Monthly Archives: January 2009

A New Toy Namely Google App Engine Has Arrived

Google seems to love and hate me at the same time. Some moments ago (I forgot the date I filled the application), I submitted application form for testing its App Engine. I was just curious about its cloud computing environment and wondered if the infrastructure they built could properly address some issues common in grid computing or cloud computing architecture. Also, I thought it would also be nice for me, although I’m not exposed to the details of the architectural implementation, to use their infrastructure for research purpose as I’m currently researching on distributed systems.

I received an email from Google containing the approval of my application. No need to explicitly express how radiant I was to receive such notification because it really means something, to be frank. The caveat is, current SDK provided only supports Python programming language, a language I am not so familiar with. I have never spent hefty amount of dedicated time learning Python, to get to know what’s inside and out. Lacking the knowledge can be a taxing obstacle, but let’s just see if I am up to the challenge.

Later, I will provide an article about cloud computing for those who want to know why it’s often said as a promising architecture for future web computation.

In the meantime, if you have ideas about applications to build or good references for Python, just let me know. The comment section is open 😉

Statistical Data of Year 2008 for This Blog and Plan for 2009

It’s been two years since I managed to write my concerns, opinions, and thoughts about technology-related topics in my own blog, which is this blog. Although the blog was originally intended to be supplementary since it’s not the main part of my future plan, it has evolved to be the façade, main terrace of a partly unveiled palazzo.

It has captured its own audience, visitors coming mainly from search engine results page using several keywords. This is mainly because I exerted minimum marketing and public relation in order to analyze how prospective the blog itself if it only relies on third party marketing, hence search engine crawl results and people discussing one of my posts and then put a link to the original content. Efforts put to expose this blog to broader audience may seem to be minimal. By seeing traffic statistics during year 2008, however, the trend infers positive outlook, a signal for me as the blog author to keep posting quality posts containing valuable information for people who might need it, avid tech blog readers, or just random visitors happen to drop by. Continue reading