Photo by Chris Bohnhoff Used with permission.

Stefan Meyer of Growing Lots, turns vacant Minneapolis parking lots into urban farms – a welcome addition to my little neighborhood.

The last time I came back from Iowa for work, I was riding the Hiawatha light rail from the Mall of America where I was dropped off. While sitting on the train, I was reflecting on how great Minneapolis is after spending a long week in Ames stuck in a hotel room. This thought was cemented further as I took a different path than I normally do from the Franklin LRT station to my house. What I stumbled upon was a parking lot filled with wire structures with plants growing in them. I stood in amazement for a few minutes taking it all in. However, sadly, I forgot the name of the operation as to look it up when I got home.

A few weeks later, via the Seward E-Democracy list, I discovered it was called “Growing Lots” – a project lead up by local urban farmer Stefan Meyer (aka “Farmer Stefan) and supported by Seward Redesign. Rather than covering the pavement with soil, Stefan created low cost “planters” using rolled wire fencing lined with hay to hold in the soil. The whole structure costs less than $2 each and supports many plants for such a small footprint. Growing Lots provides produce for local restaurants and also offers CSA shares. If you think this is a grand idea, I highly recommend patronizing it.

I have been thinking a lot about how to grow plants in non-traditional manners – especially to save space and water. This was initially spurred after learning on the History Channel about NASA’s growing of vegetables in space based on George Washington Carver’s work involving vertical mesh drip situations. However, after seeing Tomás Saraceno’s Lighter than Air exhibit at the Walker a few years ago, I started thinking about how to do it all in a beautiful manner. I would like to eventually move my garden into my front yard, but obviously a patch of open dirt doesn’t have the most curb appeal. However, at the same time, vegetable plants can be very decorative later in the season. A lot of my ideas for structures were based on Saraceno’a grass covered floating orbs, however the biggest mental hurdle for me was how to keep the soil in a wire mesh structure. I think as Stefan demonstrated, lining the structure with hay is the solution. Perhaps, I will get these designed this fall yet to implement for next spring. Wish me luck… and check out Growing Lots.

Related Links:

• Growing Lots Urban Farm Official Site
• Chris Bohnhoff’s photo collection of his visit to Growing Lots
• Tomás Saraceno’s “Lighter than Air” at the Walker – See the Flying Garden piece in the photos
• Vertical Gardening – An interesting collection of topics on the future of gardening in the growing shortage of space.

I decided to check out the android app for wordpress so I might be write a bit more. So far so good.

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Crazy Crust  – serves about 6

Lightly grease and flour bottom and sides of a 9 inch or 10 inch glass pie pan. About 6 servings. Oven 425 degrees.

1/2 cup flour
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/2 tsp baking powder
1/4 cup solid shortening
1/2 dairy sour cream
1 egg

Lightly spoon flour into measuring cup. Level off. Combine all ingredients in medium bowl, stir until well blended
Batter will be slightly lumpy.

Spread butter thinly on bottom and thickly up sides to which 1/4 inch of pan rim. Fill + bake at 425 degrees according to individual recipes.  Cool dinner 5 minutes before serving. Refrigerate leftovers.

Mexican Filling

1 lb ground beef lightly browned + drained.
1 teaspoon salt.
2 teaspoon chili powder
1/4 to 1/2 teaspoon tabasco
pepper sauce
1/2 cup chopped onion
or 2
tablespoons instant minced onion.
16 oz can of kidney beans undrained
6 oz tomato paste(I use my own tomato juice)
Half cup finely chopped lettuce
1/4 finely chopped tomato.
.5 to 1 cup shredded monterey jack cheese

prepare crazy cust. Combine all above ingredients except lettuce tomatoes and cheese.
Mix thoroughly. Spoon into crust. Bake twenty to thirty minutes or until crust is deep golden brown. Sprinkle with lettuce tomato and cheese. Serve with taco sauce if desired.

Here is the skinny:
I was running into an unexpected issue with the AppEngine users service on a folder locked down by app.yaml. I had a folder /cms/ that I wanted the contents of to only be viewed by admin users to my Google AppEngine project. All pages inside of the directory displayed the email address of the user as well as a log out link. I was using users.GetCurrentUser() and users.create_logout_url to display this. The folder itself was being locked down at the app.yaml level. Aside from this, there was no other security (@require_admin decorators, etc). After testing, I discovered I was able to return to pages within /cms/ while being logged out via the users.create_logout_url link. users.GetCurrentUser() was returning None as expected, but I figured I would be redirected to a Google login page.

I figured this might be a bug with the current sdk, but I wasn’t willing to assume that until I had support. After submitting to the python mailing list with no reply, some googling, I started debugging the app.yaml. In the end I discovered it to be the url matching condition to the app.yaml file – essentially a logical “typo”. For what it is worth, I didn’t check here first because I am making changes to an existing set of code that already had the app.yaml condition in place. However, if you are in the same boat ever, hopefully this info will help.

