Dooley Online

FUN GADGET: Interactive Fish Tank

"Add a touch of nature to your page with these hungry little fish. Watch them as they follow your mouse hoping you will feed them by clicking the surface of the water."

I discovered this tool via http://underwatertreasures.blogspot.com. You can adjust the size of the tank and the number (up to 10) and color of fish - because every good fish tank owner knows that the more fish you have the bigger your tank has to be!

Find out more about the aBowman Fish Gadget and get your own!

Furnished is to Unfurnished as Proprietary is to OpenSource?

As I was riding the metro into work today, I was thinking about the many projects I am working on this week.

I also thought about the tools I am working with and which have proven to be barriers to productivity rather than helps:

• Proprietary CMS software: The house, fully furnished. The furniture is nailed down. The furniture is nice and fully functional in terms of what you need. You can bring in some new decorative items such as a vase or book, but you can't easily move the furniture around. And matching pieces are expensive.

• Open source CMS: My experience is with Drupal (Linux/Apache/MySQL/PHP). You get the house for a reasonable price and you get the furniture -- LOTS of furniture. Sometimes too much furniture. You will definitely need to try a variety of pieces until you find those pieces that best reflect your taste. And you may need to have some furniture custom-made. But that's okay. 'Cause you can share your furniture designs with other people eager to see what neat design ideas you've come up with.

• Software to build-your-own. My experience is with ColdFusion/SQLServer/Windows. You get the house for a one-time hefty fee. But you have ultimate flexibility to paint the walls whatever color you want and to create all your own furnishings. But it takes time, keen knowledge of your environment and inhabitants of your space, and clever use of your existing resources.

Happy RSS Awareness Day!

Google App Engine Begins Flight -- With Some Limitations

Big news from Google.

Last night, Google App Engine was launched in beta. The system is designed to expose Google scaleable infrastructure to other server side web applications.

And it's free for up to 500MB of persistent storage and enough bandwidth and CPU for 5 million monthly page views.

But, you do have to know Python for this release, and data is stored in BigTable. While NASA might be able to adopt this tool easily, this limits access for PHP, ASP and other programmers who haven't kept tabs on the big snake.

Oh, and only the first 10,000 developers to sign up for the beta will be allowed to deploy applications.

But this beta testing phase allows Google to build and stronger product and gives the rest of us a chance to study-up on Python and BigTable.

But I can't help wondering whether the full adoption of this new toolset might be slower than anticipated. Websites recently investing in a move to open source LAMP, might hold out until Google offers a PHP alternative. But that may not be in the works.

Of course, that doesn't address the fact that the data source is housed in BigTable -- a  different beast from SQL. Assuming you will be able to port content over to this format, it will require a shift in how developers view content storage. While it may be the better than SQL for large enterprise-level content (see Google’s Bigtable Distributed Storage System, Pt. I), it will take some work and bend some minds as they adjust to a very different schema.

Here are some resources for additional information:

• Techcrunch: Google Jumps Head First Into Web Services With Google App Engine
• Scobelizer: Google jumps on Big Table of Web Services (A bit shout-out to Robert Scoble for keeping us in the loop on this through his multiple tweets last night)
• Mashable: Google App Engine: An Early Look
• CNET: Google hopes to house Web software on App Engine
• ThinkingNectar: Google App Engine In Brief
• Google App Engine Website -- check out the videos.