For some time the server running this site had been acting up. Page loads were slow, access through SSH seemed lagging and something was absolutely misbehaving.
I’ve been trying to figure out what exactly was going on, but nothing really made sense. there were plenty of disk space, memory was reasonable utilized (no swapping) and the CPU load seemed to be less than 0.1 at any time - there were no good reason the server was “turtling” along at such a perceived slow pace.
I’ve been playing a bit with the Google App Engine the past few nights. It’s one of the newest toys out of Google, and it could very well be a very important piece of infrastructure to many web developers trying to create a dotcom adventure.
Google App Engine (once they let you in) allows you to run web applications of google’s server infrastructure. With the Google App Engine you can write applications (and run these of your local machine (Mac, Linux or Windows) and even use data storage in your applications. Currently applications can only be written in Python, but Google promises support for other languages later. Once approved by Google and your application is ready for prime time, you simple deploy it, and it runs of Googles Servers.
A while back I complained you couldn’t change title on documents in Google Docs. Well, you can. It just wasn’t obvious to me how you do it. Just click on the title while the document is open, and you can change it.
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Placing your documents online, does require trust in the online service you choose to use. I usually have a pretty solid trust in google. They do however from time to time have some glitches. After getting the message in the screenshot for an hour, I did start to get the chills, as the document as long and didn’t exist anywhere else. After an hour or so, it did however reappear. phew.
A number of podcasts and websites have mentioned that you can get your Gmail SSL encrypted by just adding a small s in the url (from http:// to https:// in the url). Cool. But wait there’s more… it seems to work for Google Docs and Google Reader too. While I doubt the usefulness of an encrypted RSS Reader, there’s certainly a great vaule in having encrypted access to documents used with Google Docs.