The future of programming is wide screen

I have to confess, I didnt get it until I actually saw it for real - I was trying to program on my new(ish) laptop in widescreen, at 1280x800, which was killing my poor old eyes, which are just too good to use spectacles but not good enough to use a small high-resolution monitor, so I switched to a free-standing TFT monitor which only supports 80x600. Vista very obligingly reset the laptop monitor to matching resolution, and because I didnt choose to share the view across the two monitors, it showed the same. To my surprise, I could see much more of Visual Studio 2008 on the laptop monitor -- an AHA moment, this is probably what the research on higher programmer productivity on larger monitors is all about. I'm convinced. Now all I have to do is find a wide screen 21 or 24 inch that doesnt give me head-aches :-)

Update on Google App Engine

I've only played with it for a couple of hours so far, but I'm quite impressed. The command-line problem I had originally was the biggest hurdle, everything else after that seems to be well thought out and the documentation is very straight-forward and easy to understand. I've been meaning to learn Python Web programming for some years but never quite got around to it, so my initial difficulties might be down to this, and maybe its early adopter time, but I think Google could put some time into making it all more accessible to the hobbyist and dabbler -- I'm looking for something which is less of a productivity sink than ASP.NET and but for the buzz of the AppEngine and the fact I had other work to avoid I dont think I would have persisted:-)

An aside on difficulties with Scripting Language Web Frameworks
I dabbled with Grails, Trails, Boo, Castle, Turbogears and some others best forgotten, and yes, Rails, and they all defeated me comprehensively. Of the lot, Ruby on Rails would be the one I'm most likely to have another look at -- the setups are the problem always -- say what you will about ASP.NET, Asp and JSP with something like Tomcat, you pretty much always know where you are -- it either works out of the box or you need to reinstall or apply a patch (sorry, service pack). But with the rest, you are always wondering if a space in a Windows Path may be causing the problem you are having. Still the BitNami Ruby and Rails stacks are amazing, head and shoulders above and really give the casual user the chance to check out these technologies without having to take a six week course

Trying out Google App Engine

Trying Out the Google App Engine

Maybe this is implicit for all hardened Pythoners, but for the uninitiated, using Python with Windows seems to be more of a struggle than it might otherwise be (I know, I should revive my Linux partition -- but what about everyone else?).
So here for other pilgrims --
I'm still suspicious about "C:\Program Files" in the path of any application -- although the problem seems to be that you probably need to open a command line window (thats choose Start then Run then type cmd and click OK)
and type python before anything in the App Engine documentation (assumes C:\Python25 in your path, if this doesnt make sense, G help you and run away, dont walk )

eg
google_appengine/dev_appserver.py helloworld/

becomes

C:\Google:\>python google_appengine/dev_appserver.py helloworld/

simple, and possibly obvious, but it wasnt to me, so for anyone else out there struggling.

So I got it working, although as I had Ruby on Rails using port 8080 I had to stick in --port=8000 in the middle, fortunately nothing else was using that port

C:\Google:\>python google_appengine/dev_appserver.py --port=8000 helloworld/