uBoggle is now appearing as the featured application on the Google AppEngine Application Gallery. Thank you for your votes, and thanks to the appgallery editors!

And I have a screenshot for proof and posterity :)

As I mentioned recently, I have been dabbling with Google App Engine for fun with some of my friends. I think we are now at a stage where we could use some more players! :)

Ladies and Gentlemen, I'm proud to present uBoggle – the best game of its kind out there! If you like games like Scrabble, you'll love uBoggle :)

We have some amazing features – such as word highlight, word meanings and board rotation – and addictive game play, so do give it a try. You can play without logging in, but if you log in, you will get access to additional features such as game history. Many more features are on the horizon, so check back often.

If you like the game, please leave a comment here. Thanks!

Do you remember the 1984 ad from Apple? I've embedded it at the bottom if you haven't. Anyways, the point is that I was trying to download the “free” Apple iPhone SDK today and apparently they require me to sign up first. I thought alright, that doesn't seem too unreasonable. Now I have the sign up form in front of me, and I just don't understand why the following fields are marked as “required”:

• company: what if I'm NOT in a company? what if I'm NOT using the SDK for work related purposes? what if I just don't want to tell you where I work? Of course I realize I can always make this up, but why does Apple feel the need to pry on my professional/personal life so badly?
• address: are you going to send me a check in the mail? As long as I'm not involved in a monetary transaction with Apple, they shouldn't be need my address. If they want to geo-localize interest in their SDK, I'm sure they are already doing that by logging my IP address. Again, I can make up an address but that's not the point (besides, I'm sure somewhere in the fine print they will have me click some check box that is a proof of my consent that the information I have submitted is accurate)
• phone number: tele marketing?

I've been playing around with Google AppEngine for the past two weeks, and the experience has been mixed so far. First, the good:

• really easy to build something simple and get started.
• no need to worry about scaling, backup, replication etc. I haven't verified this obviously, but at least thats the claim.
• the integration with Google accounts is nice.
• good documentation, lots of sample code available.
• dev server really helps with most of the development.
• the sort of restrictive resource usage limits (see below) forced us to think carefully about our code and heavily optimize certain operations to make them work on GAE.

And now, the bad:

• too many limits: 1 million is their favorite number. No files over 1MB, no request should take more than 1 million CPU cycles (whatever that means) and who knows what other limits they impose internally. While developing, this was the biggest barrier for us. Things would randomly fail, and then our application would be disabled for several hours.
• The dev server doesn't replicate the constraints in production. So everything would run fine and dandy locally, and the minute we upload, it would fail. Since we can only debug in production, and our application exceeded the quota every time we ran it, debugging was extremely slow and painful.
• local data store is excruciatingly slow. But this is not that critical, since it is only for testing anyways.
• even the remote data store is very flaky and slow at times. Any query involving more than a few hundred elements exceeds the quota.
• the bulk uploader is very useful, but again it is really really slow. If you want to upload anything in “bulk”, you'll have a hard time. The parameters have to be chosen carefully as well. Even for very simple data models involving 3-5 fields (mostly strings), we had to reduce the batch size to 2-4 to make it work. And despite that we got a few HTTP 500 errors while uploading.

But its been fun so far. Hopefully most of these issues will get ironed out moving forward. As for what we are building? That will have to wait for another post

Compare these two sites:

I'm assuming that appropriate permission were taken and attributions were given, otherwise this is just a blatant rip-off.

I got a promotional offer in my mail today from American Express. The highlight? An extra 1% cash back!! Clearly an offer I couldn't resist. I rushed to the sign up page, where I was greeted by the following:

Pay close attention to the text below the image. First, they make sure I understand that I will continue to earn my usual cash back on virtually every dollar I spend. What more, virtually for every dollar that I spend (that is, after I have already spent $500 that month), I will get a bonus rebate of an extra 1% cash back.

This is exactly what we need to fix this country's financial problems. Go American Express, America is counting on you! Thank you, thank you soooooooo much for this generous offer. You really made my day.

This bit should have gone through WP-Dokuwiki

Well, here's your chance! If you are a budding writer in India, you can now self-publish your books through Pothi.com, an online venture by two of my good friends.

Google Reader offers several options for sorting feed items. After having played around with the “auto-sort” for several months now, I am reverting back to “Sort by newest”.

The problem is that the auto-sort mode is a little too simplistic. Here's what it does in their own words:

The general idea behind auto-sort is good, but unfortunately the execution hasn't evolved at all to become smarter. For instance, some blogs I read haven't been updated in a while. And I'm really not interested in the stuff they wrote some months back. So I never read those few old posts and yet they continue to hang around at the top of my feeds, which gets annoying quickly.

Ideally, the auto-sort should also take into account my reading trends (they obviously collect all this data, so might as well use it). In my case, what I really want the auto-sort to do is this: if there are some old posts and I'm consistently choosing not to read them, then perhaps they don't need to be raised to the top any more. If I need to find them, I can always do so. In fact, I wouldn't even mind if the old posts were raised to the top of the list once in a while.

An even smarter auto-sort will also take into account my reading habits. If there's an infrequently updated blog that I read religiously, then I definitely don't want to miss even an old post, no matter what. Similarly, old posts from an inactive blog that I have stopped following should be given less weight.

How do you sort your feeds?

While going through my feeds today, I happened to land up on the ACID tests web page, and so I thought “hmm, let me see how Firefox does”. My expectation was that since Firefox is touted to be such a standards compliant browser, it'd pass tests 1 and 2 with flying colors. I already know that it doesn't pass Acid3 yet, so I wasn't expecting much anyways.

And so I was quite shocked to see it miserably fail both Acid1 and Acid2. I'm not sure if this is because some extension that I have (unlikely). I'm running Firefox 2.0.0.13 on Ubuntu Gutsy (7.10). Take a look at the results of the test: