Firefox 3.5 Logo Troll
The other day my colleague Andy Peatling (BuddyPress lead) tweeted
“The lighter part of the Firefox 3.5 logo globe kinda looks like a zombie: http://bit.ly/Mn20l“.
Mozilla Firefox 3.5 includes a new logo. But now thanks to Andy, I can’t help but always see the water troll when I look at the logo.
Taking a Matt Nap
In “The Way I Work, annotated” my boss Matt Mullenweg shares additional insights and linkifies his Inc. Magazine’s “The Way I Work” column (July issue). Both versions are excellent reads, but the post at ma.tt benefits from Matt answering a lot of additional questions in the comments.
Here is an excerpt from the article that inspired me to share this photo (emphasis mine):
“I do my best work mid-morning and super late at night, from one to five in the morning. Some people don’t need sleep, but I actually need a ton. I just sleep all the time, catching naps in the afternoon or a 20-minute snooze in the office. Our business is 24 hours — folks in Australia start their day around 4 PM my time and our guys and girls in Europe get going around midnight. Sometimes I’ll go out at night, come home from the bar at 2 or 3 AM, and then go back to work.”
Colleague Demitrious Kelly (meech, Apokalyptik) earlier this month open sourced the (Unix process) jobs system he (primarily) has been developing for WordPress.com. Not that I really understand it, but “jobs” is described as
A fast, distributed, horizontally scalable system built upon linux, php5.2, and mysql 5.1 wherein work can be stored in a database, and processed outside the flow of script execution. Examples of common things that are part of script execution but not necessary to the rendering of the response to the user might be spam scanning, statistical analysis, email notification sending, processing input data, etc. Also included is an equally distributed cron mechanism to remove single servers as a point of failure for scheduled jobs.
There are a lot of terms I like in there like fast, distributed, horizontally scalable, scheduled. It could probably benefit from robust and fault tolerant. Any others?
Anyway, this crontab-like system for PHP scripts is an essential part of our WordPress.com infrastructure, and I’m really excited to see it open sourced!
Check out code.trac.wordpress.org for other pieces of our puzzle that don’t have pretty project pages.
Interesting development today in the blog publishing space with the announcement of Melody and the Open Melody Software Group.
Melody is a new WordPress competitor — bring it! 
Based on Movable Type Open Source (MTOS), Byrne Reese writes “[the project's] focus initially is consciously not about features, but rather upon laying the groundwork through a well-documented set of processes by which future features and contributions can be made.” to live up to it’s tag line “Community Powered Publishing”.
The tag line seems to directly take aim at Movable Type for not being community powered, though in interview Byrne suggests that may be part of the overhead of Movable Type being an enterprise product.
From my position looking over the fence, I’m sympathetic to how the Movable Type community has suffered since “in 2008 [when] the hyper dedicated Movable Type product manager, Byrne Reese, was laid off from Six Apart”. Sure, the MT community isn’t just that one person, but he sure was a catalyst and one of the only open channels to the inners of Six Apart. Since then there doesn’t seem to have been anyone there for the developer community, or for me, as a member of another project, to collaborate with. Even Byrne’s own recent email to the MTOS-dev list asking “Who is the lead engineer of MTOS?” went unanswered. Here is that email:
“I hate to ask such a seemingly odd question, but I have recently had questions I wanted to address to the lead engineer of MTOS — offlist, but am honestly not sure who that might be right now. Who is the best person to address questions about governance and process to? Is there one?”
Mark Carey writes today on mt-hacks.com:
“Over two years ago, Six Apart, the creator of Movable Type open sourced the code for the core Movable Type application. While its was an exciting and bold move, the announcement and product naming choices were confusing to many — the differences between Movable Type Open Source and the Movable Type Commercial product and closed source add-ons sold by Six Apart weren’t easy to grasp, and some even disputed the newly open source nature of core application.”
Although Six Apart promised that they would continue “fighting for openness” when they announced “Open Source Movable Type ” at the end of 2007, Melody is now the hope for a Movable Type-based openly developed product. The Open Melody FAQs includes:
“The community created Melody out a shared passion for Movable Type and a shared desire to see it flourish as a platform. We felt that the best and quickest way to achieve that goal was to create a product in which the community was inherently entrusted with a greater degree of control over its direction, communication channels and roadmap, and rewarded with more transparency and a greater sense of belonging.”
Serdar Yegulalp writes “To see a new way for the same framework to be improved, and to allow for feedback and suggestions that stem from my own use, is deeply heartening”
I’m very interested to see how the source code flows. The greatest gift of open source isn’t the right to fork, but the ability to merge.
Wih founding members and leadership including the likes of Byrne, Tim Appnel, Jay Allen , and Jesse Gardner, Open Melody is off to an incredible start. ((By incorporating as a US non-profit there commitment is beyond doubt — if only in surviving the painful process that the WordPress Foundation has recently come out the other end of.)) The web site looks great, and they’ve chosen open and friendly development tools.
