Noted. But perhaps you misunderstood me; I’m not less interested in your columns because they not always technical (at least I don’t think so). I agree wholeheartedly that we uber-nerds tend to solve problems that interest us, and don’t pay sufficient attention to issues that matter to non-programmers. I find your focus on those sorts of issues almost always fascinating; you have a gift for recasting those challenges in a way that both includes the non-programmer while catching the programmer’s interest. It’s great; thanks for doing it.

Does this mean I will soon get a cloud account to bring the good word of events to Fredericksburg? This is very cool stuff, and I also looking forward to this series, and your work with elmcity.info is really fascinating to me–and now in a couple of new ways.

Cool! Wasn’t sure you wanted that to be public, but since you do, let’s cite the URL:

http://www.mashical.com/

It’s me, not you. My goal was, and is, to illustrate pragmatic principles and practices that make sense to, and solve problems that matter to, non-programmers.

But I also want to explore what cloud-based development can mean to programmers.

Hopefully I’ll now be able to converge these missions.

Indeed you can do it on AppEngine. As I mentioned to you, I’m working on a calendar aggregator (www.mashical.com) which is hosted on AppEngine. The lack of long running processes and scheduled tasks is an obstacle, but I’ve got it working OK using alot of memcaching.

Mashical is a response to your wondering about the existence of a calendar aggregator…I couldn’t find one, so I took it as a challenge to learn python and appengine. Basically, anyone can create a single calendar from a bunch of ICS feeds. I recreated you elmcity calendar at Mashical and it’s listed as one of the public calendars. Anyone can login with their Google ID and create a new calendar (though, beware that it is definitely alpha and a bit design and feature challenged right now). You can, however, subscribe to a merged calendar.

I’d love to know yours and your reader’s thoughts about the app.

Steve

I’ll be honest; I’ve been not 100% thrilled with what seems to be a pretty notable shift in focus away from pure pragmatism since you moved to Microsoft. My enthusiasm for your posts has begun to wane a bit. It may well be me as much as you, of course…everyone changes.

But I think I’ll enjoy this series. *grin* Looking foward to it.

Not sure what the price structure of Azure is, but the pricing of App Engine is one of it’s most appealing features. Beyond the free right now, it’ll supposedly be priced by the CPU megacycle as opposed to “instance” that’s running, so it can be much more fine-grained than Amazon.

I love Amazon’s stuff too and have written a bunch about both, but I’d seriously recommend taking a peek at App Engine.

Love reading a blogger how actually knows how to code, by the way! Releasing a major version of LittleShoot soon that will likely interest you — think Winer’s early dreams for p2p coming to fruition plus a lot more.