Archive for April, 2008
Insoshi, Meet Heroku
Posted by SimianLogic in Uncategorized on 04/30/2008
(Images lost in the Great Update of 2009)
When I read about insoshi on Mashable and TechCrunch this morning, it got my mind buzzing… and immediately my thoughts turned to another Y Combinator startup–Heroku. I’ve been using Heroku for quite awhile now, and both my fondness for Ruby on Rails and my disdain (so far) for Google’s Big Table make it my prototyping engine of choice for the time being. The integration is not perfect by any stretch of the imagination, but here’s a quick and dirty way to get an insoshi install running on Heroku (assuming you have an acccount):
First Steps
- Download the insoshi tarball
- Create a new heroku app
- Import the insoshi tarball (how convenient is it that the heroku app importer wants a tarball!)
- Run rake db:migrate (this will run a ton of migrations… once complete you can press escape to close the little popup)
- Run rake install (this will create the default preferences file and the default forum.
Games and Taxes (Tax Year Resolutions?)
Posted by SimianLogic in Uncategorized on 04/11/2008
After scrimping a bit for the last month or so (and getting a nice fat refund check from Uncle Sam via direct deposit), I sent off $4000 to my Roth IRA as my 2007 contribution this morning. As far as I can tell, I’m completely done with my 2007 taxes now. Besides having income in both Georgia (while in grad school) and California, I can pretty much say that will be my last “tame” tax year. Income from Filler didn’t start rolling in until January of this year, but things should be pretty interesting this time next year. The IRS wants receipts for everything, but I’m wondering just how much they’ve done to catch up to the digital age. I can certainly prove exactly how much has come in via bank statements and PayPal transfer logs, but tracking digital expenses (for various hosting services, sound effects, etc…) might prove to be another animal altogether. Read the rest of this entry »
Google App Engine
Posted by SimianLogic in Uncategorized on 04/08/2008
Interesting news tonight: it seems as though Google is opening up their massive resource pool to the public at large (well, at least 10,000 of them). I signed up for it and got my invite an hour or so later, and I have to say it looks pretty promising. I’ve been tinkering with Heroku for a month or so now, and that also got me pretty excited. The thing about Heroku, though, is that my application sort of exists only in the cloud. They have access APIs for replicating their specific rails environment in a local setup, but the hassle of setting up that environment is frankly just not worth it. I’ve already got mySQL installed, so installing postgreSQL just for running my Heroku app locally seems a bit excessive. Both products are in beta, but there are a couple of things about Heroku that sort of bug me–namely, there’s currently no way to write your own robots.txt file, which means its practically impossible to “release” an application. If it doesn’t exist in Google’s eyes, it might as well not exist.
Though I’ve only just learned about this new Google Apps Engine, I’m going to assume it won’t have that problem. And if it scales as easily as they’re claiming it will… well I might just have to learn Python. I poked around at Django’s documenation a little bit, and it doesn’t seem so different from Rails. There are a couple of drawbacks, of course–a 500 megabyte storage limit and a one megabyte single-file limit. Sockets are also prohibited, which isn’t all that surprising (though it would be nice of Google to offer something which could be used as a multiplayer game server…).
It’ll be interesting to follow what comes out of it.