What is good for blogging and open source is good for WordPress, and Melody seems very good for both:
If you love blogging or open source, then Melody needs our love, participate! (hence this post)
Although a camera with auto focus and video would be nice, and I can imagine myself playing with the compass, the iPhone 3G S doesn’t seem particularly compelling — likely why the only name change is the addition of an S. The S is supposedly for speed, and although I do like things faster, better, stronger, I haven’t found the iPhone 3G that slow.
Much of the rest of bang of the 3G S will be available to current iPhone customers as part of the OS 3 upgrade.
Oh, the promise of better battery life is really tempting, but the original promise of the iPhone 3G’s battery life was completely bogus, so why would I believe the 3G S’s numbers. I’m still considering buying a battery sled or external battery.
Besides, because iPhone owners were required to sign a 3 year contract when it came to Canada, it will be another year before existing Canadian customers can get reasonable “subsidized” pricing. “Rogers/Fido Social Media Guy” Keith McArthur confirms here.
The good news is Kieth says “tethering included free in data plans of 1GB or more until at least the end of the year.”
Kieth does through down the gauntlet “@dasnutz Canada is a very different market than US.” in response to Jason Wilkes “@keithmcarthur why is it that Rogers wants us to sign up for a 3 year contract, yet in the US it is 2 years? Greed…”.
The problem I have with Keith’s claim is Canada stands part from many countries in allowing three year phone contracts. Challenge accepted fellow Canadians? Time to take it to our legislators?
I know Micheal Geist continues to rise to the challenge by appearing two weeks ago before the Standing Committee on Transport and Communications to discuss the state of telecommunications in Canada:
“Remove consumer barriers – Restrictive long-term contracts and the possibility of copyright legislation that could prohibit consumers from unlocking their cell phones make it harder for consumers to move between providers. Other countries place caps on long-term contracts, caps on overpriced roaming charges, and reject legislation that stops consumers from unlocking their phones.”
I’ve seen some reports lately that “WordPress is blocked in China”, including some Mashable articles. To clarify, it’s WordPress.com that is blocked, not all sites that run self-hosted WordPress.
Mashable’s “China Blocks Twitter (And Almost Everything Else)” seems to suggest that the block relates to the 20th anniversary of Tiananmen massacre on June 4th. That may be the case for the other major web publishing and social networking sites, but WordPress.com has spent much of the time since the beginning of 2006 blocked by the Chinese government.
It’s an incredibly frustrating, sad situation.
In “Blogging guru chips away at Great Firewall of China” my boss Matt Mullenweg shares:
After some discussions, Mullenweg realised the site would be allowed back online if he agreed to block certain words or topics and give up information to the Chinese communist government about users.
“I started thinking about the DNA of the company,” he said. “That sort of company is not one I would wake up every day and feel passionate about working in.”
The site remains blocked, although Mullenweg, unable to suppress a giggle, points out that the official Chinese line insists it is freely available.
There was a break in the blocking around the time of the Beijing 2008 Olympic Games, but that ended with the games. That was the longest time I know of when people could consistently access WordPress.com from across China.
Part of the Chinese government’s approach seems to be to sometimes allow western hotels access and other specific points — likely to deceive Westerners and cause confusion.
There does not seem to be a reliable way to automate detection of WordPress.com being blocked, regardless of what tools might promise. I’m not surprised that http://greatfirewallofchina.org/ gave up. This is the message on the site’s homepage:
“Because of the ever stricter measures of censorship China imposes on the Internet, the team of www.greatfirewallofchina.org at present can no longer vouch for the reliability of its test tool. We have therefore decided to take the test tool offline.”
Herdict <http://www.herdict.org/>, a project of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University, seems to be a novel, survey based approach to find out which locations are blocking or censoring web sites.
The tool of choice to let people dodge surveillance is Tor <http://www.torproject.org/>. Please consider your own safety and technology expertise before using any such tools. Reporters without borders <http://www.rsf.org/-Anglais-.html> seems like an excellent resource if you are considering reporting from a dangerous place.
Monday, June 8th Update
A reliable source in China shares that Twitter is back. The same source also shares:
Specific blockages do appear to coincide with major events, like those in Tibet last year and the recent anniversary, but are also part of general and ever-changing blanket censorship.
The Twitter blockage is really the only new story of the last week (apart from 5 second delay foreign television news blackouts) but the news media wanted to turn it into a larger story, including the Wordpress angle.
Wordpress has been blocked for years now. Youtube has been blocked for the last 3 months. Twitter went done last week.
While the dates for the last two occurred at the same time as sensitive periods or events, I think both are more about controlling new forms of communication and networking than the particular events. Censorship in China is generally a one-way street with periods of activity ramping up around specific times. I think of it in the same way tax auditors get busy around tax season and government ministries around budget time. The difference being once a site is blocked by thePublic Security Bureau (PSB) here in China, it is very difficult to get it unblocked; given the public security connection in an already opaque closed-door administrative system. A good analogy is trying to get someone off a no-fly list in a bureaucratic security system that lacks transparency.
Domestic blogging sites are heavily controlled and censored (though in an ad hoc way). Chinese video sharing sites are coming under increasing regulation and many believe it was only a matter of time before Twitter, as the newest uncontrolled networking site, was shut down.
