Winning at Puzzle Adventures

A few weeks ago, some friends of mine started playing a Facebook game, Puzzle Adventures. This is a (pretty fun) jigsaw puzzle game, so I played a few levels at some point. The game limits you significantly in many areas (e.g. you can only play three or four games before you have to wait for minutes to play more, or pay). The game is also geared against you in that the time limits are pretty tight, but what irked me the most was that the puzzle pieces don't snap together unless you get ...

How to handle Python package installation on GAE

As I've mentioned many times on this blog, I'm a big fan of Google AppEngine. I like the free tier, the effortless scaling, the zero administration, and how I can run Django almost unmodified and deploy in seconds. It has its downsides, but overall I like it very much.

The one part of deployment I didn't like was dependency handling. Due to the way GAE works, you need to install all packages in the root of your application, or in some other directory by placing the source there. I haven't been able to find a way ...

On authentication usability

A few days ago, I tried to log into my alternate Facebook account, one I hadn't logged into for a while. After the first or second failed attempt at logging in (I couldn't remember the password), my mail client rang and I saw the following email from Facebook:

This struck me as a fantastic touch and a great usability boost. It also made me think about the usual login flow in sites, and I realized that email is, in my opinion, being underutilized in the login process. There ...

A short update

As I have mentioned previously, this blog is running on Google's AppEngine, and I have just migrated it to the HR datastore to test out Python 2.7. Hopefully this will go well and the concurrent requests will keep the instances to a minimum. I am curious to see how well this will perform.

I am especially interested in the change of instance hours between the old and new backends. Based on a quick examination of the billing history of the past 16 days, the blog has used an average of 30 instance hours a day, with a max ...

How PostgreSQL's SR (Streaming Replication) works

Recently, I have come upon the need to deploy a high-availability/performance postgres cluster, and I looked into various replication solutions. Of the ones I saw, Streaming Replication was the easiest to set up, fairly performant and a good fit for what we wanted to do, and it's built into postgres 9.0+.

Unfortunately, checking the documentation and howtos, I gained little insight into how it works. There are plenty of detailed guides on how to set it up, but none explain how exactly it works, so it was a bit of a ...

App Engine pricing changes revisited

As anyone who knows me will already have noticed, I'm a quite an outspoken proponent of Google AppEngine. Many of my projects nowadays run on GAE, including this very blog, as I love the ease of deployment, the provided services and low cost. I decided to migrate this blog to it from a VPS after many troubles with Drupal (lack of customizability, security problems, etc). It didn't help that it gets 60,000 uniques a day, mainly from my Python tutorial, and Drupal on my budget VPS was crumbling under the load ...

Secrets of Power Negotiating

A few weeks ago I was recommended Roger Dawson's Secrets of Power Negotiating, and decided to give it a try. I was pleasantly surprised to find that it is full of practical tips and helpful pointers about negotiations of every type, be it salary increases, a house purchases, and even negotiations between countries (especially helpful if you're eyeing some islands in the middle of the atlantic).

What I especially liked about this book is that it contains useful information, examples and techniques without veering into the all-too-familiar territory of most self-help books nowadays, which is to inundate the reader with a series of irrelevant or inapplicable anecdotes about how people who used technique X became rich and handsome.

Book clouds

As someone who is on the road a lot, I frequently have a lot of downtime during road trips. I don't like driving, because it's mostly wasted time, so I thought I would do something useful while driving. Unfortunately, about the only useful thing you can do while driving is listen to music, but there's something better: Audiobooks.

Audiobooks are a fantastic way to read (or, well, listen to) books on the road, and it's largely made long car trips bearable, if not desirable. On the last trip, I decided I would listen to some Lovecraft, as I enjoy his writing and the genre of horror in general, so I loaded "At the Mountains of Madness" on my mobile phone and off I went. While listening, however, I was struck by his frequent use of words like "terrible", "horrible" etc. I know he's trying to convey a sense of foreboding, but, come on, Howard, not every rock has to be grotesque.

Blog migration

The old blog software was showing its age, so I decided to write a few lines of code and move the blog over to Google App Engine. Most things should work properly, but if you notice any broken links please let me know by emailing me on the address on the "About me" page.

Thanks!

Πρόγραμμα καταχώρησης αποδείξεων

Note: Apologies to non-Greek readers, this post is not for you.

Πριν μερικές μέρες είχα την ιδέα να φτιάξω ένα πρόγραμμα καταχώρησης αποδείξεων. Μια μικρή έρευνα έδειξε ότι ήδη υπάρχουν αρκετά τέτοια προγράμματα, αλλά κανένα δεν ήταν αρκετά εύχρηστο, και μου φάνηκε αρκετά καλή ιδέα για να μάθω λίγα πράγματα για το Django στο AppEngine.

Οπότε, δύο μέρες αργότερα, είναι χαρά μου να σας παρουσιάσω το TaxBonus, το δωρεάν και εύχρηστο πρόγραμμα καταχώρησης αποδείξεων. Το TaxBonus σας βοηθάει να καταχωρήσετε τις αποδείξεις σας, να υπολογίσετε πόσες αποδείξεις χρειάζεστε για την επέκταση του ...