Goodbye, Yahoo! (& instructions on how to export/backup your photos from Flickr)
Backup your photos from your Flickr account to your own computer using the flickrdownload tool and migrate your photos to Wordpress using the Flickr to WP plugin.
backup
4 Jan 2012
Since reading the news that Yahoo! have hired PayPal's president, I no longer want anything to do with them.
The only things I had left on my 12-year-old Yahoo! account were a few contacts from the days I used Messenger and email and the photos on my Flickr account. I exported the former easily and I'm in the process of backing up the photos and their metadata from Flickr now.
Update: Beta 2 Released! See the Gaebar Beta 2 announcement.
Google today released Google App Engine SDK 1.1.6 (announcement, download) which, among other things, brings with it datastore keys that you can sort and filter on.
I've been working a lot with Google App Engine in the past few months. I still maintain, as I reiterated recently in my Boagworld interview with Paul, that it's a great idea and has great potential. And the Google App Engine team has been wonderful in working with me and helping me out. Unfortunately, there are a couple of fundamental issues that must be addressed, and addressed properly, before Google App Engine can be taken seriously as a web application platform.
(And no, Java support is most definitely not one of them.)
Backing up and restoring the datastore in your local SDK can be very useful for several use cases. Personally, I find that I alternate between running the local SDK with a restore of data from the deployment environment and with an empty or test datastore.
The local SDK slows down painfully when you populate it with real amounts of data so sometimes I test with an empty datastore while developing. Restoring data, however, takes a long time too so I don't want to run my restore process all the time. And I don't have to, since I can simply backup the local datastore and restore is by copying it back.