Google just released the Google App Engine in python development environment. The environment is loaded with WSGI, and Django 0.96 “for convenience”.

Just checked the Datastore API, it is a copycat of Django reference. Google’s engineers hacked the Django’s Model to support Google’s datastore, aka BigTable. Bang! Google Account is also supported via User API, no idea whether it is integrated to Django’s authentication framework though.

I am so glad that Google has made such a move, I can bet the Django users may grow exponentially in the following couple months. Today is Django’s D-day.

Google just launched the Code Search project, it is still in the cradle of Google Labs, but it works very well, even surpasses some specialized code search service. For example, search upc_all_reduce, which is a collective function call in UPC proposal. Neither Koders or Krugle return any result, but Google Code Search does. Considering the massive amount of page indexes, it is not a surprise.

Google Code Search keeps the universal user-friendly Google interface, simple and sleek, plus the charisma of Google brand; I doubt whether Koders is another Kiko. The start-up companies need not only inovative ideas, but alos fast growth before Google enters the field, otherwise, the best solution is to be purchased by Yahoo. Google acts as the Microsoft in the desktop computing environment, it can easily take the lead in a new field; unlike the gaint in Redmond, Google achieves it via advantage in information acquiring and querying instead of monopoly in th OS.

I just installed Google Browser Sync a few days ago, to manage my Firefox profiles across the computers, one in Gentoo, one in Windows XP(VMWare), one in Mac. Today, after the upgrade the world, the firefox failed to launch with this error message:

Have I broken something in the upgrade? I double checked the emerge log via genlop, and found nothing relavent. Then I check the strace output:

It is quite strange that the Firefox would check $HOME/.firefox, it is supposed to check $HOME/.mozilla/firefox instead. There must be something wrong with the current profile. Here we are, the $HOME/.mozilla/firefox/profiles.ini is truncated to zero bytes! Once this is fixed, Firefox works again.

I don’t want to FUD Google Browser Sync, but it is the only relavent change about Firefox. If you have met the same problem, could you drop a comment here? I might need to dig into the source code before jumping to a conclusion.

Google always give us some surprise, a new service named Google Transit has been released in beta test. With open API for Google Maps, nothing but your imagination stops you building creative applications.

Here is a wild idea to create the GPS application using Google maps:

1. Build an Firefox plugin/standalone web server to communicate with GPSd, convert the NEMA format data to standard XML data source
2. Inject the Javascript to Google Maps webpage with GreaseMonkey plugin, which would fetch the data from the plugin/webserver, and show the current position in the map.

Update: here is the application powered by greasemonkey.

More advanced features in mind:

• Cache Google map meta data and reuse it when offline.
• Voice navigation