I would highlight 3 things on this release:

• The taskqueues are now part of the official API, they are not experimental anymore
• They have multiplied by 20 the maximum time of execution on cron tasks and task queues. From 30 seconds to 600 seconds (10 minutes). This is awesome! although it can be dangerous. We’ll have to use this wisely
• Finally Channel API is now officially available to everybody.

The Channel API impressed me when I saw it in May. Following a talk about Channel API on Google IO. Is a technical talk and it only make sense to see it if you program on GAE or if you want to do an API for Comet:

Links:

• Google App Engine SDK Download Page
• Google App Engine Release Notes
• Building real-time web apps with App Engine and the Feed API

The solution in 4 simple steps:
– Open System -> Preferences -> Keyboard
– Click on the Mouse Keys tab
– Deselect "Pointer can be controlled using the keypad"
– And, finally, just click on Close

The thing is that right now I am developing an application using Google App Engine (GAE for friends), and for not having problems when deploying the next version, it is recommended to use Python 2.5 when developing.

As you might have guessed in the title, Canonical have removed the Python2.5 package from the latest Ubuntu Lucid release, so I cannot run the local  Google App Engine web server.

Lucky me, after searching for a while on launchpad.net I’ve found a solution. There is a person that has created  python2.4 and python2.5 packages for Ubuntu Lucid Lynx.

The only think you should do is add the following two lines at the end of your  /etc/apt/sources.list

deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/fkrull/deadsnakes/ubuntu lucid main
deb-src http://ppa.launchpad.net/fkrull/deadsnakes/ubuntu lucid main

And finally run:

$ sudo apt-get update
$ sudo apt-get install python2.5

And that’s it, you can now run GoogleAppEngine.

Interesting links:

• Old Python versions in Launchpad (you can check on this website the packages and how to install them)
• Python 2.5.5 release page
• Google App Engine

From my point of view, the big problem I found on this release (which I just installed 5 minutes ago) is that they changed the window buttons from the right to the left side of the window. I think 95% of the users are used to the buttons on the right side, and I don’t see the point on moving them to the left.

Anyway, I don’t like it, so I searched around, and I’ve found a quick and easy solution.

Press Alt+F2, then type gconf-editor and press enter. That’s for opening the configuration editor.

Once on this editor, in the item tree at the left, you have to look for this path  app -> metacity -> general and you doubleclick on the field named  button_layout.

Then, you have only to change the value field and put this:

menu:minimize,maximize,close

You save the changes, and voila!! all the windows reconfigured again!

Now all the windows show the minimize, maximize and close buttons on the right again

You can go directly to the minute 2:50 to watch how it removes a tree out of the scene in just a click.

It is amazing the things that can be done…

Seen at John Nack on Adobe

According to this post in the Firebug blog, the crash will be solved on future versions of Firefox (3.5.8).

Just in case you are here because you have the same problem, here are a couple of solutions that work:

• Install the 32-bit version of Firefox
• Uninstall Firebug 1.5 and reinstall a previous version of Firebug, you might want to install firebug 1.4.5

As you might expect, I’ve downloaded and installed this brand new version of Chrome for Linux and I installed on my Ubuntu 64-bit laptop.

The truth is that it caused me a great impression, when I launched google-chrome command, the browser just appeared in a fraction of a second. I though Opera was quite amazing at rendering the browser, but now I think Chrome is even faster.

The next thing I tried is the typing test of ARTypist, and it worked amazingly well. I know it uses internally a lot of javascript, and it all works great.  Even the CSS displays properly well, and since several months ago I haven’t tried to run ARTypist on Chrome

Finally, after visiting another couple of web sites I realized flash worked as well without me having to install any plugin. I don’t know if it has detected the flash plugin was already installed (probably), but it’s great having it working on all pages. At the first sight, it seems the browser seems it’s working well

Right now I’m not planning to change Firefox by Chrome, but at least I can test my webs on Chrome without having to open a virtual machine with Windows.

Anyway, these days I’ve been working in integrating the Sign in with Twitter and Sign in with Facebook in the typing web (I haven’t released the new changes yet). I’ve been thinking that it will be a good idea to create a user called “artypist” in twitter to post the news of the web, so once I created that user I though it will be a good idea as well to move my ARTypist application from my user (amniotic) to the new artypist user. The only problem I found is that there is no option in twitter that says “Transfer this application to another twitter user”.

After this, my first though was removing the application and creating it back on the other user. This was not possible !  Twitter does not allow to remove applications once created…

A couple of minutes later I got another idea… And this new idea worked!!

To transfer a twitter application  (say APP) from one user (A) to another user (B) the only thing you need to do is to log in twitter as A, then edit the application settings and rename it to APP2, then logout and log in as B, and now you can create the application APP again. As the name has been “released” it can be used by another application

I hope this helps somebody!

Nowadays the configuration for mounting disk partitions on linux (the file /etc/fstab) uses the UUID instead of the device name (/dev/hda1, /dev/sda1 …).

If you need to know which is the UUID of a particular device you can run the blkid command. E.g:

$ sudo blkid /dev/sda1
/dev/sda1: UUID="8b6ec31c-1f41-49f3-82da-d2ab0f0fa312" TYPE="ext3"

If you don’t like this command, or you think you cannot remember it, there is another way of knowing the UUID. If you have udev in your system (I think is udev the one that updates the list), you can go to  /dev/disks/by-uuid/ folder and run a list command (ls). E.g:

$ ls -l /dev/disks/by-uuid/
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 10 2009-11-19 07:56 8b6ec31c-1f41-49f3-82da-d2ab0f0fa312 -> ../../sda1
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 10 2009-11-19 07:56 626adc53-3478-4eb1-9f68-dc0b6f9308e7 -> ../../sda2
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 10 2009-11-19 07:56 9cfc5c6d-f343-411e-ac59-31eee6b12a9b -> ../../sda3

The advantage of this command is that we don’t need administrator privileges, and it’s easier to remember

the…

wait for it….

wait for it….

wait for it….

GOTO

It’s amazing how PHP team is including in the same release high-level features, as well as a low-level feature like that (BTW most of the people will consider this feature harmful). They should have felt a great pressure from people or something, because I cannot find any reasonable reason for them to include it…

In the PHP goto documentation you will see that at least, they are funny about it: