Allegro Non Troppo - Using Tropo API in App Engine

I was looking for an SMS - Voice gateway for an application of mine and after thoughtfully looking into Clicatell - twilio etc. I opted for Voxeo's tropo.
Do not ask much for the reasons I am not ready for a war over which one is better or cheaper to use.
I just felt like that tropo's "develop free - pay as you go once in production" business model fits well with App Engine's model that is on the same line, same applies to application scaling which is analogous to App Engine's.

So I decided to give it a try and here are my preliminary assessment of the service:

Understanding the concurrent requests limit

This "800ms" rule started as 1000ms some time ago, now it moved to
800ms and 400ms enters the scene. I am afraid it has became a moving
target approaching 0ms too fast. Somebody must stop the bar
somewhere.

Happy coding ;-)
(From my post in : http://groups.google.com/group/google-appengine-python/browse_thread/thread/6353b6232e8851aa )

A bug in tweepy streaming API

I found a bug in tweepy streaming API .
It can't filter by tag with non Latin characters.
I was astonished coz this was working when I used it some months ago (version 1.3 if I remember well).
So here is my small contribution to the project :
def filter(self, follow=None, track=None, async=False):
   params = {}
   self.headers['Content-type'] = "application/x-www-form-urlencoded"
should be :
def filter(self, follow=None, track=None, async=False):
   params = {}
   self.headers['Content-type'] = "application/x-www-form-urlencoded; charset=utf-8"
I have only tested streaming and only tag filtering - probably this applies to other parts but I am not sure.

App Engine & Google Geocoding Service II

This issue comes and goes in this thread all the time.
I also suggested in the past to delegate the job to the client since I
could't see a scenario where we use server side request and be within
the TOR's.
see here : http://gaengine.blogspot.com/2010/05/google-maps-api-quotas-and-app-engine.html
I was wrong. Recently I run into a case where I had to do this and
still I am sure I am within legal limits, this is so when you need the
geolocation service in order to publish a static map served from
Google.
So this is a real problem and the issue has to be resolved somehow,
although I think we are discussing this in the wrong group. IMO that
this is an issue for the maps group and we should adress it there.
Happy coding:-)

Update :For an alternative solution you can take a look here.

Re: What is the best way to convert a dictionary of data into a datastore entity?

If you are going to use your dictionaries as dictionaries back in your
program then why not save those into a Blob or Text datastore property
(by pickling or repr - eval or other means).

SDK version 1.3.5 Prerelease

App Engine team announced V 1.3.5  prerelease, I do like the release early release often attitude.
From a quick source code reading, what I see as most important new feature in this release is the support for Content-range headers for Blobs and stream like interface to blobstore that will extend usage of blobstore to some new application scenarios.

Transparent App Engine logo

The other day I was looking for a transparent App Engine Logo to use in this blog.
Unfortunately I could not find one so I had to make it. Now it is available here .
As for people asking how I made this flying animation ( I know I know ...  it looks  stupid and obscuring etc. etc.  but I wanted this lovely plane to fly a bit !, it is all pure CSS  plus a couple of lines of js all made very easy with the new blogger template designer. Here are the steps :