Bill Katz

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)

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.

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 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.