1. No shared memory among instances. I even wrote a StackOverflow question about it to see whether I was missing something. The only way to emulate memory that will last for the entire lifetime of your instances is to purchase a backend instance for a minimum of 58$/month.

   Why is this so important to me? Because I want to store a cryptographic key safely and in a way that even if someone has access to my computer, my Google account or my code, they will still need another piece of data that is either in my head or stored safely someplace else (think bank vault.) I do not want to persist the key in a data store.

2. No https for custom domains. If you’re writing a website that requires a secure https connection, then essentially you are limited to https://yourapp.appspot.com. You can’t use your own domain name. I read somewhere that it’s on Google’s todo list for App Engine, but Google never states when they’re going to actually implement things, which is a shame.
3. Outgoing emails cannot be signed. This practically prevents use of App Engine’s outgoing email feature, since emails that are not signed with DKIM these days will probably go into the spam folder of major email providers. To circumvent this I use task queues (for rate control) and Amazon SES, which works OK but requires a lot of code to be written instead of the few lines it would have taken if Google provided proper facilities for signing emails.

In any case, it’s time for the yearly look back:

A year ago I left my job to start a new venture with a friend. We since grew to a 3-person team and by now we have a very early version of our product, while we’re still tweaking the requirements for the first release. Hopefully in a few months we’ll have something to show for. This is probably the year in which we’ll know for sure whether this project is destined to take off or not.

Being unemployed (and having no income) for so long is my biggest worry for the upcoming year. I was very willing to spend some of my savings on this project, but I was hoping it will be in a better place by now. Other than that, I don’t think there’s a lot to say about entrepreneurship that hasn’t been said before. The joys and sorrows of this road are well documented in countless articles. I’m otherwise happy with my life, something I wished myself a year ago on my birthday post.

Travelling: I was abroad twice – France/Germany and Switzerland. Both trips were great. Having already booked one trip for this year – to The Prodigy’s 3rd Warrior’s Dance Festival – I already made sure that I’ll keep “exploring the world” this year as well. Travelling has become one of my favorite things.

Side projects: I updated Dindy a few times in the past couple of weeks, hoping to address issues users have been experiencing for a while. I don’t plan to add any new features to Dindy – this was just to prevent it from rotting in the Android market. Unfortunately it hadn’t gained any new users for a long time now, yet it remains with a relatively high user score (4.2 out of 5.)

Another side project is my online will idea from nearly 3 years ago. I already have an almost fully functional version of it running on Google App Engine, but there’s still a long way to go as it lacks visual design (if you’d like to help me with that – let me know) and there’s still quite a lot of code to write.

Workouts: Having suffered some injuries I’m working out (running) only twice a week now. I’m not happy about it, but I’m still in pretty good shape so it’s not that bad. I hope my injuries will subside and that I’ll be able to get back to my 3-workouts-a-week routine at some point.

That’s about it, I guess. I hope you’re happy too.

To those of you who are interested, the difference is that Service.startService() started returning START_STICKY instead of START_STICKY_COMPATIBILITY.

I consider this very poor backward compatibility support on Android’s side. It also forced me to deal with Dindy’s service being killed by the Android platform at any given time. The solution wasn’t a trivial one – I had to add a new table to the database to save Dindy’s runtime state.

At least now hopefully (and excluding other bugs) Dindy will work on most phones, even those where the service is being killed for no reason.

I still haven’t managed to get my hands on a phone, on which Dindy doesn’t work, long enough to hook it up to my computer and figure out what the problem is. But since it works well on all base (“Nexus”) versions of Android and also on many other devices – I blame the changes made to the OS by phone manufacturers.

Hopefully I’ll figure it out. While Dindy is pretty much a finished and abandoned project, I would still like to know that it works well for whoever is using it.

The manuals and driver in the zip file are for the following models:

• DCM325
• DCM425
• DCW725
• DHG520
• DHG525
• TCM420
• TCM425
• TCW710

The manuals are in these languages:

• English
• French
• Swedish
• German
• Hebrew
• Dutch (the file name is Netherlands)
• Polish
• Portuguese
• Spanish

These are all from an original old CD I got around 2005 with my TCM425.

WARNINGS:

1. Use at your own risk. I recommend first looking for official drivers for the product online or contacting your Internet service provider before trying these drivers.
2. Since you probably don’t know me – don’t trust me and check the files for viruses first.

(On a side note: I witnessed one of these calls. It makes you feel really uncomfortable. If you want to see how criminals are treated, get your eBay account suspended and then call them to ask why. Just know that you will never be able to be an eBay user again)

My idea revolves around verifying that the person is real and “innocent.” Much like the American system of financial credit score, using a person’s email address, one service will be able to trigger an “online identity score” check with other services that user is registered to.

For example, let’s say I’m registering to eBay. During the registration process I give my Gmail address, which I also use for Facebook. With my consent, eBay will be able to query Google and Facebook and ask them about how genuine my account is, so as to verify both that I’m a real person and that my account hasn’t been hacked (both Gmail and Facebook already have fake account and anti-hacking protections.)

The big culprits for the thrashing turned out to be Eclipse and Unity. We have pretty large projects by now, and having the main ones open together requires no less than 2GB of virtual memory and nearly 1GB of actual memory. That’s a lot, and it doesn’t include at least one running Android emulator! Unity added quite a bit to that (I don’t remember the number) but switching to Gnome helped.

I’m still happy with this Core Duo, now very old, computer. It does its job well and I expect it to last a year or two more.

So I decided to go back to Gnome classic. The computer is way more responsive now and works considerably faster. My guess is that either Unity’s memory requirements are so high that I ran out (of 2 GB) and the memory had to be constantly swapped or it’s my relatively old 3D accelerated nVidia video card or Unity is doing too much disk access. Whatever it is, Unity does not work well on my machine.

I’m not so happy about reverting back to Gnome because I don’t like to be the kind of person who doesn’t accept change. But for the sake of productivity – I have to forget about Unity for now.

The easiest workaround I found is: right click the tab in Konsole and choose “Detach tab”, then drag the tab in the newly detached window back to where you intended to put the tab in the original window. When you’re done – the launcher will hide itself.

Excluding (some really annoying) bugs, is anyone else having difficulties with the new Unity interface? Or am I just too old for these kind of conceptual changes?

EDIT: This is a known and confirmed bug in Unity. I dutifully added my two cents.

You know… because of the extra CPU cycles.

I had to get it out.

Sorry.