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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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I’ve been using IMAP over Gmail since the kind folks at Google enabled it for all of us.  This is exactly what I wanted in a Gmail IMAP interface.  Here’s how it works.

There is a special folder called [Gmail] that has the following subfolders: All Mail, Sent Mail, Spam, Starred, Trash.

These map directly to the folders as you see them on gmail.com.   To mark something as spam from my iPhone, I just have to move it to the Spam folder.  To add a star to an item, you just flag it.  Brilliant.

Along with those special folders, you also have a Drafts folder and a folder per label.  I use many labels to stay organized so this is great.  You can copy an item to multiple folders to apply multiple labels or if you move an item from your inbox to a label it has the same effect as labeling it and archiving it on the website.

When configuring the account for the iPhone, here are a couple things you should do in the advanced settings for your account:

1. Your Drafts Mailbox should be the Drafts mailbox on the server.  This way, all your draft messages are synced in every mail client.
2. Your Sent Mailbox should be on your iPhone.  When you send a message using Gmail’s SMTP server (smtp.gmail.com) it will auto-magically create a copy of the message in your special [Gmail]\Sent Mail folder.
3. Your Deleted Mailbox should be on your iPhone.  Since deleting a message from the inbox archives it when you’re using IMAP, you probably don’t want to do without that feature.  To actually move a message to the Trash on your gmail account, go ahead and move it to the [Gmail]\Trash folder.  To archive, just tap delete.

My Mail.app setup is very similar except I don’t use Gmail’s Drafts folder for my drafts.  There is some kind of Mail.app/Gmail bug where the auto-saved drafts that are created as you type each create a new message on Gmail.  This is super annoying… if you type a longer message you may have a dozen messages on the server by the time you’re done.

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I’ve finally seen the true potential of Gmail.

Recently, I’ve decided to stop hosting all my email on my own single server and move it to something more reliable. I’ve got a DreamHost account that I’m slowly moving websites to so I figured I’d just create the account here.

This presents a couple challenges. First off, I use lots of dot-qmail aliases. DreamHost doesn’t seem to have this concept of loose user aliases. This would be annoying having to find all 100 or so aliases and add them. Plus, I’m not a big fan of DreamHost’s policy of rotating the inbox to keep the size down. They also use SpamAssassin for spam filtering which I’ve had to tweak a whole lot on my system to keep the spam to a minimum… not something I wanted to do again. So, this removes them as a contender for my email host.

Next up I tried Google Apps. I signed up as soon as I heard about the beta a while ago with one of my never-used domains and really liked how easily you could integrate everything. They’ve recently added the ability for you to have one domain as the master domain and multiple alias domains so user1@alias-domain is the same as user1@master-domain. This works great for me, as I’ve got the only email account on these small domains I can just have chris@domain for everything.

There is still the problem of my Google Talk contacts list, existing mail on my old gmail account, and everywhere that I’m using that @gmail.com email address. So this means that I’ll just make Gmail my primary inbox so I have a single point for all email. I’m just using the free version of Google Apps to serve as my domain catch-all and forward on to my Gmail account.

Gmail lets you add additional email addresses (after verifying that you are the owner of the mailbox), so I’ve just added my main accounts here and it will send from whatever account I choose, or if I’m replying it will send from the account that the original message was sent to. Nifty.

Now to get all of my old mail on my Gmail account. I created multiple accounts on my server and copied specific maildir folders into them so I could have Gmail slurp them in using its POP3 access. You can label incoming messages per account, which was perfect for my approach as these were already filed how I wanted them in my mail folders. The import worked great, but it took a long time to import. All of my email probably took about 24 hours.

I’ve always liked Gmail but I haven’t had enough mail volume going through there to actually see how easy it will be to keep a clean inbox and still have everything neatly filed away. Now I’ve already looked for a few older messages and they couldn’t have been easier to find. The search is powerful and as fast as you’d expect from Google. The keyboard shortcuts are great - if you haven’t got them turned on in your Gmail account I’d suggest doing so and then taking the time to learn them. You can do pretty much everything without having to reach for the mouse.

I’d recommend anybody use this setup for a reliable, free email system with very few limitations. I’ll be moving my users over to a similar setup soon.

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Google just released a new tool for the masses: Google Calendar. It looks like it’ll be pretty cool. It has built-in XML feeds as well as iCal feeds, so it should integrate nicely into client apps (specifically, working with iCal would be nice on my Powerbook). The web interface is very nice - much nicer than the Microsoft Exchange interface and the one for .Mac.

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Looks like there are a few popular google bombs going on right now:

One about John Kerry and his waffles (search), and here’s one about a miserable failure (search).

(I think the latter is more applicable to the URL I provided, since it is kind of hard to call the leader of the free world a miserable failure.)

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