Tuesday, June 21, 2011

Google App Engine for Business error with appcfg.py

I have "App Engine for Business" access at work, which lets me create internal-only App Engine apps.

But upon creating a new internal app, I kept getting "Error 404" messages about "This application does not exist" when I tried to use appcfg update to upload it.

Turns out there's a special syntax for the application name in the app.yaml file. I changed the "application: myapp" line to "application: mycompany.com:myapp" and then it worked.

Wednesday, June 15, 2011

Regarding Bryce

My apologies in advance.

Boyce: Bob, I'd like you to meet my brother, Bruce.
Bruce: Bob, I'm Bruce Bryce. It's a pleasure.
Bob: Bob Bluth, Bruce. Likewise. Where are you from?
Boyce: Bruce is from Blythe.
Bruce: Yes, I'm a lumber man. I grow Spruce in Blythe.
Bob: Blue Spruce?
Bruce: Both Blue and True Spruce. And in fact, I'm working on a new variety that's a mix of the two.
Bob: A True Blue Spruce?
Bruce: Exactly.
Bob: How's it going?
Bruce: It's back-breaking work. I lost half my trees this year to a blight.
Bob: That's terrible! What type of blight?
Bruce: Nobody knows. They're just calling it the Blythe Blight.
Bob: How did the True Blue do?
Bruce: It beat both the True and the Blue. In fact, it did so well I had to rename it. We're going to call it Bruce Bryce's Blythe Blight Beating True Blue Spruce.

Saturday, June 04, 2011

Tax burden stats

Here are tables for tax as a slice of GDP and tax rates by income level.

In terms of GDP, the last two years seem to be outliers, probably due to the economy tanking. The rest of the decade went from 8.0 to 10.2, pretty much exactly in line with the rest of the last 30 years.

The table of tax rates by income level is much more striking: the poorest 20% saw their taxes cut nearly in half since 1980, while the richest 20% saw only about 10% reduction in tax burden. So basically, the tax system got a whole lot more progressive in the last 30 years. (Progressive = the more you make, the higher your tax rate.) That's interesting in context of the stuff I've been seeing from the left lately about how we need to raise taxes on the rich, since it appears the burden has been shifting that way already for the last few decades.

Wednesday, June 01, 2011

Android "SetupTask cannot be found" error

I recently checked in an android project, and when I checked it out elsewhere to check it over, I got the following error when trying to build it with "ant debug" per the command-line build instructions:
...
taskdef class com.android.ant.SetupTask cannot be found
 using the classloader AntClassLoader
...

The solution was to run "android update project --path ." to update the project to work in the new location.