app engine and django mail

lo and behold, local email (as in, sending email to console) in django works with the app engine development server, but not with the app engine development backend / taskqueue server. It gives you an attributeerror: Exception Value: 'module' object has no attribute 'getfqdn'

google gdata oauth

there's a great big honkin awesome library for python called gdata - it lets you interface with a ton of their APIs, including spreadsheets and docs. We use it internally at SimpleRelevance to write all sorts of logging directly to shared spreadsheets - a big process will finish and have reams of data to share, but rather than parse out a flatfile every time, I wrote a wrapper that takes the data and spits it into a beautifully formatted google spreadsheet. From there, charts and such are easy.

We also now use it externally - clients can log in and authenticate through oauth with google, and then we can write their predictions to a spreadsheet in their own account.

You probably know about oauth - it's nice because the client never has to supply us with any login credentials - the whole thing is very secure. Unfortunately, it was a little painful to set up. Like, 1 hour of productive work and 2 hours of fighting with stupid. Why?

I'll tell you why.

1. There are a lot of outdated tutorials.
2. The gdata plugin, while awesome, has tons of legacy code and 2 completely different and mostly working ways of doing everything.
3. There are tutorials for the old path, tutorials for the new, and tutorials that mix the two.
4. This page has the most beautiful, well-written, cogent, perfect, comprehensive example of how to set up oauth with gdata. Unfortunately it gets confusing in a crucial bit at the end.

Although it's great, check it out. It has examples every step of the way in 4 different languages, for both gdata paths. That's 8 examples every step of the way (and you know that oauth2 is a 3 step process - that's around 24 pieces of code).

It's actually spot on all the way through to the end. The confusing part comes when you have to exchange your oauth token for the longterm access token - the thing that actually authenticates and lets you access stuff.

The tutorial has this line:

access_token = client.UpgradeToOAuthAccessToken()  # calls SetOAuthToken() for you

But I had trouble. Frankly, I messed up. But I couldn't get it to work until I did this:

client.UpgradeToOAuthAccessToken()
access_token = client.token_store.find_token(oauth_token.scopes[0])

It turns out that the first line actually does returns the access_token, so the google tutorial is correct. This was fixed some time in the last something or other. Used to be you had to use that second line to get it. Older tutorials don't reflect this change. I was getting tired by then. I missed the boat. Cue frustration.

Then, I my second point of confusion: the request token key and secret (leg 1) are the same as the oauth token key and secret (leg 2) but the access token key and secret are totally different and new. In retrospect, this makes perfect sense (from a security POV), but at the time I was baffled. Don't try to upgrade your oauth token and then save its key and secret to authenticate with. It won't work.

The google tutorial tells you to save it but leaves it to you to figure out how to use the access token object. Really, it's easy:

save access_token.key

save access_token.secret.

You can use the session, you can use a database, you can use a session stored in your database, whatever you want! I think the access token lasts for a while.

Anyway, oauth is hard, but I'm really getting the hang of it. Feel free to email me if you need help with this one.

facepalms: 4.5.

My foray into Quantified Self research

So this is really cool - with the advent of the high speed internet in your pocket smartphone, everybody can do their own quantified self research with ease and convenience. Forget apps, it's even simpler than that. Just make a google docs form . You can choose anything about yourself that you want to track - for instance, say water intake. You can make a form that has inputs (type of your choosing - check box, radio button, text, etc) corresponding to what you want to track. Every time anybody fills out the form, a line will be added to a google docs spreadsheet with the info that they filled out.

The trick here is, give yourself and no one else the url for your form. Bookmark it on your smartphone. Fill it out all day long, whenever appropriate. I've been tracking all my bodily inputs and outputs, as well as mood, sleep habits, and a couple other things. I generate about 10 or 15 lines on the spreadsheet a day. The form takes about 15 seconds to fill out, which I do during downtime (like while I'm peeing...).

At the end of the month, I'll have more than 400 datapoints. Since it's in a spreadsheet already, no extra tabulation is necessary. As long as you design your form/spreadsheet combo with some insight, you'll be able to learn things about yourself that you never knew before.