made a simple class which performs the following actions: Automatically gets information about GSM cellular towers around you (like cell id, signal strength etc.); Sends it in JSON format to Google via the Geolocation API; Receives the location information ... http://kvdb.net/blog/android-determinig-location-using-gsm-googles-geolocation-api/ This is a small copy-paste howto for debugging your TG2 app using: Java 6 Eclipse 3.5 PyDev 1.5.0 TurboGears 2.0 VirtualEnv Ubuntu 9.04 Setup Java. # Setup a Java platform $ sudo apt-get install openjdk-6-jdk # Make sure that sun java is the default $ sudo update-java-alternatives --set java-6-openjdk Download Eclipse 3.5 from http://download.eclipse.org/eclipse/downloads/ $ cd ~ $ tar xzvf eclipse-SDK-3.5-linux-gtk.tar.gz Setup PyDev. # Start eclipse $ ... http://kvdb.net/blog/turbogears-2-eclipse-pydev/ Outsourcing as much services as I can to a (free) third party saves a lot of time I would otherwise have spent on system administration. The task that will always remain, is keeping backups. Install the prerequisites on Ubuntu Jaunty or later: $ sudo apt-get install python-gdata Or on any previous Debian based ... http://kvdb.net/blog/backup-google-services-data/ When prototyping, it's handy to use a plain text file that contains JSON instead of generating its content by code. But consuming JSON data from JavaScript works better when it's served using the appointed application/json mimetype. Using the PHP wrapper below, that plain text file is served correctly. By providing the optional jsonp ... http://kvdb.net/blog/wrap-plain-json-data/ Host 6pp_vm is a virtual machine that runs on host kvdb.net. The usual steps for connecting to 6pp_vm from my laptop: kvdb@laptop:$ ssh kvdb.net # Type password kvdb@kvdb:$ ssh 6pp_vm # Type password kvdb@6pp:$ The goal is a login process reduced to: kvdb@laptop:$ ssh 6pp_vm kvdb@6pp:$ First, using OpenSSH's ProxyCommand, an instant connection from laptop to 6pp_vm can be ... http://kvdb.net/blog/ssh-directly-into-remote-virtual-machines/ On this blog, I'll post technical notes so I won't forget them. You might find them useful. http://kvdb.net/blog/hello-world/