Bill Katz - Carving out my niche in webspace with a spoon

Bloog, a blog/homepage app for Google AppEngine

Wed, 21 May 2008 20:22:04 -0500

I've just released an alpha version of a blog/homepage app for Google AppEngine.

Bloog is open sourced under the MIT License. Go forth and multiply.

Bloog was created to experiment with blog ideas on Google AppEngine while allowing migration from a legacy blog.
These goals shape the feature set, which includes:

A resource-oriented architecture, as described in the great book
RESTful Web Services
A Drupal converter/uploader that queries a local MySQL database
and uploads the data to a Bloog through REST calls.
A datastore deletion utility that can clear out your entities in your Bloog's datastore.
Arbitrary URL aliases, which can be created by the drupal uploader, that provide redirection from legacy urls.
There's also a programmatic aliasing function that can take a regex like 'node/(.*)' and map it to legacy IDs
stored with the blog entries. (http://foo.com/node/4 is a typical Drupal url.)
Dynamic per-article sidebars. (in progress)
A Yahoo UI Ajax front-end for posting and managing entries in a RESTful way. (in progress)

Bogus required insurance

Thu, 14 Feb 2008 13:54:25 -0600

Now that I've left Stanford and ventured into self-funded entrepreneurial waters, I have the joy of paying the full cost for medical insurance. And thanks to a breakdown of what I'm paying for, I discovered it's not just "medical" insurance on the bill. There's a mental health component that usually isn't broken out. My medical insurance bundles this component into the overall plan and outsources the service.

Almost $40/month goes to United Behavioral Health, a service my wife and I will not use and an expense we'd like to chop. I complained to our COBRA representative about this bundled insurance and was told I can't remove it without stopping medical coverage.

MacOS X 10.5: Leopard Time Machine Problem

Sat, 15 Dec 2007 18:42:38 -0600

The new MacOS X upgrade, Leopard, adds many useful features. Some upgraders who try the new backup system, Time Machine, may experience an excessively long initial backup time. For example, 90 GB on my MacBook Pro laptop could take 2+ days for the initial backup to a USB 2.0 Western Digital Passport drive. I disabled the Norton AntiVirus "Auto Protect" feature, and the backup speeds increased quite a bit. Still not very fast, but it looks at least an order of magnitude faster than with NAV on.

If you've got speed issues, let me know if Norton AntiVirus is the culprit.

Adobe Share out in beta

Sat, 15 Dec 2007 18:42:59 -0600

Adobe Share service lets you store and share documents online. To test the service, I tried to use the embed feature to share a short story. Unfortunately, my Drupal blog filters some of the crucial tags, even using the "full HTML" setting.

How good is Kevin Spacey at imitations?

Sat, 15 Dec 2007 18:40:23 -0600

Watch this video to find out...

Intelligent photo resizing and alteration

Sat, 15 Dec 2007 18:40:59 -0600

Here's some astounding work on photo manipulation by Shai Avidan and Ariel Shamir: Seam Carving for Content-Aware Image Resizing

iPhone Mania hits Palo Alto

Wed, 03 Oct 2007 12:35:49 -0500

Steve Jobs said people should queue up at an AT&T store for an iPhone, and he was mostly right. Well past midnight on Thursday, Jenn and I did a tour of the three stores around Palo Alto that will sell the iPhone: the Apple retail stores in Palo Alto and the Stanford Shopping Center, and the AT&T store at Page Mill Rd & El Camino Real. Guess which store is best for a procrastinating iPhone owner wannabe?

The Apple Palo Alto store had a sizable queue, which isn't surprising after notable technoblogger Scoble began broadcasting from his #1/#2 queue position on Thursday morning. Here is some camera video of the scene:

Backing up DokuWiki to Amazon S3

Wed, 03 Oct 2007 12:34:13 -0500

I've been using the PHP DokuWiki in a couple of places. It's small, skinnable, simple, and database-free. If I had the time, I'd clone it in Ruby. (Ruby needs a nice little wiki system.) Integration and backup is easy since all the content lives in files. I made a quick Ruby hack that backs up a DokuWiki to an Amazon S3 account. You can view it here.

More on leak of e-mails from Ameritrade

Thu, 31 May 2007 02:55:52 -0500

I closed commenting on my previous Ameritrade post, but I'm still receiving e-mails from customers annoyed by spam traced to Ameritrade. Just received an e-mail that suggests the possible vulnerability.

