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This is a great site. They frequently update with made-up superheroes that defeat the prior hero. Start at the first hero and work forward through time to see the battle as it wages on.

The Superest

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There’s a bug in the way the windows version of the Google App Engine SDK handles static directory handling. Basically, the way the SDK figures out the request URL and path to map it to don’t handle the backslashes properly. Single backslashes are left in the variable that is later used in a regular expression match. Here’s what you can do to modify the code to escape the path and make the SDK work on windows:

Open up this file in your favorite editor: C:\Program Files\Google\google_appengine\google\appengine\tools\dev_appserver.py

Search for this code block: (line 2369)

regex = os.path.join(re.escape(regex), '(.*)')
path = os.path.join(path, '\\1')

Replace it with these lines:

# urls should always have forward slashes
regex = re.escape(regex) + '/(.*)'
# be careful turning paths into regex strings
path = re.escape(path + os.sep) + '\\1'

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Google announced a new product yesterday called Google App Engine.  It looks very interesting.  The jist of it is, you can write your own dynamic web application and have it run on Google’s servers, using their fancy software.  This means you get to use GFS and BigTable as well as a bunch of other proven Google technologies.

The current offering is only a preview, which was limited to 10,000 users.  I didn’t read about it until this morning, so I missed the preview window by a long shot.  If you try to sign up now you can have them notify you when a spot is open.

They have a SDK available to write and test applications locally.  It has a stand-alone webserver so you can have a development environment similar to what you’ll see when you upload your application to Google.  Speaking of uploading, the SDK contains the tools to upload your code to Google.  The configuration is done with YAML files.  You set your application’s name, version, runtime, and the version of the App Engine API you’d like to go against.

Though they claim the underlying framework is runtime agnostic, the only currently available runtime is Python.  They’ve got the full core language and a neutered version of its standard libraries.  They’ve even made Django available in their hosted environment.

This seems like it will be a pretty cool option for future web applications.  The scaling and redundancy is what interests me the most.  Not to mention the cost: free.

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Okay so I’m reading the latest Golf Digest and I ran into a Q&A about handicaps. I recently tried to explain to a friend that handicaps aren’t what you should be expected to shoot above par.  This sums it up nicely:

Q: How often should you beat your handicap?

A: Not often. In fact, you should average about three shots higher than your handicap.

For example, if you have a course handicap of 16, and the Course Rating is 71.2, you should average 90, not 87. The USGA Handicap System is based on 96 percent of the best 10 differentials (corrected for Course and Slope ratings) of your last 20 rounds. More than half of your scores should be within three strokes of three over your handicap (87 to 93 in this example). Most golfers beat their handicap (86 or better in this example) only 20 percent of the time and beat it by three strokes one out of every 20 rounds.

For a person with a course handicap of 16 to break 80 (beat his handicap by eight strokes), the odds are 1,138 to 1. To do it twice, it would take the average golfer more than 700 years. In other words, it ain’t happening.

Source: Golf Digest, May 2008

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