Adding a single static file

To add a single static file to your App Engine application, let's say your robots.txt file, add the following to the handlers section of your app.yaml:


- url: /robots.txt
  static_files: static/robots.txt
  upload: static/robots.txt

This assumes your robots.txt file lives in the directory static and that you want to access it from http:///robots.txt

My first try after looking at the docs missed the upload parameter.  Totally zoomed in on static_files and figured I was good to go.

Mac helpers

Some Mac-related things that have helped with the day-to-day:

• UTC clock widget - detailed instructions here.  UTC is way easier to work with as a base for date/time normalization, but it's a pain to constantly have to convert in your head (especially if you travel).  Modifying the World Clock widget was simple.  Remember to look in /Library not /Library and make a backup just in case...
• iTunes control - you control: tunes.  I use all of my Spaces and with this free utility I get iTunes music control no matter which Space I'm in (adds controls to your menu bar).

Google App Engine and Cron

1. Stagger your cron tasks such that they don't resonate
2. Limit cron time limits to 2 digits

Looking at the requests/second graph on my GAE dashboard recently, I noticed a pattern of medium peaks at one frequency and a pattern of large peaks at about half that frequency.  These were the result of the way I had set up my cron tasks.

Self-inflicted usage spikes have to be avoided when you need to live within per minute quotas.  Because of a natural inclination towards time anchors like whole and half hours, multiple cron tasks were often starting up at the same time even though they all had different intervals.  The large spikes were from when they would all start up at the same time.  Oops.

Changed the intervals to ones that didn't overlap so frequently and ran in the the error below: 

Error parsing yaml file:

Unable to assign value 'every 157 minutes' to attribute 'schedule':

schedule 'every 157 minutes' failed to parse: line 1:8 mismatched input u'7' expecting set None

Turns out that 'every n ...' is ok and 'every nn ...' is ok, but 'every nnn ...' is not.