Nick's Blog

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Because repeating myself sucks.

Bookeen CyBook vs Sony Reader

I've been a fan of EBook readers for a long time now. Before EPaper based readers, I had an LCD-based one, and before that I had a Palm that I used almost exclusively to read EBooks.

EPaper, though, is a big step forward in terms of EBook readability, and when the Bookeen CyBook first came out, I immediately got one.

Unfortunately, a couple of months ago, I ...

Ricochet Robots and interesting game trees

Every Wednesday at work we have a Games Night - people bring along (non-computer) games, we get together, and we play a few. Last Wednesday, someone brought along Ricochet Robots. I wasn't very good at it, but the game intrigues me from a computational point of view.

Essentially, it's a puzzle game. You have a board divided into squares. Each square is either empty or has a ...

BDBDatastore 0.2 released

I'm pleased to say that BDBDatastore 0.2 is now released. With this release, BDBDatastore is now officially at feature parity with the production App Engine datastore. That is, it ought to be able to do everything the production datastore can, which means you can port your apps off the production datastore without having to change them.

Installation instructions can be found here. The release is numbered ...

Interesting articles about SQL and non-relational databases

Here's an interesting article about why SQL databases suck for webapps, and another one with good detailed reviews of non-relational databases.

BDBDatastore 0.1 released

When I announced BDBDatastore just a few days ago, it was still a ways away from being practically usable for anyone wanting to develop or deploy App Engine apps. The purpose of the post was twofold: To attract some initial interest, and to motivate me, with the light of public scrutiny, to make sure it gets finished and polished.

I'm pleased to say that release 0.1 ...

Announcing BDBDatastore, a replacement datastore for App Engine

One criticism I frequently see directed at App Engine is that of lock-in. Since App Engine doesn't use the same APIs and libraries that people are used to using elsewhere, people say, Google is implicitly locking people in to continuing to run their App Engine apps on Google infrastructure.

I'm of two minds on this. On the one hand, I don't think it's justified ...

Cognitive dissonance and the "download 4 free" debacle

I've been watching the whole Amazon/Pirate Bay debacle with some interest. Of particular interest is the number and type of critics of the whole thing: Some of the loudest critics seem to be those who would otherwise proudly admit to downloading pirate copies of media, or who like to go on about the dying business model of 'old media'.

I think the reason for this rather ...

Bloog developments

Bill Katz, the original author of Bloog, has kindly added me as a contributor on the official Bloog repository. I've pushed all my changes from my 'master' branch to it, and I'm working on getting the 'breaking' changes in.

I'm thankful for...

Thanksgiving itself. I don't live in the US, wasn't born in the US, and have only visited the US occasionally, but I'm still thankful for it: The lull in blog activity has enabled me to catch up in reader for the first time in over a month.

Migrated!

I've now migrated this blog from Serendipity, the blogging package I was previously using, to Bloog, a blog platform written for App Engine. Before doing so, though, I made some fairly significant changes and improvements, including:

  • A Serendipity uploader script (so I can import my old articles).
  • (Limited) unit-testing.
  • A bunch of improvements suggested by Matteo Crippa, including:
- Comment notification by email to the blog owner.
- Gravatar ...