Inspirational Technology

Google recently announced a new cloud based application deployment system called Google App Engine. I’ve been playing around with App Engine for the last few days and it’s really interesting. If you build an app for it you’re REALLY locked into Google, but the benefits of the system are pretty compelling. Since the SDK they released is Open Source we decided to put together a JumpBox for it.

The JumpBox gives you a drop in place system for doing Google App Engine development that’s contained in an isolated environment within a virtual machine. It runs exactly the same on Mac, Windows or Linux and gives you a development environment that lets you take advantage of great virtualization features like snapshots. It will run from a single download on Parallels Desktop, any VMWare product, Virtual Iron, Microsoft Virtual PC/Server and Xen Open Source in fully virtualized mode.

It’s a great solution if you want to play with the Google App Engine SDK without really installing it on your system. It’s also perfect as an integration point for a small team working together on a Google App Engine project.

Google made it possible to build applications for App Engine using several different mechanisms and the JumpBox comes with CGI, Google Webapp and Django environments setup and ready for development. It’s also a really great way to just kick the tires of the different frameworks before committing to development.

Also, since this is a JumpBox our backup system is included which allows you to backup your source code and development data to network shares or Amazon S3.

The JumpBox for Google App Engine Development is just something we put together because it looked interesting, if people find it useful we’ll continue developing it and tracking Google’s SDK releases. I think there are a lot of things we could add to it to make it a really useful tool for developing apps. If you have any suggestions definitely let me know.

Get more information and download the JumpBox

Man, it’s getting harder and harder to blog any more. There’s a lot going on in my life that I should be writing about, but never do. Not sure why.

We launched JumpBox in July and it’s moving along nicely. We’ve since released two platform point releases and one new JumpBox for the Twiki Enterprise Wiki system. It was a scary thing to launch the company with no idea whether or not anyone would be willing to pay for what we were doing. Thankfully they were and we easily beat expectations for our first month. Now the challenge is just getting the growth we need to become profitable. We have some really interesting stuff in the pipeline for release in November which is pretty exciting.

Perhaps more important though, it looks like after 37 years I’m finally going to get married. Oct 27 is the date, exactly one year after Lisa and I met for the first time. I’ve tended to not share too much about my personal life, but this is a pretty important event and it’s amazing that I finally found someone who is as quirky as I am.

That about sums up my life right now, business and getting married. Could be worse I guess.

Just wanted to post a quick note to say I’m in Portland this week for the O’Reilly Open Source convention thru Thursday and will be at the TechCrunch party in San Jose Friday night. If you’re going to be at either of those events I’d love to meet some new people while we’re here. I can be contacted via email kstaken@xmldatabases.org.

Today I came across an article about a new 32GB solid state 2.5″ SATA disk from SanDisk. This could potentially be a quite extraordinary development. Compared to current hard drives, it’s faster, quieter, uses less power, has much faster random access times and doesn’t have any moving parts. All very positive sounding things, the down side is that it’s lower capacity and costs quite a bit more than current harddrives. I’ll be watching these drives closely and am definitely looking forward to seeing real world performance numbers. There’s no data on write performance and the limited write cycles of flash media could be an issue for really heavy write intensive applicaions.

Well, we’d like to think virtual appliances are only used for good, but it looks like there’s also a virtual appliance floating around that can be used to activate the corporate version of Windows Vista without paying for the licenses.

The MelindaGates hack uses a VMware image of a KMS server to activate — and keep activated — a pirated edition of Windows Vista Business. “Looks like Windows Vista Volume Activation 2.0 is a big bust,” wrote a user identified as “clank” on the PirateBay Web site Friday.

I’m not much of a fan of the activation nonsense that Microsoft has been putting into their software, so it’s kind of interesting to see it defeated so easily. It looks like the use of a virtual machine may have been a necessity in this case as well. This current trend of tying software to hardware is kind of interesting when you consider that the hardware that’s being presented to the OS now is increasingly just software itself. I suspect we’re going to start seeing some lobbying for some way to allow software running in a virtual machine to gain more access to the physical hardware for the sake of licensing and “security”. If that happens then we’re really going to have a mess to deal with.

