Google App Engine Error: Over Quota

internet technology

After reading a couple of intro pages I suddenly get this error message at 7:20 am Pacific:

App Engine Error

Over Quota
This Google App Engine application is temporarily over its serving quota. Please try again later.

I have not even created an application yet. Actually I am glad I did not: I would have blamed myself for this. Probably would have panicked, thinking that my application would have caused all sorts of trouble.

I wonder how many applications will be built based on this offering. It is tempting to have all those resources. But being 100% depending on one vendor is a strange feeling. No matter what the legal stuff says, you always are depending on Google. Who else would be able to build a competing infrastructure?

first time for everything

internet technology

Probably a coincidence. Freak accident. Kind of. Today was the first time that Google happened to return meaningless crap and MSN actually showed me the page that addressed my issue. I was looking to get rid of “PHP Notice: Undefined index: ” which -and I should have known that anyway- is a simple isset() call. But why remember things when the internet can, right? Well until the net turns to mudd.

I wonder if I just had bad luck or if the latest Google version I get to see is actually having ranking issues for relevance.

spam costs money

economy internet malware technology

In the past gmail has been good with spam filtering. Just now I checked up on a prospect. It turned out that he felt I was interested in his business, since I did not reply to his emails. They were in the gmail spam folder. Nothing special about them. Sadly you can not search the spam folder. Spammers never made a single cent with me. But they cost me and everybody else money. When I was looking at the last 3,000 spam mails I got (2 days) it seems that they peddle only a few items. I am sure that most of the spam tries to benefit just a couple of business. How about somebody going over there to these people and kind of make then reconsider the business attitude?

hitting on the ugly girl

economy internet M$ technology

It really must suck to be Microsoft these days. Their attempt to buy Yahoo for more money that they actually have was a desperate move to begin with. And now they even got rejected. Who know that Yahoo! of all companies had choices. In this whole M$ bid media frenzy everybody seem to have forgotten about the layoff story that Yahoo had coming out. Yahoo is ailing. But they seem to have decided that they rather disolve like AOL or Netscape than to be part of would have been the worst merger in the history of Internet companies. Hitting on the ugly girl, since you think you have a chance is bad enough. Getting rejected leaves you with a little less than nothing. Not that I would know anything about that.

the day google had won, for good

history internet technology

Microsoft tries to buy Yahoo. For 46 billion dollars. 4 short years ago they would have had that kind of money in cash. And then some. Cursorly googling around it seems that M$ cash reserve has melted down to 29 billion. So they would need to raise money to buy Yahoo. They would get eyeballs and visitors. But then what? The technology running Yahoo is completely free of any Microsoft stuff. Yahoo has been actively supporting things like javascript libraries and other open source related items. Will Microsoft run now Unix servers? They have to, or they will kill Yahoo in the attempt to transfer it to their technology base. Yahoo had years to grow. It’s a start up with 15,000 people. Give or take a thousand that needs to get layed of. Or not.

Microsoft used to be the biggest software company in the world. By numbers as well as in the minds of the people. IBM used to be the biggest computer company. Microsoft can consider itself very lucky if it will do as well as IBM does right in a couple of years. Once Gates had left nothing really worked any longer. People will say that. Maybe Bill wants to pull off a Steve, and come back one day?

Google lost two competitors today: Yahoo and Microsoft will be absent from any innovation for a long time while they try to figure to integrate what they have. Maybe in 2009 they emerge with an ok conglomerate of what they were in 2007. Allot of time to get new things going for Google.

postfix: can’t create user output file

internet linux technology

people alerted me that they got an email bounce saying:

Final-Recipient: rfc822; andreas@interdubs.com
Original-Recipient: rfc822; andreas@andreaswacker.com
Action: failed
Status: 5.0.0
Diagnostic-Code: X-Postfix; can't create user output file

it turned out that my local mail file that I keep as a backup was bigger than 1000 Megabyte. Seems to be that postfix (or whichever program delivers the mail locally to /var/spool/mail) does not like to write to files that are bigger than that number. Scary the file grew to that size within one year.

keynote via radio

Apple internet media

The part of the world that cares about Apple computers is holding it’s breath. Real Christmas will come around in a couple of hours. It is a big deal. I would carefully estimate that a hundred thousand people are pretty interesting in what will be revealed in the next hours.

