Simplistic

I am a fan of simplicity, but when it comes to clocks I usually like to see all the inner-working guts ticking away.  Something about the amount of work and parts that go into making something so precise is just amazing; same with a vehicle or even a space shuttle.

But when I saw the following clock, I just thought it was a stroke of pure genius!

And then after that, I thought how easy would this be with a little bit of code!

Keeping Google App Engine (GAE) instances alive

So you finally finished an application and decide to deploy to Google's App Engine service, only to find out..... it's slow! After so many seconds, the JVM application instance gets shut down and takes a whopping 10 seconds to start back up. Of course, google wants you to pay for an always-on instance, but there are a few tricks to managing how you can keep an instance alive.