Google has launched a preview of their new Google App Engine. The first supported language is Python, which can be used to develop web applications that Google will host for you.

Google's plan is to handle all the mundane things that you need to do when getting an application running on the web... things like hardware setup, DB and web software configuration, notifications, authentication, log rolling, scaling and the like.

I wonder if offerings like this from Google (and other vendors like Amazon) could spawn a new breed of startups where entrepreneurs can concentrate on their ideas without worrying about hardware purchases and Apache config files?

I wasn't absolutely sure it would work, but for not too much cash I was able to upgrade the Rogers PVR that I'm renting to have about 5 times the space to store more shows. The Scientific Atlanta Explorer 8300 (not the HD version, no high def for us yet) has a port on the back that allows adding a second hard drive.

I went the fairly cheap route and bought a new 500 Gig Western Digital hard drive at Canada Computers in Waterloo and a basic, cheap case/enclosure together for around $150.00.

The first time I hooked the drive to the system, I didn't read the PVR manual closely enough. You are not supposed to plug the hard drive power into the PVR switched outlet. The drive needs to be powered up before the PVR.

The second time around, I got a message to format the drive. I agreed and then the system worked, but still no extra space. The next morning I hard-powered-down the components again and let it boot. Then wham... the system goes from 80 Gig to 580 Gig. Yay. A rough calculation/guess and I figure I can store about 430 "shows", noting that we save shows that are a mix of 15 minutes, 1/2 hour, full hour and the regular 2 hour movies.

Is it just me, or does the introduction of Squidoo Module Development Kit coincide with the introduction of Squidoo group spam? I maintain a robotics group that used to be configured to allow anyone to join, that is until spam lenses started to be added. I've changed the configuration to force approval for being added to the group, but I'm still getting requests for adding lenses that have nothing to do with robotics.

Are these just ad-revenue-hungry lensmasters, or an automated barrage of Squidoo-spamming-bots on the loose?

Update 2007/03/31: It looks like Squidoo has been listening to complaints of spam. Follow the link below to read about their efforts:

Spam, It’s What’s Not For Dinner

If you've ever had the urge to do some birdwatching, keep an eye on this one. From the creators of Winamp and the Yahoo! Music store comes Songbird, an open source project that I'm sure will be big.

It's a music player, organizer, mixer and what have you that looks a bit like iTunes from the screenshots. But where Winamp and iTunes support video playback, from what I it looks like so far there are no plans to do so in Songbird. It appears the coders are trying to it do one thing and do one thing well... making the best free and cross-platform music player possible.

If I were a betting man, I'd bet this project will go far and make a big impact.

Oh ya... I shouldn't forget to mention that I first read about Songbird on the MAKE: blog.

Blogs and blogging software are becoming ubiquitous. They let you journal your every thought, and combined with web feeds make it easy for anyone to read your thoughts in the way that they prefer. But the basic blog is still lacking in functionality in my opinion. Guided by Internet search engines, people often return to blog postings long after they were posted and possibly after they are relevant. Stale posts can be irrelevant at best and misleading at worst.

Constructive bloggers often re-visit and update their posts from the past as they learn more about the topic. Take the PressThink blog for instance. Jay Rosen is quick to add to his posts with a summary of other people's comments, as he comes across them, in a follow-up area he calls the "After Matter". He include quotes from other sites and links to additional information, along with his own commentary on how his opinion changes as time passes. If all blog software had a feature that supported this, posts would rarely go stale. I can see this turning into a Wiki-like page for each blog post.

There's also the Work.com site. While I'm not sure it can be called a blog, each article has several sections recommending other sites, services and blogs that provide additional information on the topic.

Maybe it seems like a lot of work to revisit your posts days, weeks or years later? I guess you could say that. But if you are providing information to a community of readers, you might feel that you owe them to keep the information up to date. You could look at it this way, the more quality content that appears on your site, the more loyal readers you will find and keep. If they come to know you as an expert, they'll be more likely to return to your site and recommend it to others.

You might say that existing comment systems provide the type dynamic updates that I'm talking about, but on popular blogs I see a really poor signal to noise ratio in the comments. It's not really a conversation as much as it is a shouting match there. Having something like the after thought section allows the author to pull together reactions to the original post in a clear and concise manner.

I just updated the software that I have used to store and share my bookmarks to the most recent version. The free and open source software is called "Scuttle" and it requires a database (preferrably mySQL) and PHP. After an initial hick-up configuring my web server, the newest software installed fine. Even better, I was able to export about 4 month's worth of my bookmarks from del.icio.us (thanks Yahoo!) and then import them into Scuttle.

The new version of Scuttle gives me most of the functionality that I used on del.icio.us, and let's me keep total control of the site. The only thing missing is the number of other people that link a particluar page and the added benefit of suggesting tags based on how other people tagged something. Neither were show stoppers for me.

