10 things we do not love in Ubuntu 10.4

There was an article on techrepublic today titled "10 things you'll love about Ubuntu 10.4"

And what about those 10 things we do not love in Ubuntu 10.4 ?

Well ... make it just 1 - moving the window controls to the left  I think it is a damn wrong move since It creates a lot of confusion especially to new users converting from Windows and quite a lot of ambiguity since some windows still have window controls on the right i.e. Chrome browser.

Of course you can move the controls back to the right using the configuration editor but this is not a solution for newbies.

I believe Canonical's first priority should be targeting Windows users coz there are much more  of them  and more easy to convert compared to Mac users.

Google Maps API quotas and App Engine

There is a lot of talk in various forums that I follow about Maps API quota limits.
To summarize: there is a limit of  2500 requests per day per requesting IP (see: http://code.google.com/apis/maps/faq.html) , if your application issues those requests from any server you can reach this limit quite fast. The situation is much worst if your application is based in GAE then it has to share those quotas with any other application in GAE that happens to use the same  API since all those applications are served from a limited number of google IP's making the API useless.
So far so bad except ...  there is a solution, delegate the job to the client using JSON & JS. This way :
a) quotas are calculated against your user's IP and more probably than not he will never exceed those.
b) you offload some workload from your server.
c) save some bandwidth.
Practically  I can't see a scenario where we can't use client side, since whatever we do we have to use the results only in connection with a Google map according to Maps TOS para 10.12 (unless of course you opt for the premier edition).

Happy Birthday

It was two years ago today that I have started developing in App Engine, been one of the first 10000, when it was released to the first 10000 developers.
Since then I have spent a lot of days and nights (well ...  mostly nights) working with App Engine having seen it advancing to its present form, something I do not regret.
On this occasion I must express my many thanks to the wonderful App engine team for their efforts and the support they give to developers.
http://googleappengine.blogspot.com/2010/04/happy-birthday.html

New Warning message in logs

Any body noticed following new warning on their logs ?
"
04-20 04:02PM 48.495
This request caused a new process to be started for your application, and thus caused your application code to be loaded for the first time. This request may thus take longer and use more CPU than a typical request for your application.
"
Very helpful and useful in many ways (code optimization etc.)
Oh ! just a short commend : could it be a little less verbose ? thus not waisting so much valuable space in logs database etc ?

Google Plans To Expand Cloud Computing Services

This sounds like good news for App Engine developers
http://techcrunch.com/2010/04/12/google-plans-to-expand-cloud-computing-services-think-aws-on-steroids/

Post mortem of a different kind.

Today's post has nothing to do with Application Engine neither with programming at large which are the subjects of this blog. 

Or may be it has ?

My dearest brother died last Wednesday night at the age of 47.

I do regret that been occupied with work and programming, did not spent much time with him lately neither I have listened carefully on what he was trying to tell me.

Programming is work and hobby but there are lots of other things in life that we should not neglect and never let computers, social networks and all virtual paraphernalia replace real human relationships.

CSS Chrome now supports border-radius

Just discovered that Chrome now supports standard CSS 3 border-radius.
So no need for "-webkit-border-radius" if you target chrome.
It works on 5.0.342.7 beta Linux still have to test for other OS & versions.