geekitarian

I've published a few more chapters of my guide to App Engine (and some sample code) over at CODING4.US .  These ones introduce the App Engine Users API and the App Engine DB Datastore API.

Following on the relentless bothering of Gillian Jacobs on Twitter , we got a response ! That's not a guarantee, but it's a good start!

I just discovered the site gifyoutube.com yesterday.  What it's supposed to do is convert YouTube clips to animated GIFs.  What it actually does is show you all the weird stuff that other users are converting to GIFs, and of course what they are converting to GIFs is basically chock full of WTF. You can check it out for yourself, but be prepared for one of two reactions: this is stupid, I'm leavin' ooooooooohhhhhhhhhhh look at the videos It's like somebody picked out the weirdest bits from that weird part of YouTube, enhanced by the fact that it's mostly short loops with no real context. For example: https://gifyoutube.com/gif/m2QRPP and  http://gifyoutube.com/gif/Kz2DRl and  http://gifyoutube.com/gif/KYY86b and  http://gifyoutube.com/gif/Kz2qk3 I'm not sure if this is horrible or awesome.

Gillian Jacobs (of Community fame) recently directed a documentary on the venerable Grace Hopper .  If you don't know who that is (and you should), she was an early pioneer in computing - she led the team responsible for building the first compiler and is generally known as a really big deal. If you haven't seen the documentary, it's worth your time.  It's awesome.   Watch it here .  Go ahead, I'll wait. Now that you've seen it, this is where I need your help!!  I do a bit of work with the Women in Computer Science organization at the University of Pittsburgh.  I also work at Google in Pittsburgh.  Both of these organizations have common goals   regarding inspiring and motivating women in the field of computing, and I think this documentary could be really inspirational to local college and high school students. Gillian Jacobs just happens to be from our fine city of Pittsburgh and it would be AWESOME to get her to come visit Google Pittsbur