Matt and Kat Brown

In one of my opinion one of the coolest products that Google has launched since I’ve been working there is the Google App Engine, a service that allows anyone to write a web application and host it on Google’s servers. Google then looks after scaling your application and ensuring that as it becomes popular thousands and thousands of people can use it without you having to worry about buying physical servers and all that sort of messy stuff. It’s very cool.

Google App Engine has been live for nearly 2 months now and in that time a whole bunch of applications have been created. One of the best, in my opinion, is Wordle. You upload a bunch of text to Wordle and it creates a pretty picture that shows which words appear most frequently. I uploaded the front page of our blog (on the left) and the front page of my more technical blog (on the right) and you can see the results below (click on it for a bigger version).

Pretty cool, huh? The only downside to it is the fact that it uses a Java applet to display the resulting image and Java doesn’t get installed on most computers, so you may need to install it before you can see the image.

Try it out and if you make a cool image send me a link in the comments.

We’re off to London for the weekend in a few hours so you can expect an update on our weekend early next week sometime.

Our Internet connection went live today which means that we’re now completely settled in our new apartment in the Christchurch area of Dublin. We’ve been here for two weeks now and we are very happy with our decision to move across town.

I have added some photos to the gallery so you can get a feel for what our second home in Dublin looks like:

• Photos from our 2nd Dublin Apartment

The apartment was freshly painted before we moved in, and all the kitchen appliances and lounge suite are brand new! Kat has a much shorter walk to catch her bus in the mornings, and my commute is only about 10 minutes longer, although I now catch a bus rather than walk which means that I might have to stop procrastinating and sign up for the gym at work. Maybe.

We booked a trip to London for next weekend, staying somewhere around Westminster. The plan is to see a show and catch up with a few of our friends who are calling London home at the moment.

Dublin’s weather has been relatively good since I got back from Australia and New Zealand, there have been quite a few nice warm (low 20s) days with sunshine and only a smattering of rain here and there. If Dublin can keep this up for the rest of the summer then there may be a chance that last year was just an abnormality. Whatever the case we’re making the most of the sunshine and good weather while we can.

We’ve been kept busy the last few weeks with moving apartments. We’ve moved across town to a slightly older but more ‘homey’ apartment right in the heart of old Dublin. We look out the bedroom windows onto a sea of red brick and out our lounge windows to Christchurch Cathedral just across the road. Its nice to be really central, close to some great restaurants and shops. We have a local bakery and the ‘best chipper in Dublin’ just round the corner.

We’ve unpacked all our boxes and cleaned and decorated the apartment. The only thing left now to make our new home complete is to get the internet connected. We’re into our second week without internet now and starting to suffer withdrawal. Hopefully it will be set up later this week… all according to plan.

Once we’re back online we’ll put up some photos to show off our new ‘gaff’  =)

NZ translations:   ‘Chipper’ is Irish slang for a fish and chip shop.   ‘Gaff’ is Irish slang for someone’s home.