Testing out the new photo sphere widget. The widget below is a photo sphere of our trip to Great Falls Park. You can find out more about how to embed the widget here: https://developers.google.com/panorama/web Another working example is here: http://goo.gl/BbEpS

This year's Google IO page has a nifty little game that allows you to build a machine that guides a ball from an input chute to an output chute. I noticed right away that the tools you can use seem to have odd shapes as if designed for a purpose. You could also choose the primary colors that Google uses often. I figured that they were originally designed so that you could easily make a machin[...]

(This post is the English translation of the Dec. 24th edition of the Python Web Framework Advent Calendar 2010. Other posts can be found at: http://atnd.org/events/10465 though they will be in Japanese) I usually use the kay framework for Appengine development as I am a developer for the framework, but recently I have been playing with the Tipfy framework (http://www.tipfy.org) written by R[...]

Google Appengine 1.4.0 was just released and has lots of interesting new features. Channel API, "Always On" (reserved instances), Improvements to background processing, Warm up requests, and Metadata queries just to name the big ones. ## Channel API The Channel API is a way for you to "push" data to the client browser. The Channel is a bit like a socket connection but it's implemented using[...]

Yesterday I became the new Google Appengine API Expert (Python) for the Japan region. Google Experts are the equivalent for Google API Gurus as they are called in the 'States. I will be helping out other developers in Japan to learn about and use Appengine and successfully deploy projects. I've been playing with Appengine since just after it came out in 2008 and I've built a number of sites [...]

Today I found that google chrome was making lots of background connections to 1e100.net. I was a little worried at first but this seems to be a google owned domain and these connections are used for their anti-phishing/malware feature. But even after disabling the feature I still noticed lots of connections open to 1e100.net: ian@macbook-ian:~$ lsof -i4 | grep chrome chrom[...]

My good friend Takashi Matsuo wrote an interesting blog about start up times of various frameworks on appengine. Because appengine kills your server process it often needs to load your application into memory from scratch. This can take a lot of time if a lot of modules are loaded. http://takashi-matsuo.blogspot.com/2009/10/minimum-cost-of-various-frameworks- cold.html

The Google Appengine SDK 1.2.3 was just released and contains some often asked for goodies such as Django 1.0 support and support for a task queue API. I haven't found much information about the Django 1.0 version in Appengine but here are some links with some related information about the Task Queue API. * Google Appengine Blog * The task queue API documentation - Looks relatively comp[...]

I'm about 2 weeks late getting around to writing about Google I/O and most people already know what went on but I'll share a bit more. The keynote was given by Vic Gundotra. Vic announced that Google would be pushing HTML 5.0 in order to speed up acceptance of the web as a platform. He included 5 things that Google is excited about. These include, * The canvas tag * The video tag * GPS[...]

I attended the Google Wave BOF (Birds of a Feather, A gathering of people with similar interests). It was a good time for folks with Google Wave accounts to show it off to folks who can't sign into it yet. It originally was going to be about 25 people but due to popular demand the location had to be moved, and it went up to about 40 people. Lots of folks were interested in hearing about Googl[...]