Monthly Archives: April 2012

Google App Engine Installed

Posted by Wujie of Dasheshire on

Installing the Google App Engine was pretty easy. And there are also tutorials on the website.

To get an account with Google App Engine, you need to be able to receive a phone text. I don’t have a cell phone number to give out so I used the web-based Pinger service. When I gave the number to Google App Engine registration to get the password, it said there was an error in sending the text, but it actually went through and I got the verification code off Pinger.

I want to note one thing that confused me about uploading apps. “Application ID” vs. “Application title”. In the Google App Engine Launcher, the name column is actually the App ID and is the same as the first line of the ‘app.yaml’, just called application: and should also be the same as the Application Identifier that you register on Google App Engine. The Application Title seems to do nothing but you can make it the same as the python application.

The bottom line of ‘app.yaml’ says script:, and this is where the name of the python module goes, except you replace the extension .py with .app.

To summarize, app.yaml has two important lines (for a beginner like me):

application: HelloWorld

this name after application in app.yaml must be the same as the registered name on the App Engine: HelloWorld.appspot.com. The name might be taken already so be prepared to change the application name in app.yaml.

  script: helloworld.app

calls the helloworld.py program that must(?) reside in the same folder as app.yaml.

Udacity

Posted by Wujie of Dasheshire on

I signed up for two courses on Udacity; CS373 Programming a Robotic Car, which is in its second phase self-paced incarnation, and CS253 Web Application Engineering. I signed up for the web app class initially because I think it could lead to a great occupation and also because I believe I have a great idea for a facebook rival and an idea for a research oriented ‘timeline’ application.

I wanted to sign up for the robotic car because it sounds very interesting, but I wasn’t sure if it would take time away from my schoolwork. I decided it doesn’t have to be a serious commitment because it seems that a lot of people don’t finish it. Turns out that it is very applicable, I’m already understanding the machine learning concepts from a class I was sitting in on. That class was a second part to a previous class that I missed and too difficult, but Thrun is so much clearer and takes it in easy steps. Now I have a better grip on Bayes theory, which it not all that complicated and something that I was already naturally doing. It’s just a formal definition of obvious logic.

Now I’m installing the Google App Engine (v1.6.4 for windows) for Python. It said it found Python 2.5 while installing. I hope that won’t be a problem since I use 2.7 mostly.

Thrun’s use of Python seems a little backwards and doesn’t use the special nuances of Python. I don’t know if he thinks it’s easier for the students or because he is use to it from other languages. There is no NumPy in the online Python IDE. I have to learn how to manipulate lists in ways that would be so simple with arrays. Although I think it is pointless since array processing is computationally faster than lists. All this time I’ve been trying hard to avoid for loops, especially nested for loops, and now I am forced to write them, haha, but that’s okay.