Bill Katz - Software

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)

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.

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

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.

Lisp vs Python vs Ruby for Web apps

Sun, 11 Dec 2005 18:01:00 -0600

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.

The Cornucopia of Javascript toolkits

Mon, 03 Oct 2005 02:34:55 -0500

It seems like every week I'm discovering a new javascript toolkit for building your next "Web 2.0" application. I'm knee-deep into developing a Rails-based Writertopia, so I'm trying not to spend too much time looking at these nice open source frameworks, but it's hard -- real hard.

Here's a quick list of some of the more promising systems that you can google:

Zimbra popped up on the TechCrunch.com radar. Very nice collaboration suite that shows the power of their AjaxTK toolkit. Try the demo. You'll be impressed.
Dojo deserves a look. One of the main developers gave a talk at OSCON and I was impressed with the packaging system and obvious expertise being brought to the framework.
Scriptaculous and Prototype, two libraries well known to the Rails community, keep getting better.
Mochikit is a nice suite of javascript libraries. Get your rounded corners there.
Quooxdoo (pronounced "cooks do") has an impressive array of UI widgets. Check out their demo page.
TrimJunction is a Rails-clone in javascript. If you look around their well-documented pages, you'll see how powerful javascript can be.

Run Don't Walk from Yahoo Small Business

Mon, 18 Jul 2005 18:10:47 -0500

Summary: Yahoo! accidently deleted an entire web hosting service for my father-in-law's business. No warning, no cause, no e-mail to any of the addresses of the account holder (me) or any of the service administrators. On Friday morning, the account was closed for "other reason" by a program. Several people at Yahoo Billing could not tell me why the account was unilaterally closed. But the business got no e-mail or web hosting for a full business day, and no assurance was made that the web files (of any date) could be recovered or the e-mail accounts restored. The full horror story is below.

All Kinds of Greasemonkey Goodness

Fri, 03 Jun 2005 18:16:24 -0500

Short note: Two great developments are available that build on the Greasemonkey tool for the Firefox browser. Platypus allows you to modify a web page from your browser, and then save the changes for next time you browse through. Julien Couvreur has released a very nice Ajax debugger that shows XMLHttpRequests in real-time and techno-color.

Agile Web Development With Rails

Sat, 28 May 2005 10:57:31 -0500

Over the past few months, I've been happily looking at early drafts of Agile Web Development with Rails, the first book on Ruby on Rails by Dave Thomas (author of Programming Ruby and The Pragmatic Programmer) and David Heinemeier Hansson, who we should just call the Rails dude. Some of the chapters were contributed by other members of the Rails community, including Leon Breedt, Mike Clark, Thomas Fuchs, and Andreas Schwarz.

Google Web Accelerator - A Nice Wake-up Call

Sun, 08 May 2005 00:46:05 -0500

Google released a beta of their new Web Accelerator, and all hell promptly broke loose. Web accelerators have been around for the masses since dial-up, but with broadband and non-client-side accelerators like Akamai that cache content off your local computer, many of us haven't needed to install acceleration on our computers. Enter Google and their recent foray into web acceleration. When Google speaks, people (and especially geeks like me) listen, so we dutifully installed the web accelerator to see what new marvels Google has cooked up. The results, for some, weren't pleasant.

An Early, Quick Look at ActiveGrid

Mon, 20 Jun 2005 10:25:10 -0500

ActiveGrid just released the early-access version of their application builder and grid application server. The specifics of this open source grid-based web system had been kept under wraps since last November; CEO Pater Yared dropped hints about a Google-inspired system built on LAMP (Linux, Apache, PHP/Perl/Python) for delivering scalable web apps. I say "Google-inspired" because ActiveGrid pays a lot of attention to scaling web apps across a grid of commodity computers (minimum hardware: 800+ MHz x86 processor, 1 GB RAM, 10 GB hard drive). ActiveGrid allows six deployment patterns, most of them focused on high-availability. The grid application server is implemented as an Apache module with libraries that run within language-specific modules (mod_python, mod_php, mod_perl, tomcat).

Could Rails have been built without Ruby?

Mon, 09 May 2005 14:46:47 -0500

On reading Paul Graham's essays on computer languages, I was struck by some interesting points he makes. This blog entry could just as well be called "What Paul Graham made me realize about Ruby and Rails."

First, new languages may be trending towards LISP, perhaps because LISP was initially a theoretical exercise by McCarthy, a gedankenexperiment not really designed to be shoehorned into 1958 computational constraints, but rather discovered "when you try to axiomatize computation." (See Graham's full postscript paper The Roots of Lisp.) FORTRAN and C, on the other hand, took a lot of cues from the hardware; they had to be fast. Over time, the lower-level languages have been relegated to handle algorithmically-simple, computationally-needy problems, while the scripting languages - PERL, PHP, Python, Ruby - have been getting fast and moving from simple glue to more complex processing tasks.

Patching Drupal for poker trackback spam

Thu, 10 Mar 2005 02:28:03 -0600

Spammers have begun using trackback comments as a way around the Drupal spam module. Looking over at the Drupal board, I see that some people got hit with hundreds of spam comments. This site got some ads for poker, casinos, and an anti-obesity drug, phentermine. The rising use of comment spam has spurred Google, MSN, Yahoo! and others to embrace the rel="nofollow" tag for hyperlinks.

In the short term, I offer this to Drupal victims:

Enter the Drupal

Sun, 19 Feb 2006 23:32:59 -0600

After much dithering and review of blog & content management systems, I selected Drupal as the engine for my revised website. Why Drupal? The key reasons are:

Ease-of-use and large selection of modules & themes
Excellent categorization of content through taxonomy system
Nice input filter system that lets me choose the format style (e.g. HTML or Textile) for each entry
Clean URLs through apache mod_rewrite as well as Drupal URL aliasing system
Built-in revision system so I can handle different versions, although you can't mark one revision published while working on another.