Regular expressions: repeating a capturing group and making the inner group non-repeating

08/09/2008 05:36 pm by Aral Balkan in Development

In the dark old days when I was working on a Windows laptop, I used to use a tool called RegexBuddy to help me write regular expressions. Up until recently, I didn't really get regular expressions. Working with Django forced me to change that and I'm so thankful I took the time to delve deeper [...]

jsontime for Google App Engine

07/10/2008 04:58 pm by Aral Balkan in Development

From the Simon Willison/Natalie Downe dream team comes yet another very useful service for Google App Engine developers: jsontime. I have been meaning to blog about this for some time (no pun intended!) Simon and Natalie have uploaded the 500 or so files that are in the pytz library so you don't have to and built a [...]

Google App Engine: no support, quotas, throttling… Help!

07/10/2008 01:29 pm by Aral Balkan in Development

I wrote to Google on April 19th, 2008 to ask for the quotas to be lifted on the upcoming new web site for the Singularity Web Conference. I still haven't heard back from them. On April 23rd, I wrote to Kevin Marks, whom I'd met at the excellent LIFT conference, to tell him how excited I [...]

Google and Yahoo’s Flash indexing is revealing… too much?

07/06/2008 09:58 am by Aral Balkan in Development

Adobe's announcement that Google and Yahoo! will be indexing Flash content at a much deeper level was met with all sorts of reactions last week, ranging from praise from the Flash and Flex communities to utter shock and horror from some HTML fundamentalists expressing fear that the end was nigh. Well, it appears that Google [...]

New Singularity site: status update

07/06/2008 09:05 am by Aral Balkan in Development

This week has seen yet another week of heavy development on the Singularity It would be an understatement to say that I'm working feverishly to get the new Singularity web site ready for release and ticket sales started for Singularity. Originally planned for July 1st, I delayed things for a week to give us some [...]

European VAT Number validation API

07/04/2008 11:05 am by Aral Balkan in Development

EU-based businesses are required to obtain valid VAT numbers from VAT-registered entities. Unfortunately, especially for e-commerce systems, there isn't a simple way to check the validity of a European VAT number. The European Commission provides a web site where you can validate VAT numbers by entering them in an HTML form. This is not [...]

Displaying “Pay” instead of “Continue” on the PayPal site with PayPal Payments Pro UK Express Checkout

07/03/2008 11:00 am by Aral Balkan in Development

By default, PayPal Express Checkout for PayPal Payments Pro UK displays a "continue" button and sends the user back to your site, expecting a confirmation page before actually making the payment. This differs from other PayPal checkout procedures and, in my testing, I found that users expected to complete the transaction once on the PayPal [...]

ISO 3166 Alpha-2 codes for EU countries

07/03/2008 10:53 am by Aral Balkan in Development

For businesses based in the EU, it's important for VAT purposes to know whether your customers are also based in the EU. As usual, a quick Google search did not reveal a usable list of EU countries by ISO 3166 Alpha-2 code, so I whipped up my own. european_union_countries = ('AT', 'BE', 'BG', 'CY', 'CZ', [...]

Building Conference 2.0 on O’Reilly InsideRIA

06/20/2008 08:51 pm by Aral Balkan in Development

I just started my development diary for the Singularity web conference on O'Reilly InsideRIA. Check out my inaugural post: Building Conference 2.0.

Conditionally displaying sIFR text for different languages using content negotiation with Django

06/20/2008 08:29 pm by Aral Balkan in Development

I'm using sIFR on the new Singularity teaser site (not least because Mark Wubben is speaking at the conference, mind you) and ran into an issue today with extended characters (such as extended Western characters, Chinese, Japanese, etc.) not displaying properly as they weren't embedded into the Flash text field. Getting extended Western characters working is [...]

Saving a Float or GeoPt in Google App Engine? You need this patch.

06/10/2008 12:48 am by Aral Balkan in Development

This one had me scratching my head and wondering what I'd managed to corrupt in my setup today: After you save a float (or, in my case, a GeoPt instance) to the datastore, the next time you start the server (e.g., ./manage.py runserver or dev_appserver.py .), you'll get a traceback that culminates in: File "/usr/local/google_appengine/google/net/proto/ProtocolBuffer.py", line 455, [...]

Testing Google App Engine apps in Internet Explorer on Windows with Parallels on OS X

06/05/2008 04:36 pm by Aral Balkan in Development

I've had a hard time trying to get Internet Explorer on Windows (under Parallels) to connect to the Google App Engine local development server running on OS X. The interesting thing was that IE would connect to the built-in web server on the Mac without problem (using the Shared Network setting, I could also connect to [...]

Email address validation with Django and Google App Engine

06/05/2008 04:12 pm by Aral Balkan in Development

Email address validation is a quixotic affair that's sure to end with you sporting a false sense of achievement and your users in tears. Many "better mousetrap" regular-expression-based validation system on the web today are overly strict and reject perfectly valid email addresses. Beyond regular expressions and other string-based techniques, your options are to check [...]

Running the Google App Engine SDK offline without an Internet connection

06/04/2008 08:55 pm by Aral Balkan in Development

I was without a Net connection today at one point and needed to run the development server for my Google App Engine app and the server kept getting stuck while trying to check for updates. Checking the options for dev_appserver.py, I couldn't find a setting to tell it to stop checking for updates to the SDK. When [...]

ISO 3166 country codes for HTML, Python, ActionScript, Flex, JSON, and XML

06/02/2008 12:00 am by Aral Balkan in Development

Introducing Open Country Codes: easy to use ISO 3166 country codes for your apps. Why are some things just much harder than they need to be? Finding a current, easy-to-use data source for populating a country selection box, for example. Most of the clean country data out on the web is second-hand, having at one point [...]

PayPal vs. Google Checkout: countries supported

05/31/2008 11:56 am by Aral Balkan in Development

Your choice of payment processors ultimately determines the number of people who can potentially purchase your product or service. Looking at the differences between PayPal and Google Checkout, I couldn't find a comparison of the countries each processor supported so I quickly whipped up my own using the country lists each processor presents on its [...]

FlashDevelop and PHP

04/27/2008 11:34 pm by Daniel Tome's blog in Development Environment

The future of coding PHP in FlashDevelop may be quite closer than expected, thanks to user: kuzya (flashdevelop member from russia) http://www.flashdevelop.org/community/viewtopic.php?p=13082 He modified the HaXeContext plugin and now you can see your php class methods and variables in the outline pane. It was a bit buggy, and then Philippe managed to get to get a basic [...]

Google App Engine skip_files patch

04/14/2008 10:49 pm by Aral Balkan in Development

Using skip_files in app.yaml as outlined in the docs causes an error (yaml.representer.RepresenterError: cannot represent an object). There's a patch for it on the Google App Engine issue tracker. Unfortunately, when I tried to apply the patch, I got an error (I'm assuming that the copy/paste from the support forums messed something up): patching file /usr/local/google_appengine/google/appengine/api/validation.py Hunk [...]

Google App Engine: To Django or to webapp?

04/13/2008 03:26 pm by Aral Balkan in Development

Google App Engine (GAE) supports both its own framework, called webapp, and Django. So, which one do you use? As far as I can see, there isn't a compelling reason to use Django at the moment with GAE. I just can't see what benefits it offers over webapp and you have to hack Django to get it [...]

Google App Engine

04/11/2008 12:11 pm by Aral Balkan in Development

Google App Engine is a massively-scalable all-in-one application, database, and storage hosting solution released this week by Google. And it has me more excited than I can remember in a long while. Here's how it works: You write your application in Python with a WSGI-compatible web framework via the Google App Engine SDK and upload [...]

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