Appengine: Transaction Safe Reference Properties with Ancestor Queries

This is a quick article on transactions with “one to many” relationship queries within a single by utilizing entity groups and ancestor queries. If you find it helpful, please feel free to link to it and help spread the google juice. Special thanks to co-worker Robert Kluin for helping me figure this out last week. My Problem My initial problem was that I was working inside a...

Appengine Files Api – part 1: Storing/Fetching remote images in Blobstore using Django

Here is a quick tutorial on how to fetch remote images with the new Files API on Google Appengine 1.4.3 released March 30th. These examples use Django. Before we begin, read up on how to write files to blobstore using the Files API. Prior to the 1.4.3 release of the SDK, the only way to get files into the blobstore (and thus leverage things like BlobInfo) was to upload them via a POST request. To...

2010 Reflections p2.3 – The Snowy Epic Conclusion

This is a continuation of the story of my truck accident earlier this year. You can read part 2 here or start from the beginning here. When I left off, I had just hitchhiked through a rural Iowa town holding a bloody towel and was chain smoking in my hotel room wondering how I was going to get home. I woke up in the morning around 7 A.M. I immediately started trying to figure out how to get...

2010 Reflections p2.2 : People Look At You Weird When You Are Bloody

This is a continuation of the story of my truck accident earlier this year. You can read the lead up here. When I left off, my truck had just rolled twice on the freeway at 70 miles per hour, I was standing knee deep in snow, and really not excited about life at that point. As I stalked around trying to figure out what to do, a guardian angel coincidentally passed by – an ambulance stopped...

2010 Reflections p2.1 : Crashing Trucks for New Outlooks

This is the second installment in a series where I reflect upon the year in order to understand where I am and appreciate all that happened in the last twelve months. In this post I revisit my truck accident in February and how it changed quite a few things for me. Shortly after it happened, I wrote about some of the details of the accident. I had to leave out a few key bits, including the reason...