Bill Katz

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.

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

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.

The founders of Reddit, a poster-child for web app development with Lisp, decided to rewrite their site using Python. The collective cries from the Lisp community are deafening. And the Ruby on Rails followers are wondering, "Why not Ruby?"

Aaron Swartz provides some insight into the Reddit move and why his web.py project was selected over Django. Web.py will be used by two of the startups (Reddit and Swartz's Infogami) from Paul Graham's Y Combinator.