Breaking up with Google App Engine

Sorry Google. It's you, not me.

Perhaps I'm not the target developer for Google App Engine but it seemed like it. I run hsxworld.com, a little community site built around the Hollywood Stock Exchange Game. It pretty much runs itself on a webhost with a database but lately my backend software, PHPnuke, is aging.

Along comes Google, with their new fangled App Engine that seems a perfect fit. Dump the stock data plus other stuff into it, build a few functions to return some data, and I have a nice scalable engine to host the data on. I even had some fun learning Python for the first time as well as exploring some AJAX. Even better, I could even design it so that other community sites could grab the data AJAX style and maybe give a little back.

What I found quickly was that the BigTable database engine behind it was either not well suited to what I was doing or I was doing things all wrong. I even went so far as to really AJAXize my code to fire off many transactions instead of large monolithic queries. Nothing seemed to help. Simply queries like finding 20 or 30 records from a 300-400 row table took longer than they should. More optimizing, and I was able to get it reasonable (see here) but yet the backend logs still complained that I was using too much CPU.

Too much CPU on a 30 row query? Egad.

So, I'm breaking up with Google App Engine. I'll just have to either upgrade my PHPnuke or abandon it for some straight PHP+MySQL.

Subway is trying to make me fat

Case in point: Subway has what seems like a great promotion running. $5 footlongs. Sounds nice, doesn't it? At Subway though, the Double Stacked 6" sandwiches have just as much meaty goodness as the footlongs. So check this:

6" Double Chicken Teriyaki: 480 calories, 7g fat, 100mg Cholesterol, 65g carbs
Footlong Chicken Teriyaki: 750 calories, 10g fat, 100mg Cholesterol, 118g carbs

And they cost the same. $4.38 here for the double, ~$5 for the promotional footlong. I'm sure it is even worse because I use the Italian Herb and Cheese bread rather than the regular Wheat or Italian.

Don't be fooled!

Internet TV and me

Last night I think I became a convert of this whole Internet TV streaming thing. I'm a subscriber to the most basic of basic cable, 12 channles in all, and yet I still find enough things to watch to fill my 1TB MythTV. But because of this, I miss important shows like Battlestar Galactica which air only on the premium channels. Thanks to hulu.com, I can now watch my BSG without resorting to downloading it from online sources. It works great on my TV set to full screen.

A few months ago I also rigged up my new HP Media Center PC to my TV so I could use the Netflix Watch Now feature (only works on Windows so my MythTV is out). Not only did I watch the latest BSG episode last night, but I found that the CBS showing of the latest Dexter episode I was watching was delayed, probably due to some sports, and I missed 45 minutes of the show. No problem, Dexter Season 1 is on Netflix Watch now and I saw it in all its uncensored glory.

Now I certainly wouldn't want to watch all my TV this way, but in a pinch, getting episodes of two shows I really like from online sources was a huge benefit to me and I didn't have to resort to any nefarious schemes.

Now if we can just get this all a little better integrated with the TV rather than rigging up an expensive Media Center PC...

Threat Level Red

I received this today from Twitter


Hi, Kevin Kuphal.

al qaeda (al_qaeda) is now following your updates on Twitter.

Check out al qaeda's profile here:

http://twitter.com/al_qaeda

You may follow al qaeda as well by clicking on the "follow" button.

Best,
Twitter


Be afraid, be very afraid

Head in the clouds

So I managed to get signed up for one of the free accounts on the Google App Engine. It is basically a distributed computing cloud that lets you write Python applications that run on Google's massive infrastructure. So far it has been a great experience learning a bit about Python and playing around with what the engine can do. I was considering using this as a data service platform for hsxworld.com since I need to do a bit of rewriting there. More on this later.