I'm honored and humbled every time I look through the list of stellar speakers we have confirmed to present at the Singularity web conference. As such, I want to take a moment every week to highlight a new speaker, starting this week with Tim O'Reilly.

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Google released version 1.0.2 of the Google App Engine SDK two days ago. If you're using Google App Engine, you should definitely upgrade.

You can find a list of fixed issues in the release notes, including the template cache issue that I was running into.

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If you download development tools you will probably have come across SHA1 or MD5 signatures for downloads in the past.

It's very easy to test the download to make sure that the checksum is valid. For MD5 signatures, you simply type: (more...)

I hate blog spammers. Unfortunately, you normally don't know who exactly is responsible for blog spam and so there's usually very little you can do about it beyond getting angry, deleting the comment, and feeling wholly inadequate about the whole thing.

However, today, I saw some spam on my blog from a company called First Rate, promoting the web site of a certain photographer (Update: name and spam comment removed to protect the photographer who is innocent in all this, read my follow-up post for First Rate's reponse).

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In the last few years, I've been making a very conscious effort to attend and speak at a variety of conferences both within the Flash world and in the greater world of web development, web standards, and open source. This has meant that in the last year or so alone, I got to opportunity to present to plethora of different audiences at conferences as diverse as MacWorld, Wizards of OS, Flash on the Beach, and d.construct. XTech, however, was very different to any of my previous conference experiences and I have to thank Jeremy for suggesting that I speak at it. (Jeremy also live-blogged several of the sessions from the conference and you can find several of the session slides online at SlideShare.)

XTech, at its birth, was a conference about XML. Although, as I understand it, the focus of the conference has shifted somewhat in recent years to embrace other web technologies and the crazy/sexy world of Web 2.0. Shifts in focus notwithstanding, I still had the pleasure of meeting and conversing with delegates from a variety of interest areas that I hadn't had the chance to at previous conferences, from people who make dictionaries to government representatives.

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