It also is in Apples interest to provide people with the information directly the way they intended it. Having people transcribe it is what happens. But not necessarily what Apple would want.

Let’s make no mistake: the Keynote is as brilliant of a piece of Propaganda as it is possible for the audience of 2008. It is surprising that Apple does not broadcast it over the radio. I am serious. It can not cost that much to get this going. No need for quality. The geeks that care for this would run out and even buy a short wave resceiver just to listen to Steves voice live. All internet attempts to do live audio streaming seem not to work. They didn’t in the last years, since those 100,000 people would have to high bandwidth demands. Apple used to stream it, but stopped.

Kinda lame.

me likes

BlogsNow internet

I love BlogsNow for bringing things like Bent Objects to my scattered attention.

Somehow the Internet also lost someting after we started to never went further than one or two clicks away from Google.

fighting terror, sans SSL

internet malware politics technology

the small chronies (50K in tax money wasted for this site) get caught

Actually those monkeys at Desyne kick out a 403 to me, since my IP is not one that is in the US. How pathetic.

I would have not missed much. Just verbage like:


Our clients range from global Fortune 100 corporations to local retailers. They all, however, share one thing in common: an absolute commitment to a strategic marketing approach wrapped around a comprehensive web-based technology capability. It's a formula for success we have delivered to more than 1000 clients since our founding in 1996.

Awesome that they all share “an absolute commitment to a strategic marketing approach wrapped around a comprehensive web-based technology capability”.
That evokes strong mental images. No, really.

use HTML code in Wikimedia

internet malware technology

since it is pretty tricky to google for, here the wonderful scary as hell wikimedia addition that lets you add raw html code in your pages:
[make sure to read the end of this post]


< ?php # RawHtml.php - raw HTML extension # # Defines the tag pair .
# Sends the content out without any processing.
#
# To use, include this file into your LocalSettings.php
# To configure, set members of $wgRawHtml after the inclusion.
#
# include 'RawHtml.php';
#
# $wgRawHtml = array('JoeUser', 'JoeUserBot')
#
# Adapted from code by Jan Steinman

class raw_html_settings { };

$wgRawHtml = new raw_html_settings;
$wgExtensionFunctions[] = 'wf_raw_html_ext';

function wf_raw_html_ext() {

global $wgParser;

$wgParser->setHook('RawHtml', 'render_raw_html');
}

function render_raw_html($raw_html_src, $style='') {

return $raw_html_src;
}
?>

found here.

It really is easy to use: Just add the file as RawHtml.php and then add in the end of LocalSettings.php the following lines:


include 'RawHtml.php';
$wgRawHtml = array('user-name-to-use-this-goes-here' , 'this-would-be-a-second-one');

It turns out that the user names get absolutely ignored. So actually this is really dangerous to do, since ANYBODY that can edit the wiki can also insert any html code. Which is ok in a non public wiki, but NOT out there on those internets.

So the code above is plain malware: A bot could crawl the sources of wikis and could insert any html that might please in those pages. Allot of harm can be done that way.

For a decent explaination how to add your own addition look here

I ended up boiling up a couple of probably horrible php lines myself:


?php
#mimg.php
#insert image in wikimedia pages.
#to use add code like:

#/path/to/image.png

#please note that I have no freaking clue what I am doing.

#this will only work with local links to images, since all
#characters apart from numbers, letters slash and dot will be filtered when rendered
#to install save this in a file and include in LocalSettings.php

class mimgclass { };

$mimgo = new mimgclass;
$wgExtensionFunctions[] = 'installmimg';

function installmimg() {
global $wgParser;
$wgParser->setHook('mimg', 'mrender_mimg');
}

function mrender_mimg($mimg, $style='') {
$mimg = preg_replace ('/[^a-zA-Z0-9\/\.]/' ,"",$mimg);
return "";
}
?>