Mark Suster CEO of Koral is talking about his experiences raising a round of venture capital.

So I’m stuck with the paper shuffler and the Blackberry man. I am not kidding you when I say that I was on the verge of literally saying, “let’s just call this meeting a day. It’s clear you have no respect for me and no interest in my company.” I bit my tongue (which my wife will tell you is rare). I finished the next 15 painful minutes and said goodbye. My only regret … the $25 I had to pay to park in their building. They were seriously the most pompous, self-centered, unprofessional group of people that I have come across in a long time. I went to back to their website and unsurprisingly there were no great companies I had ever heard of. I later learned that they were a spin out from an investment bank. It all made sense. They were not “real” VCs. If you are raising money in the Bay Area and want to know who this firm is to avoid them drop me a line at msuster@koral.com and I’ll tell you the name.

Not kind words for this particular firm.

I saw Mark demo Koral at the Office 2.0 conference and it looked like a pretty compelling product, certainly one of the better products falling into the “Office 2.0″ bucket. It’s a shame this group couldn’t give him the respect he deserves, ultimately though, it’s just an opportunity missed for them. I’m sure Mark will have no trouble finding the money he needs elsewhere.

As a solution for something that’s way harder than it should be, Microsoft has released a virtual machine with Windows XP and Internet Explorer 6 & 7 preinstalled. The target for this is web developers who are looking to test their sites against both of the IE versions. The virtual machine has XP installed and pre-activated with expiration on April 1 2007.

It’s getting really interesting to see what Microsoft is doing with pre-built virtual machines. I hesitate to call these virtual appliances, but I suppose they are. I wonder if now that Windows Vista is released they’ll be a little more willing to allow Windows XP to float for this type of applications. This release certainly sets an interesting precedent and as a Macintosh user, testing in IE is really the only thing I really need Windows for anymore. So far I haven’t seen anyone convert the VHD format release into something that will run under VMWare or Parallels.

A couple days ago Ben came back to the office after lunch with one of the more desired toys for this Christmas, a Nintendo Wii. Being the geeks that we are, we of course had to crack it open and give it a go. Ben has posted his impressions on his blog. I only spent about an hour playing Wii Sports, but I have to say it was definitely a lot of fun. The new controller, while not perfect, makes a huge difference in the accessibility of the games. The Wii Sports package overall is rather light fare, but the bowling game does show some real potential for the controller. It felt the most real to me, and many of the same techniques you use when really bowling also work within the game. For me my horrible inconsistency with bowling even carried through to the game, that’s not necessarily good for my scores, but it is realistic. That to me is a true advancement. It’s definitely going to be interesting to watch what new games emerge as developers get more experience with the controller. I don’t play games much anymore, but if I were going to buy one of the next generation consoles, it would definitely be the Wii.

A new Microsoft melding between Internet Explorer and Firefox to bring Windows users great new features.

Print it right the first time

Microsoft Firefox 2007 automatically shrinks text to abysmally small sizes, so all webpage content can fit onto a single apostrophe on your final printed page. This saves ink. Printing options includes adjustable margins, customizable margins, removable margins and more changeable margins. Manipulating margins has never been so exciting.

Put Safety First

A robust new Microsoft security architecture known as TakeOver™ helps to protect the Windows Kernel from malicious, damaging and viral software such as Symantec and McAfee products.

And my personal favorite, updated RSS support

RSS (Real Simple Sex) is a relatively new algorithmic technology fueled by the continued hot desires of many online web users. Accessed by an illuminating an icon on the toolbar - a single click allows you to view and optionally download anything that resembles a tit, a boob or a breast - rendered directly in the browser with speeds up to 10 times faster than the competition. Real Simple Sex can scan and arrange explicit images/pictures in order of quality and effectively filters out irrelevant content such as balloons or soccer balls.

Somebody had too much time on their hands, but it is amusing.

According to Marketwatch the F-117 Nighthawk “stealth fighter” is set for early mothballing. I find this to be kind of sad. It’s such a fascinating aircraft. When I lived in Tucson you would see these flying around every once in a while, now they’ll probably end up there permanently for storage.