Over on the Maple Leaf 2.0 blog, Mark Evans has a post listing several Canadian-specific Internet search engines. Of course, there's always Google.ca which has the "pages from Canada" filter (a radio button under the seach term field) and the Canadian Yahoo! which also has a "Canada" button for filtering. It likely won't be long before Microsoft's Live site features area geographic searching like this as well.

I've been wanting to get some experience with Ruby on Rails for some time now after reading about it on a couple blogs for the past 6 months or so. The Odeo and Flagr websites are built with Ruby on Rails, as are the popular applications developed by 37Signals. I'll have to admit, I'm a bit of a computer language junkie. I learned Basic and Pascal in high school, C and assembler in college, went through C++, Tcl, and Python phases, and now I code a fair amount of Perl at work. So adding another language to the mix (i.e. Ruby) can't hurt. I decided to start a pet project at home.

A first step was to see if there was a decent IDE I could use. I stumbled on RadRails as they were releasing version 0.71. RadRails is Eclipse bundled with support for Ruby on Rails. So far so good. I've used it for a couple of nights and it's working out fine. I was looking for an excuse to try out Eclipse as well. I already had Instant Rails on my system, and a simple change to my PATH environment got it working together well with RadRails.

RadRails lets me run the rails generators and unit tests from the IDE. It would be nice to run SQL commands from the IDE, but it doesn't take much to do that outside of the IDE, and who's to know what DB someone is running with Rails.

The Timeless Material Co. has just made a new addition to their website. They now feature incoming items one their "What's New" page. I've spent many a lunch hour wandering their spacious showroom (a huge 3-storey barn) standing in awe of the craftsmanship found in the reclaimed architectural salvage pieces that they sell. Now I can take a quick peek to see new items before wandering down to their store on Northfield Dr. in Waterloo.

The "What's New" page features a running list of items as they come in, and also provides categorized lists based on several categories such as doors, furniture, hardware, mantels, and structures. They also have a "Unique" category that currently lists an oak cooler unit among other items.

The main page and the category-specific pages also feature web feeds, the same technology many people use to read blogs. If you use a feed reader, you can subscribe to these lists and watch for changes. Some sites like the Google Homepage and my Yahoo! let you add a feed. Bloglines and Google Reader are good web-based choices for subscribing, and there are also applications that you can install on your own computer.

Check out the new items at: http://www.timelessmaterials.com/incoming/

Disclosure: I helped the folks at Timeless set up the web site software for their incoming items.

I just finished reading Eric Giguere's book "Make Easy Money with Google: Using the AdSense Advertising Program". According to the introduction, the book is somewhat of a departure in writing style when compared with author's previous books which were technical in nature. This book reads like a narrative from the perspective of someone having conversations with non-techies interested in setting up web sites with Google ads to earn some extra cash.

The book is clear and well written, outlining the basics of the AdSense system such as how ads are tailored for each web page and how to go about setting up your own web site. Eric, a Waterloo-local author, has done a great job with this book. I especially applaud his advice not to "game the system" and to honour copyrights on the Internet.

Even if you are not interested in using Google AdSense or other ads on your web site, Make Easy Money with Google is good primer to understand what happens when you click those ads.

I've just added some software to my site that appends a few links at the bottom of each blog posting. These links allow quick saving of a blog page to any of the common bookmarking services like del.icio.us, digg, reddit, ma.gnolia, furl, Google and Yahoo! You can also search for posts that link to this one using Technorati.

One thing to note, after downloading and installing the software that makes all this happen, I updated the code to add one additional link for a new blog search engine called Sphere. From their about page:

Sphere's advanced search algorithm helps you discover high-quality, relevant, and timely blog posts that match what you're looking for.

Give this one a try and see if you like Sphere.

Update 2006/06/25: Hmmm... and now everyone else should be able to see these links. I guess I should have checked anonymous access to my blog posts before I announced this feature :)

Here's a note that I sent to Google through their support request page. I'm suggesting a new feature, which I'm surprised they haven't implemented yet.

Google Alerts are great.

Your link for reporting spam search results at:

http://www.google.com/contact/spamreport.html

... is great.

Now... put them together. Add a link for each search result in the Google Alert e-mail messages that would prepopulate a web page for submitting a spam report. It would be a quick, efficient way to get spam blogs and other spam sites out of the search index almost as soon as they are added.

Spam blogs are most likely set up using automated tools, all in a name of getting ad revenue or for spreading malicious software to unsuspecting computer users (who could have their computers taken over to be used again to create more spam blogs). They can also boost a web site's search ranking to have it appear higher in the search results list. Since many people only look at the first few pages of an Internet search, this can make a big difference, especially if you're selling something.

