The Principal Principle

is it just me?

A principle is a law or rule.
A principal is a chief or leader or senior.

Why do people ask for 
principle 
developers?

App Engine from Scratch

I decided to see how easy it was to deploy an app engine project without reading all the documentation.
I already have the Google plugin for Eclipse.
So I created a new default Google Java application project for GWT and AppEngine, changed the greeting service to reverse a String. Very stupid app, just for testing purposes.

Did have to ask a couple of questions, trying the experiment of NOT reading any documentation.
OK so:
1. Sign up for app engine.
2. Give them your cell phone number.
3. Get an SMS message back.
4. Enter it.
5. Create your application URL at https://appengine.google.com/
5 1/2. Make SURE you put your application name IN your appengine-web.xml file. This is where I ran into a snag!
It will look like:


<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<appengine-web-app xmlns="http://appengine.google.com/ns/1.0">
<application>edsmiley666test</application>
<version>1</version>


<!-- Configure java.util.logging -->
<system-properties>
<property name="java.util.logging.config.file" value="WEB-INF/logging.properties"/>
</system-properties>
</appengine-web-app>

Yeah, App Engine needs to look at that to be able to deploy! Otherwise appengine says WTF is this and 403s you.

6. Click your little app engine icon to deploy. It will grind away like this:
Compiling module geek.Edsappenginedemo
Compiling 6 permutations
Permutation compile succeeded
Linking into C:\eclipse3.4\workspace\edsappenginedemo\war
Link succeeded
Compilation succeeded -- 24.149s
Creating staging directory
Scanning for jsp files.
Scanning files on local disk.
Initiating update.
Cloning 31 static files.
Cloning 51 application files.
Uploading 26 files.
Uploaded 6 files.
Uploaded 12 files.
Uploaded 18 files.
Uploaded 24 files.
Deploying new version.
Will check again in 1 seconds
Closing update: new version is ready to start serving.
Uploading index definitions.
Deployment completed successfully

The app itself, which is not worth looking at is at http://edsmiley666test.appspot.com/.
Each deployed version gets a subdomain of it, e.g. http://1.latest.edsmiley666test.appspot.com/

October GTUG

SV-GTUG Tonight: App Engine 1.2.5 release.
October Meeting: App Engine 1.2.5 Coding Session Oct 7 Wed 6:00 PM
Where? Googleplex (Bldg. 43) 1600 Amphitheatre Parkway Tunis Conference Room Mountain View, CA 94043

...
blogging live from october sv-gtug

It’s a nice cozy group here, and several Santa Cruzans are here as well.
(Maybe the “write code” pared it down somewhat.)

So just finished off my ginormous burrito and diet coke.
Just learned about a framework for Groovy on AppEngine.

My Guice Presentation

My presentation

Attention is so short, I thought that there was room for a really really “KISS” dead simple presentation on Guice, so I tried to restrict it to 12 slides and a “hello world” type application. I figure if you “get” IoC, not just as a way to get “Spring” on your resume, you’ll get the basics from it and then move on to the grown up stuff.

Eclipse Day At Googleplex 2009

Conference I recently attended.

SLIDES AND VIDEO AT:
Eclipse Day At Googleplex 2009 – Eclipsepedia.

Eclipse in the Enterprise: Lessons from Google – Terry Parker, Google & Robert Konigsberg, Google
Developing DSLs with Eclipse – Peter Friese, itemis
OSGi for Eclipse Developers – Chris Aniszczyk, EclipseSource
Developing for Android with Eclipse – Xavier Ducrohet, Google
Distributed OSGi in the Eclipse Runtime Project – Scott Lewis, EclipseSource
Deploying Successful Enterprise Tools – Joep Rottinghuis, eBay
Build and Provision: Two Sides of the Coin We Love to Hate – Ed Merks, Eclipse Modeling Framework Lead
Google Plugin for Eclipse: Not Just for Newbies Any More – Miguel Méndez, Google

Review: Symmetry: A Journey into the Patterns of Nature"

Symmetry: A Journey into the Patterns of Nature by Marcus du Sautoy



This book is really awesome and goes into a mathemetician's private obsession and delight in symmetry and the drama of the pursuit of a complete catalog of all symmetry types.  The Moorish tiles in the Alhambra, the packing of spheres in the 24th dimension, error detection and correction codes, all are connected.

This has about the best explanation for the math loving quasi-layman of the Monster symmetry which emerges from the depths of the 196833rd dimension.

An object with rotations for this symmetry group needs 196833 dimensions to construct....

Yes, 196,833....  (The sphere packing solution, the so called Leech lattice, and the EDECs are all there for the taking in the 24th dimension, just to give you a sense of proportion.)

Um oddly if you add one to the dimensionality IT JUST SO HAPPENS to appear as a coefficient associated with the modular function, and the NEXT ONE is can be formed with this and other dimensionalities in which it occurs by a trivial bit of arithmetic and so on.  Now this function connects to Wiles proof of Fermat's last theorem, and this symmetry is starting to show up in string theory--and essentially IT IS IN THE MIDDLE OF EVERYTHING.

(The monster group is the highest order sporadic group . It has group order, well,  too long to type out.)

Well, this book was so fascinating I couldn't put it down (and I am rereading parts of it.) Of course your mileage my differ, but I enjoyed it a lot.


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