Today I’m launching my first Google App Engine site. While I built it largely to play with GAE, it is also useful in its own right (I like to think so anyway). It does two different things:

Link shortening without redirection. Put in a godawful long Amazon link and get back a shorter Amazon link. Works with eBay and a few others too. I welcome recipes for other sites. (For the programmers in the audience, which is most of you – yes, the processing is via regular expressions.)

I move between a couple different computers regularly: my old 12" PowerBook and the 15" MacBook Pro my job provides me with. Like all multi-computer users I periodically bump up against the challenges of what files (and versions) are where, especially when there’s work in progress.

To further complicate things, I also have an extra laptop running Ubuntu. And sometimes I just SSH to my web server from somebody else’s machine.

At work I still mostly use Subversion for version control. Its main selling points: stable, performs as expected, integrates nicely with Trac, holds all our old stuff (legacy inertia).

Note that “pain-free branching and merging” is not on that list. (And don’t give me the old “branching is cheap in svn!” line. It’s not about the branching, it’s about the merging.) A couple years ago I started also using Mercurial and plan to eventually replace svn with it entirely. The aspect of Mercurial that made my life better recently is its support for branching and merging.

Spam is occupying more than its customary share of my attention in recent weeks. I’ve long had a morbid fascination with sleazy human communication (hence Purportal.com). That makes the always-relentless stream of spam, though not exactly welcome, at least interesting.

Spam volume also seems to have increased during this period. The number of spam attempts my mail server rejects per day had been steady at around 3,000 for months. Now it’s back up around 5,000 or 6,000.

Among the many anti-spam measures on my mail server – which help me reject 5000 spam attempts per day – is SPF. SPF allows domain name owners to specify which mail servers are allowed to send its mail. That makes it an excellent way to detect address forgeries, a favorite spammer tool.

One of the early questions raised about SPF was: won’t spammers just buy their own domains and set up their own SPF records that say it’s all OK? You can read the answer in the SPF FAQ, but the short version is: Yes, they will, but it won’t give them a free pass.

I’m still loving my iPod touch. It’s really a great little handheld computer. I’m able to do almost everything I need with the stock apps, but there are a couple free third-party apps that have earned a permanent place on it. One is the game Chess With Friends from NewToy.

This is a version of what is also known as “postal” or “correspondence” chess. You make a move and send it to your opponent; your opponent makes a move and sends it back to you. (In this version, the CWF app rather than your mail carrier is the middleman.) You can pick somebody out of your address book, or ask the CWF app to find you a random opponent. Nice touches include in-game chat, step-by-step replays, and optional email or SMS notifications.

This evening, the Western Mass. Developers Group was treated to a talk by Ben Fry of Processing fame. It was excellent and inspiring. Having not much prior exposure to Processing or his work, I left hungry for more. (The title of this post is taken from the name of the group at the MIT Media Lab where Fry did his PhD work.)

I liked the graphical-REPL flavor of his live demos. Surprisingly, the feeling reminded me of being a kid flipping through Alan Kay’s article about the Xerox Alto in Scientific American 30 years ago.