Java Thinking

I'm getting back into appengine at the moment, and I came across this error: No module named _multiprocessing A google search turned up this error report: http://code.google.com/p/googleappengine/issues/detail?id=1504 which lead to this post: http://code.google.com/p/soc/wiki/GettingStarted The problem was of-course, that I was using Python 2.6 instead of 2.5. I love Linux, the solution is trivial: The workaround for this is to install Python 2.5 on your machine. It will be then be accessible by using python2.5 on the command line. Then open thirdparty/google_appengine/dev_appserver.py in your favorite text editor and replace the first line, #!/usr/bin/env python with #!/usr/bin/env python2.5 Note, I already had Python 2.5 installed via: sudo apt-get install python2.5 Now, I'll promptly get back to figuring out how best to use DataStore to implement my solution!

I just recently noticed that Amazon have changed the way you invoke their Product Advertising API - you now need to sign requests as described in the Example REST Requests . I obviously haven't been reading my emails, since the first clue came when I saw: <Error><Code>MissingParameter</Code><Message>The request must contain the parameter Signature.</Message></Error> Luckily, they have a java example demonstrating how to make an API request. If you extract the source from this sample into your <GRAILS_APP>/src/java directory, then you can invoke the amazon api with code like: [sourcecode language="java"] import org.codehaus.groovy.grails.commons.ConfigurationHolder import com.amazon.advertising.api.sample.* class AmazonService { private static final String ENDPOINT = "ecs.amazonaws.com"; private static final String AWS_SECRET_KEY = "put your secret key here"; private static final String AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID...

I don't know how it happened, but my local working copy got locked. This meant that every time I tried to commit, I got a 'working copy is locked' error. The solution was easy, after I found a reference in the FAQ : svn cleanup <directory>

Something happened on my Ubuntu install sometime which meant that double clicking on an HTML file resulted in the file being opened by gedit . Not really what I wanted. I started looking through the GNOME system menu (Preferences and Administration) to find how to change the default action - but that turned out to be the wrong place. In Nautilus , simply right click on the file and select 'Properties'. From there, go to the 'Open with' tab and select the appropriate application.