So, if you think you have a folder locked down with app.yaml and users are still able to visit the page while logged out, check the url conditions. Examples below:

My app.yaml has

#- url: /cms # BAD VERSION - only protects a file named cms in the root, not the cms folder</del>
- url: /cms.* # GOOD VERSION - protects any url matching the regexp "starts with '/cms' followed by any number of characters (including '/') "
  script: main.py
  login: admin
  secure: always

Hopefully, that helps someone out. I know I wasted lunch break figuring it out.

On the page, I display the value of users.GetCurrentUser() and have a logout link generated by users.create_logout_url(’/home/’).
When I click logout, I am redirected to /home/ as expected.

The odd behavior is that I can then go to /cms/ again without having to reauthenticate. The value of users.GetCurrentUser() is None (as expected).
However, I would expect the app.yaml to cause me to be redirected to the Google login screen when trying to revisit logged out.

I have not tested on production yet. Is this correct behavior and/or a known issue on dev sdk?

Here is the star tribune post.

Here is a list of restaurants that participated:

The whole trip was somewhat worth telling. There was unsolicited discussion over the state of hog farming with some Ames locals, blood soaked small town hitch hiking adventures, being trapped at the air port during a blizzard in Milwaukee, and, of course, the crash it self. The short version of the crash goes as follows. A 10 mile stretch of I35 north of Story City, IA was particularly icy that afternoon after a bright cold gusty day. As the state trooper later informed me, numerous vehicles including myself ended up in the median. In my specific case, I was driving just below the 70mph speed limit and I started to skid towards the median while passing someone more cautious than myself. I tried to turn out of it, but only ended up rolling. Officially, I only rolled once even though it seemed like more. I landed right side up and managed to walk out of the crash. An ambulance checked me over and put a few band-aids on. A state trooper took filed the report and gave me a lift back to Story City where I spent the night at the Super 8. The next day, after a snowy extended lay over in Milwaukee, I managed to fly home to Minneapolis and have a few rounds of drinks with my buds to celebrate life.

The truck was totaled by insurance and I used the money to put towards another truck. I wanted to get something similar. I did toy around with getting something more fuel efficient. However, since I primarily used my old truck to haul paintings and things from Menards, I wanted to get another SUV. After looking at quite a few SUVs, I found a good ol Navy Blue 2001 Blazer similar to my old Victory Red one. The new one however, was the LT package and came with leather seats and some features I could really otherwise not care about. Eitherway, it is nicer. For the first time ever, I have decided to name my new Blazer – “Blue Rum”. This is based on an inside joke “Too bad your new truck isn’t red again so you could call it ‘red rum’”. If people don’t get the obvious Shining reference, I can fall back on just making a pirate joke. Yarr.

Anywho, I am alive, thankful to be so, and have an upgraded painting hauler. Thanks to everyone who helped me through this ordeal. My friends and family are pretty rad and I am fortunate to have all of you. Let’s definitely take Blue Rum camping this summer.

Edit 2009-02-02 - Added note about inequality query complexity. Spoiler – inequalities are 2 queries under the hood.

In my further adventures in Google AppEngine land, I wanted to ensure uniqueness of an email field while still allowing the user to change their email address. Since, Google App Engine’s BigTable doesn’t allow you to custom define unique indexes, this poses a problem. Instead of relying on database defined indexes, you have to set up your own rules, which is a wee bit tricky for GAE beginners such as me.
This can be done in general by overloading the put() method on an entity, but I wanted to be able to handle the errors nicely for the form UI.

The old Django Method:

#account = account entity you are editing
email = form.cleaned_data['email'].lower()
users_with_this_email = User.objects.filter(email=email).exclude(pk=account.pk).count()
if (users_with_this_email > 0):
# do something...

The new Google AppEngine Big Table GQL method:

#account = account entity you are editing
...
email = form.cleaned_data['email'].lower()
users_with_this_email = Account.all().filter('email = ' , email).filter('__key__ != ' , account.key()).count(1)
if (users_with_this_email > 0):
# do something...

The key here is making sure some OTHER entity does not also have the value for their email field.
In regular Django, an entity will evaluate to its primary key when used in a query and can be filtered on ‘pk’ .
GQL, however, the primary key needs to be explicitly fetched via entity.key() and filtered on __key__

A couple other notes:

• GQL does have an email property. I have not run tests yet to tell if this is case sensitive.
• GQL does not allow case-insensitive searches like regular Django does. Thus, I am making sure all email addresses are lowercased when inserting and querying against the db. Even if this is not needed for EmailProperties, you will need it for ensuring the uniqueness of other types.
• != filters are actually ran as two queries – one where the != is replace with a less than inequality filter, and one where it is replaced with a greater than inequality  filter. No word at the moment if this applies to __key__ searches.
• A query with a != cannot have inequality filters because of the above rule nor other != filters.

Related Links

• Add A Unique Constraint to Google App Engine via Squeeville
• Case Insensitive Queries via GAE Java Persistence
• Appengine Types and Properties via Google Code
• Queries and Index via Google Code – discussion on inequalities and != filters

Arika went as trailer trash. Below are pics from Karen’s party.