Google Alerts can be setup by anyone, for free. Google will send you an e-mail when content based on your search terms is added to the Google search index. Letting people report spam directly from the alert e-mail messages would be a quick solution to reducing some of the spam blogs. I'm starting to get occassional alerts regarding sites that seem to be copying content from my own website.

I'll report back if anything comes out of my suggestion.

I've just been checking out Google's free version of SketchUp and I like what I see. It was quick to get going and there are some features that make creating three dimensional images easy and fast. Something that I will need to give more attention to though, is the fact that SketchUp offers an API using the Ruby programming language. This allows third party developers to add functionality to the package. It's kind of like Script-Fu in the Gimp, a highly-recommended, open source 2D image editing package.

Venture Voice is a great podcast. Gregory Galant does a great job of interviewing the high-rollers of the technology world. A recent session with David Sifry of Technorati dives into how the high-traffic, blog-tracking site Technorati started, and what David does to keep it going. Some of the lines that David comes out with are bound to be quoted and repeated. It was inspiring 45 minutes to say the least.

Read more here or if you see the button below, you can click play listen right now thanks to Odeo.

Some notables:
"Far more important than the technology you have is the team that you build."
"I firmly reject the notion that the primary reason for companies to exist is to make a profit."
"I can’t believe they actually pay me for this."

Tod Maffin reports that CBC Radio is now making some of their programming available as podcasts... audio programs that you can subscribe to and listen to on your computer or portable audio player. I'll be glad to get the best of Ideas, Quirks & Quarks, DNTO, The Current and other great programs.

Andrew S. Tanenbaum will be speaking at the University of Waterloo tomorrow (Tuesday Mar 28, 2006). He is best known for his creation of the Minix operating system which was an inspiration for Linus Torvalds when he wrote the Linux kernel.

See the brief note on Monday's UW Daily bulletin or get more details here.

I remember pouring over a textbook written by Mr. Tanenbaum in my college years... mostly because I was about to fail the class if I didn't learn everything in the span of a week, but also because it was a seminal work that helped shape my understanding of operating systems (and was a good read to boot). By the way... I did pass the course :)

Update 2006/03/29: Ken Dyck was able to attend the talk and gives a summary here. Too bad I couldn't make it. Everyone got a free Minux 3 on CD.

I know I'm a few months behind in breaking the news about Google Base, but I'm just getting around to investigating it and found this quote from their FAQ interesting:

Remember, our goal is to organize the world's information and make it universally useful and accessible, and "the world's information" certainly includes almost anything you might wish to contribute. We encourage you to submit your item, whether it's your store inventory, collection of original poetry, or research paper on cancer receptors.

Organize the world's information, eh? Some have written that maybe Google wants to own the world's information. I've noted the following coutner to that in their Terms of Service documentation:

Google claims no ownership or control over any Content submitted, posted or displayed by you on or through Google Base.

It makes a lot of sense for information providers to have the ability to feed information to the search engine in order to get a wider audience as people rely on search engines to locate important data. Others have questioned whether Google will allow other search engines to index information submitted to Google Base. I'll give that a try and report back if I find anything. If I can figure out how (and why I would want to) publish items, they should appear here:

http://base.google.com/base/a/onecog2many

Google Video has an episode of WGBH's "Thinking Big" from October 2005 titled "News in the Digital Age". Rebecca MacKinnon, formerly CNN's top person in north Asia, provides a good overview of how blogs are improving (but not replacing) the news as we know it. The show details the benefits that a personal point of view brings to news stories, but it is clear that not all bloggers stand up to the same journalistic rigors as most professional journalists hold themselves to.

It touches a bit on government censorship as well.

Read the transcript here.

Grab the video here in .mov format or here on Google Video.

New York Magazine has a story titled "The Rise of Craigslist and How It's Killing Your Newspaper" describing some of the history behind the makings of Craigslist.org and some insight into its creator Craig Newmark. It's an interesting piece and a good read for anyone that wants to understand more about the site and the motivations that lead to its creation back in 1995.

The piece also hints at Craig's future endeavors in the area of citizen journalism. Should be interesting to see what he comes out with, or more importantly what the world does with what he comes out with.

Google has been making more efforts to make it's "personalized homepage" more interesting in hopes that more people will adopt it. A recent Google blog posting announced that they are now offering APIs to enable developers to create and share their own modules for a homepage.

Currently, someone logged in with a Google account can only see their own homepage. It seems to me that if Google adds the ability for others to view your homepage, then they're more than half way to having created a competitor to Squidoo. Between you and me, I'd jump at the chance to be able to create my own modules. Having the ability to tweak or add to the code for my site (or lens or homepage) is much preferred. But, I'm guessing Squidoo is targetting an audience that is not interested in tinkering.

Update 2005/12/15: Come to think of it, MSN Spaces could easily become a Squidoo competitor with a little bit more marketting, and Microsoft's beta of Windows Live seems to be in the same space as the Google homepage. Competition is always healthy I guess :)