Add a Little Privacy to Google Latitude

This title must sound very ironic given that the whole purpose of Google Latitude is to reduce privacy. I am not saying this is a bad thing, just that telling people where you are right now is less private than not telling them.

Recently, Google took the reduction of privacy a little further by allowing you to setup a web site badge for Latitude. Up until this point, you could only share your location with select friends, however, now you can share it with the whole world via your website, blog, etc. I do use this, so you can spy on my location if you wish.

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Even my iPod wants to go back to California

As many of you may know, I am very eager to graduate and head back out to California. However, last night I discovered that my iPod seemed just as eager to do the same… I was playing with the new Google Earth application which features location detection. Basically, all you do is press a button and it zeroes in on your location. At first it worked as expected, followed by some interesting results

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Summer Wrap Up

This summer has been anything but boring. My summer has brought many travel and experiences and I decided to list as many as I could remember as I prepare to head back to Purdue for my final yea!

Here we go (attempted to keep in order of occurrence):

1. Accepted internship with Cisco
2. Road trip across the country (to get to Cisco in San Jose)
3. Visited Garden of the Gods
4. Climbed to the top of Pikes Peak (well, drove to the top)
5. Visited Las Vegas
6. Got a tour of the Googleplex
7. Spent 2 days in Yosemite National Park
8. Went to the Google I/O Conference
9. Visited the Mystery Spot
10. Visited San Francisco
11. Got my laptop stolen (from a locked trunk) in San Francisco
12. Traveled the 17 Mile Drive in Monterey
13. Redesigned Hydra Labs web site (work in progress)
14. Got hired by Cisco to work through the school year
15. Vacationed at Deep Creek Lake in Maryland
16. Released 1.2.0 of Dtella
17. Wrote this post

Time it took me to do all this: 13 weeks! Lets see if I can keep up this momentum as I head back to school…

Google App Engine

Last night, Google launched App Engine which allows developers to create web applications and publish them on Google’s infrastructure. The exciting part of the App Engine in my eyes is that the language you use to develop on it is Python. Google provides many API’s to interface the Python programming language with the various services they offer. You can authenticate via Google accounts, use Bigtable to store data, and use Google Aps to bind your application to your own domain. They opened the initial “Preview Release” to the first 10,000 developers to sign up. From the looks of it, those 10,000 spots filled up within the first few hours of the launch.

I was fortunate to be one of the first to sign up and got my account last night. I created a basic hello world application to test and overall the system seems very easy to use. My demo is at http://labs.appspot.com.

I also created an account for the PyAMF project and we were able to get a PyAMF echo server running on App Engine. It is currently located at: http://ae.pyamf.org We are continuing to work with it today and tomorrow to write up some examples and a How-to to get people started quickly. We will continue to add more examples to the site as time progresses and we get everything documented.