Google Application Engine

As it stands, google runs my favourite search engine, my favourite web browser, this blog, my email and even my calendar. They also help me get from A to B, watch videos that I'm interested in and find the cheapest price for things that I want to be.

Since I do all of this whilst logged in to my google account - it stands to reason that google owns a worrying amount of information about me. Sometimes I worry about it, but then I stop worrying, because, after all, I can stop using google's services any time I like, and, to be fair,  my habits as an individual probably aren't that interesting to a large, multinational organisation like google.

Google application engine, on the other hand, completely changes the name of the game. 

GAE (the application engine) is a service provided by google that allows online web applications to be built using Python and then hosted - completely free - on google's servers. They promise that the engine is extremely scaleable - that means that an application created using GAE could be used by 4 people, or by 4 million people. The service could be used to create almost ANY type of data processing system, provided that it is web oriented. 

That sounds wonderful, but it raises the question of ethics. Google operates in hundreds of different legal climates, although it is in itself an American organisation. What happens when the application engine is used, for example, to store information about the mis-treatment of prisoners in one country, or measures taken to drive out dissidence in another. On a less ethical note, is it really a good idea to trust the innermost aspects of the workings of your organisation to another company? No less one that is incredibly good at indexing and data mining.

In fact, I believe that the British Data Protection Act makes it illegal for any company to pass your data to another organisation without seeking permission from you for it first. If google ran servers in countries that DON'T have similar data protection laws, you would need to ensure that none of your customer's information lands on those servers - that's another requirement of the Data Protection Act.

Nevertheless, Google's application engine is a very useful and interesting peice of technology. It is easy to work with, includes a set of tools that are fairly standard for web applicatioons in Python, and encourages best practises for scaleability by providing an excellent set of standard tools. It includes a powerful data storage system (with its own problems, mind you - I might discuss those in another post), and it can run easily in both development and production environments.

Using google's servers can be extremely useful if you run a small to medium sized site and you don't mind passing your data to google. In fact, you can run the engine on a server of your choosing, as long as it supports a django environment. That was your information is NOT all passed to google - useful when you start storing information that matters.

All in all, I believe that GAE is a fun bit of technology. It could be used in a fairly large number of situations to make life easier and simpler for the amateur web application developer. Should it be used for larger organisations? Probably not - or at least, I believe it shouldn't.

Bye for now!

Esperanto

Esperanto is a spoken and written language that was constructed some time ago by an academic type that thought it would be lovely if the whole world was able to speak some universal second language. The idea does sound grand at first doesn't it? International politicions would be able to talk to each other honestly and directly - without any translation needed. They would be able to avoid the bias of using a language that belongs to a particular nation! That would be great.

Probably the most important thing about esperanto is that it is constructed - it doesn't originate from any nation, and it doesn't give anyone an unfair advantage because they come from a country that already speaks it. I think that's important - the british people are particularly bad at getting on with the rest of the world, and I think that partly it's because we're so rubbish at learning other languages - we simply expect other people to speak our own!* That's an attitude that we often extend to culture and tradition - sometimes without even realising it.

Of course, another major advantage of Esperanto can be demonstrated by looking at the story of The Tower Of Babylon - as described in The Bible (by God). In The Bible, when civilisation first grew all of the nations of the world spoke one language and acted under one banner. One day, they decided to build a fucking huge tower so that they could become closer to the heavens. God didn't like that, so he went super-saiyan and smashed the tower with a kamayamaya wave before spreading humanity all over the world. To make sure that the tower would never be built again, he gave them all different languages. For this reason, I believe Esperanto would help to anger God.

Good eh?

Esperanto is taught in a few different places. Notably, in the UK, Manchester university helps 4 primary schools teach it - the schools believe it will help the children to learn the basic skills needed to acquire further languages. There are 2500 books in Esperanto, and 2 films. There are between 100,000 and 2 million speakers world wide. This is an abysmal figure when you consider that it's been around for well over a century. Looks like that pesky tower isn't going to get built, after all! :(

The problem, as I see it, is that Esperanto is a novelty. It's spoken by few - you could go out and learn it, but the only people you could speak to are the sort of people who speak Esperanto; I'll bet that would be dull. Of course, the language itself also has some flaws - for example, words are intoned according to a general rule - it is not permitted to use intonation of words to convey meaning. Words spoken without intonation would sound extremely un-natural and artificial to any human being. The language is also nowhere near as neutral as it should be. It uses european pronunciations and european letters. It also derives many of its word roots from european words. Speakers that haven't grown up learning some European language find it difficult to pick up Esperanto.

All in all, I give this language 6 out of 16. Nice concept - but poorly implemented.

Yummy biscuits

Today I made a batch of my favourite type of biscuit - shortbread. As you can see in the picture to the right, they went down well enough for all but three of them to have been eaten by the time I could take the photo!

This is a big achievement for me, as a person who can't cook. Finally, I have the independance to cook sugary buttery treats whenever I want to!! However, I can't really take credit as the recipe did, in fact, come from Andy's mum's brilliant website about baking, Cake Frills. The site is regularly updated, includes loads of great seasonal recipes and has the added advantage that I can pester the person who runs it if I ever get stuck! You should definitely check it out.

On an unrelated note, I miss my guitar :(