CHRIS MCMICHAEL

Today I road a total of 40 miles to and from work. The photo below shows where I decided to take a shortcut (or perhaps got lost) and realized that NASA does not have trails that offer shortcuts around their facilities. So I decided to backtrack costing me 5 miles.

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Last weekend, I took my very first trip to SoCAL to attend Coachella; the most amazing music festival of them all.

Here is a list of musical artists I saw this year:

50 Cent, Andrew Bird, AVICII, The Black Keys, Bon Iver, BoomBoomBoomBand (RedBull Speakeasy), Calvin Harris, DJ Shadow, Dr Dre, Eminem, Florence and the Machine, Flying Lotus, Frank Ocean, Girl Talk, Godspeed, Gotye, The Hives, Justice, Kendrick Lamar, M83, Miike Snow, Radiohead, SBTRKT, Snoop Dogg, Swedish House Mafia, Tupoc hologram, Warren G, Wiz Khalifa, & a few others that I can't recall.

Pro Tips for next year:

• Get a campground for drinking, eating, and hanging out. Who wants to pay $10-14 for beer and food inside?!!
• Rent a condo b/c if you sweat like all of the other smelly campers you will want to take a shower (at least I hope you would). Also it's nice to sleep in a real bed and not a blowup bed or worse, the ground.
• Bring your own TP. Does this point really require detail?
• Buy some walking shoes with tons of padding. You will be walking around for 6-12 hours at a time. I made the mistake of walking around in my Vibrams sock shoes which has zero padding. Don't make that mistake or you will regret it, like I did.

Check out my Gallery: Coachella 2012 Gallery

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Today, I spent a few hours migrating my site back to one of my SliceHost servers. The appEngine just wasn't doing it for me. The biggest problem was storage limitations in regards to the size of files you could store. The AppEngine only allows 1mb files to be stored which is sadly stored on the database itself. Limitations like that meant that I could not host my own photo gallery and I missed not having my own gallery! Using Picasa would have been the alternative but, at the time, I didn't feel motivated enough to implement that. The nice thing about Django is that it automatically comes with a fairly straightforward administrative tool whereas the AppEngine makes you somewhat responsible for writing your own administrative tools.

Disqus comments rock! Previously, I was relying on Django comments. After that I tried a custom comments system that I made but was getting way too much spam so I decided to completely axe comments altogether. About a year or so ago I discovered Disqus but I never got around to actually implementing their comment system. 5 minutes was literally all it took to install and I was up and running. The only thing I have left is to customise the look and feel of the comment system. Though, at some point, I may try to use their new API to have a more tightly integrated comment system.

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As of today, my site is officially on the Google App Engine (GAE). The switch was rather painless considering the GAE is largely python/Django-based. The main difference in the GAE versus using straight-up Django is that GAE has it's own ORM.

Limitations:

1. Performing complex queries is somewhat difficult to do. When using Google Query Language (GQL) or the filter query method, sorting becomes an issue. For example, lets pretend that we would like to filter blog posts based on their category. We would filter using the category foreign key. Simple enough, what's wrong with that? Well nothing, but according to the documentation, there is an ordering limitation. A query can only be ordered by the item that it was being filtered on. In our case we are filtering on a category FK. If we wanted to order by date instead, according to the docs, that is not possible.
2. Read-only access to the file system is another limitation. If you need to upload an image, you're out of luck. However, storing file data in the database as a blob is an option (although not a good one) but you are limited to 1MB. In most cases, this will not be an issue but when dealing with large images or videos consider you might consider YouTube or Picasa which can easily be integrated.
3. Domain configuration documentation is lacking on how to point to a project. I actually had to find the solution on a non-google forum. Since the google app engine works by using sub-domains, I also have to use the ugly www prefix which is not a big deal but I prefer not to take a step back to 1995. I prefer non www domains, they look nicer!

Advantages

1. Apps are super easy to setup and deploy.
2. No need to spend to time being a sys-admin. Google takes care of that.
3. All the great tools and applications that Google has Docs, Picasa, YouTube, gmail, etc.. can either be integrated into your app or setup on a sub-domain.
4. Perhaps the best feature that I am befitting from is the fact that I am saving $10/month in hosting fees. The likely hood of my site ever exceeding the quota for free accounts is very slim.

Overall, I feel that the advantages outweigh the disadvantages at this time and I plan on making more apps on the GAE. One feature I wished that the GAE offered is access to the gmail spam filter through an API. How awesome would it be if you could filter comments or any type of text for spam? I would totally implement that. Speaking of which, I finally turned my comment system back on.

Previously, I had no solution for combating comment spam. I spent some time playing around with akismet but could never get it to function correctly so I ditched that solution. Next, I stumbled upon recaptchas.net, But I didn't like having an ugly badge that didn't flow with my site just to validate that a user is human. Finally, I found captchas.net, a very light weight captchas system. So I hope this will help combating my spam issues. In the event that spam gets through, I have an easy way of disabling spam as soon as it comes in. Maybe Google will implement my feature request then I can avoid captchas altogether.

I am still in the process of adding my gallery back. It's completed, I need to spend some time migrating the data over. Since GAE is using Django components I felt that I could keep the Django badge on my site. That's about it. I hope you like my subtle design changes!

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Rumor has it that SocialBooth will be opening up for more than just a select set of users. I will be striving to get this service up and fully functional with in the next month or so and hopefully with a kick-ass design.

Went to Google I/O this year and it was by far the best conference I've ever been to. Free G2 phones with a months worth of service and access to new Google Wave, the Future! I've been told that I am now living in the 21st century now that i have my new iPhone 3GS. SIM cards rock my world! Now I can swap between the 3 phones that I own

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