DISQUS

Actually I think his point is that it is even less useful since the protocol isn't self describing like XML or JSON. There is no way to read it at all without knowing the format of the protocol buffer. As an optimization or in isolation though, I think that is ok.

If you also wanted a client that only understood JSON or XML to access your web service you could also write a provider that could translate to and from JSON to Protocol Buffer objects. Then in each method you would add those as supported media types and it would map it for you based on the Accept header.

Sam

Specifically, I didn't find an actual distribution of it on the Apache incubator[1] and most typical developers aren't going to depend[2] on something that they have to build from snapshots or by checking out the source code. That said, I could probably get it working in its current state with the current feature set. More documentation + tutorials couldn't hurt either :)

Sam

[1] http://incubator.apache.org/thrift/download/
[2] http://mvnrepository.com/search.html?query=thrift

I haven't done any more work on it but I am running it 24/7 on 2 of my machines (a MacPro and a Macbook Air) and the overhead seems to be very low. As for incremental deletes I basically decided that I would just run the full backup periodically rather than add the functionality. Full volume backups I believe are possible as I just recently used rsync to move my bootdisk. You need some additional parameters to make it work: rsync -xrlptgoEv did all that it needed to make a full backup.

Sam

Reference: http://rna.urmc.rochester.edu/john/public/pages...

I have seen this error from time to time when Yahoo! BOSS takes too long to respond back to Google App Engine. Are you asking for a lot of results?

Sam

Indeed it was down. I need to put some monitoring in place. It should be up again now.

Thanks,
Sam

Hi Miguel,

I'm pretty sure that MySQL doesn't support DDL + transactions like PostgreSQL does. If it does, I will fix it but that is my understanding.

Sam

@Cristian: 1) Didn't mean to imply that they were new, but they are new to the Mac. 2) That is ideal for a ZFS only environment -- hoping we can do just that in Snow Leopard. Right now though I'm still on Leopard and using HFS+ as my main filesystem.

@Mark: I am backing up to ZFS running on my Mac OS X box using the latest bits from http://zfs.macosforge.org/trac/wiki/ along with the Mac version of rsync on both sides. Additionally, I am only backing up things in my Users directory -- no system files, do I still need the additional flags?

@ssp: I actually think it would be quite system to use this tool http://www.osxbook.com/software/fslogger/ to track filesystem changes which would allow the rsync solution to be just that much better. Looks like I'll need to put a nice UI on it as well.

It sounds to me like you need a pretty extensive solution for all the integration between the various Windows programs that you are using. For something like this where it isn't just a single program in isolation I would recommend VMWare/Parallels over Crossover. With any of these solutions it is possible to directly share files between the two systems.

Your best bet would be one of the real windows environments. Presuming you don't want to reboot to do it that leaves you with Parallels or VMWare. For this application either would work great though Parallels has somewhat better desktop integration so would likely work best. You would still need a Windows install.

As I mention in the blog, I agree that this is biased against countries that are either uninterested or unable to compete. Here is the original spreadsheet if you want to mess around with it:

http://sheet.zoho.com/public/spullara/olympic-m...

Ah, should have done a quick search before bothering. Fun exercise anyway:

http://www.stubbornmule.net/2008/08/olympics-by...

Searched for ‘porn’, clicked on page 10, bam, it breaks

http://www.4hoursearch.com/search?q=porn&p=10

Traceback (most recent call last):

File “/base/python_lib/versions/1/google/appengine/ext/webapp/__init__.py”, line 499, in __call__


handler.get(*groups)


File “/base/data/home/apps/yoolsearch/1.232/search.py”, line 40, in get


ysr = result['ysearchresponse']


TypeError: ‘NoneType’ object is unsubscriptable

My error checking is not "robust". That looks like I didn't get a response back from the urlfetch. Could have been Google App Engine or BOSS. I should check for that and put up the fail whale.

Hey the pagination seems to not be working. It forgets the query string and doesn’t have a page as a parameter.

Other than that, good work!

Hi Jim, I wasn't able to reproduce this. It may be that there aren't enough results -- I am not handling that case well. Can you give me an example query where it doesn't work for you?

It’s now working fine (: what was causing the error btw?

http://www.4hoursearch.com/search?q=mp3+download

resulted an error:


Traceback (most recent call last):


File “/base/python_lib/versions/1/google/appengine/ext/webapp/__init__.py”, line 499, in __call__


handler.get(*groups)


File “/base/data/home/apps/yoolsearch/1.216/search.py”, line 52, in get


template_values['image'] = image_response['resultset_images'][0]


KeyError: ‘resultset_images’

An underlying BOSS web service regressed temporarily, it has been corrected.

For IRIs to URIs in Python (like http://www.4hoursearch.com/search?q=mémoires) see:

http://code.djangoproject.com/browser/django/trunk/django/utils/encoding.py

This isn't included in Google App Engine -- it has an older version of Django -- but I ported it over and it works great! Please test out the unicode support now.

The functions django.utils.http.urlquote() and django.utils.http.urlquote_plus() are versions of Python’s standard urllib.quote() and urllib.quote_plus() that work with non-ASCII characters. (The data is converted to UTF-8 prior to encoding.)

That fails in the same way as it is a wrapper on quote_plus.

Yeah, I suck at python. If anyone knows a better call to use than 'quote_plus' that works with UNICODE, I'm all ears.

Just wondering. What’s up with the image next to the first returned result? The image next to the first search for my name is from some random other site and has no connection to the listing.

Sorry it didn't work well for you. The image is the #1 image search result for the same query. If you click on the image rather than the search result it will go through to the site that it was found on.

“The requested URL /src/4hoursearch-src.zip was not found on this server.”

<img src="http://www.javarants.com/wp-includes/images/smilies/icon_smile.gif" alt=":-)" class="wp-smiley"> </img>

-Russ

Ugh. Bad push, just saw it in the log, fixed.

Nice one. Very clever. I guess you could do a url specific BOSS image search per result link in order to get images as well. However, this could take time so you’d need to do it in async mode. On server side I am not sure how you’d do it in Python on AppEngine and on the client side you’d run into concurrent requests from the same domain problem. It would be cool though if it was a 1-1 copy of the interface.

It would be hard to make it a complete 1-for-1 copy because I have no idea where they come up with their images. What I would like is to grab an image from the page that I'm linking to. It would be better if I was doing my own crawl for that...

I have hear that the categories will be coming in the next versions of BOSS. Sam to my knowledge BOSS does not support search suggestions.

I'm using the regular Yahoo! Search Suggest API.

BTW you should use the ClickURL (as per TOS) for the links in the results when using BOSS.

Strangely, they are the same for the searches that I am doing. I expected the redirects. This might have something to do with the changes that were recently rolled out on Yahoo! SERPs that don't requite it.

Thanks,
Sam

Good idea. I'm looking at things to put in the Infobar and those make a lot of sense.

Nice article.

By the way, can’t you include simplejson using

“from django.utils import simplejson”?

You sure can. I didn't know that was in there. Thanks!

I don't have any experience with the trial version and Bootcamp. My guess is that it is supposed to work though. In the past, I have gotten great help from the VMWare forums for their other products so I suggest that you post your question there.

If that is what you are using Quicken for I would sign up for Wesabe or Mint which both do a fantastic job of tracking credit and bank accounts without a lot of fuss.