Hi Bill,

A lot of rumors and speculations are flying. Most are 'slashdot quality', I've been a customer of both Ameritrade (before the merger) and TD-Waterhouse. I always give out unique addresses. I run Linux, two firewalls, intrusion detection, I _know_ my machine has never been compromised. I did my own research, including corresponding with their security. Here are my findings. YMMV, but I suspect ot by much.

Simulation Talk in San Diego

Wed, 03 Oct 2007 12:35:07 -0500

I'll be speaking at the O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference on "Patient-Specific Cardiovascular Modeling."

Topics will include Simbios, trends that bode well for simulation software, and some very cool work in cardiovascular modeling and simulation from Charles Taylor's lab at Stanford. We're currently in alpha for the SimVascular open source system and hope to have the beta (and a course) by the July/August timeframe.

T-minus 4 weeks to getting cast off?

Sun, 25 Mar 2007 03:07:51 -0600

I broke my wrist playing football a few weeks ago. There was little pain and initial swelling, so I compounded my stupidity by staying in the game until it ended (30 more minutes of potential misalignment) and going to Stanford Barcamp for the rest of the day. Later that night, an acute care doc diagnosed the injury, and by weird chance, he had planned to go to Stanford Barcamp the next day. He posted my x-ray with my permission.

T-minus 4 weeks, maybe, until the cast comes off.

TD Ameritrade data definitely compromised

Thu, 31 May 2007 02:58:40 -0500

In April 2005, Ameritrade reported that several tapes with customer information were lost.

From an article on the incident:

The company discovered the loss in February when it received a
damaged package containing a number of backup tapes shipped
from its secure facilities in the U.S. Katrina Becker, an Ameritrade
spokeswoman, said the shipping company caused the damage
to the package.

Ameritrade immediately launched an investigation and learned
four tapes were missing, three of which were subsequently

Back from RailsConf

Mon, 06 Nov 2006 19:24:48 -0600

RailsConf 2006 was one concentrated dose of Ruby and Rails goodness. I went through my talk a bit faster than expected. If you are looking for the slides, they are posted over at Writertopia. I plan on writing a lengthy article based on the talk to flesh in many points I skipped or glossed over.

The Authorization plugin has been getting a lot of love for the last two weeks. I stupidly labelled the pre-RailsConf release as "1.0 release candidate 1." Now I'm hacking things up, adding lots of sugar, and maybe merging an outside contribution into the code base. The differences between the release candidates will be closer to version changes than simple code stabilization. Oh well. Better to hack and release than worry about looking like a fool...

Authorization Plugin 1.0

Mon, 06 Nov 2006 19:24:25 -0600

A new version of the Authorization plugin is available, just in time for RailsConf. A detailed description is available on the development page at Writertopia. An "Identity" plugin will soon be up as well.

Update on life

Sun, 25 Mar 2007 03:13:30 -0600

I've been at Stanford for a few weeks now. Some happenings and initial impressions:

After accumulating a decade worth of junk, cross-country moves are... taxing. I will never move again. That's it. They'll have to drag me from our new place. We're still not unpacked and fully situated although I can breathe a little easier now.

I'm enjoying my new position. On my second week, the cardiovascular lab I'm working with went to Tahoe for a retreat, spouses included.

It rained all but two days for my first three weeks. We used to joke that people from Washington brought that kind of weather to Stanford. Apparently, it's people from Washington DC as well as Washington state.

Linx, the dining area in the Clark Center (where I work), served Pho last week. With real, flat rice noodles. Not bad for a university cafeteria.

My new MacBookPro with TextMate rocks, even if it gets hot. I'd like to find something like TortoiseSVN for the mac.

Having a $40 T3 connection into your townhome rocks. The server rack we crammed into my den is going to enjoy the big pipe.

I'm a Ruby on Rails virus. Within a week of arriving at Stanford, I convinced a project manager (for the Simbiome biosimulation directory) to switch from his prototype Perl scripts to Ruby on Rails.

Palo Alto is expensive. Not a little expensive. We're talking Tokyo-high housing prices. Food and restaurants are more in line with Wash DC prices, but the tax is higher. All of University Ave, though, is a free wi-fi hotspot. I'm typing this in front of a cafe using my MacBookPro and wireless.

The campus has grown substantially since my undergrad/coterm days. Besides the building that houses my office, I would guess 80% of the med/engineering corner of campus is new.

Riding your bike into work within 5 minutes is pretty nice, even if it's in the rain.

My talk proposal "Metaprogramming Writertopia" was accepted for the First International Rails Conference. Looking forward to Chicago in the summer. I'll make sure to get the two relevant plug-ins cleaned-up and released before then.