Open source project hosting has long been a topic that interests me. I stopped recommending venerable SourceForge.net some years ago, as it’s proprietary stack (open source prior to 2001) became crufty and fell behind some of the newer and more agile offerings.
Well, I think it’s time to revisit.
I received an email on Tuesday from the “SourceForge.net Team” with the geeky and lame title of “SourceForge.net feature deprecation upcoming: forums, DocManager, TaskManager, Diary/Notes”. Deprecated should be deprecated from email subject lines, as should negative sounding email subjects.
The meat of the email is the second half (emphasis mine):
…
We will provide an easy-to-use migration path to move the data to the provided replacements. We will also provide dumps of this data in case
projects want to do something different with their data. Additional information on how to obtain or migrate your data will be provided when the
timeline is announced, in a future mailing.The following applications are due to be deprecated, replaced by high-quality Open Source applications we have in our Hosted Apps offering:
* TaskManager will be replaced by TaskFreak!, dotProject and Trac
(tickets).
* DocManager will be replaced by MediaWiki and Trac (wiki).
* Discussion Forums will be replaced by phpBB.
* Diary and Notes will be replaced by WordPress.To solicit your feedback on how the migration should be handled, and alternate options you would like us to consider, we are running a survey
for the next 30 days for the user base of each of these applications. For links to the surveys, please see our Site Status post at:
http://tinyurl.com/q3g8o3
Trac and WordPress (really!) are two of my favorite open source web applications. And all of the applications in that list are highly regarded.
It’s fantastic to see SourceForge getting back to open source — ironic, no. It will be interesting to see how active they are in particulating in those projects. I dont’ think I’ve seen any SorceForge team members participating recently on WordPress’s Bug Tracker (Trac).
It’s also fantastic to see SourceForge engaging their community by posting this on a WordPress powered blog and also using surveys to solicite feedback about the migrations and the tool choices.
I would love to find out how long this change has been in the works and what people made it happen.
I also notice that SourceForge’s own documentation is now in a trac wiki. Wow, as well as Subversion, you can also use either Mercurial or Git.
The SourceForge team has done an incredible amount for open source, and I’m excited to reconsider using SourceForge.net again to future projects.
Only two more weeks until WordCamp San Francisco 2009. I can’t wait!
This is the original WordCamp. Every year has been fantastic! There is no other event that brings so many of WordPress’s elite together.
They’re friendly people to boot! Thankfully, the elite are welcoming and generous with their time, knowledge, talent and bad jokes (puns). It’s a great learning environment.
The best kept secret about WordCamp is that the speaker line up includes many technology and web luminaries – Matt Cutts, Philip Greenspun, Tim Ferriss, Tara Hunt to name a few of the incredible speakers.
Can you believe it is near free — the $25 cost doesn’t even cover the cost of the food. Thank you sponsors!
Even if WordPress wasn’t your thing (shame!), if you’re in the web, it should be a must attend event. It’s a great event for all bloggers and anyone publishing online.
There is also an after party celebrating the sixth anniversary of WordPress!
And Sunday, we’re hosting a barcamp-esque WordPress developer day:
…expect more hardcore geek content like heavy WordPress performance optimization, BuddyPress internals, an intro to Erlang, a guide to secure coding, WordPress-as-CMS discussions, and more. If there’s a topic you’d like to lead start thinking about it now…
There are only 64 spaces left for WordCamp, so sign up now! (Already 536 people have registered.)
I hope to meet you there.
Budd Family helping at Genius Bar WordCamp SF 2008, as seen at http://central.wordcamp.org/
“Stop starting with hardcovers” eloquently argues Pat Holt. Many people respond on BoingBoing how much they love hardcovers. I don’t care if with the few years publishers have left that they keep starting with hardcovers, as long as they start with the paperbacks at the same time. I like to read in bed — comfortably. I don’t like feeling like a book is a sacred tome.
Lately, forwards and prefaces in non-fiction books have been bugging me. Like credits at the beginning of movies, forwards and prefaces are seldom executed well, and almost always too long. Also, the person writing the forward always makes sure to get in a plug for their own books or work.
Worse is an author’s preface telling you what you need to know to read the book or how to interpret it. The Head First technical books each start with a verbose section on how to get the most of the books. The material in each is near identical, but I feel required to read it in case it is not. If you are explaining, you likely have already lost.
If you must have it, move it all postface.
The best of books leave me wanting more, but they never include recommendations of what other books to read or resources to consider. I find this ironic considering the covers are filled with ego stroking recommendations of the book by her peers. Even if your opus, no book is an island.
And why are none of the recommendations by people that I can relate to? People that have been moved or raised by the book?
Today, I’ve been trying various password managers — seems like thousands of mostly complete solutions, all lacking polish. One of them was JPasswords, after I tried it I found a lone file in my home directory, jpws.ini.
Before iCal supported CalDAV, I tried Calgoo Connect to sync my Google and 30 Boxes Calendars. I laughed as it’s menu icon was the only colored one. Bonus was the “Calgoo Connect” folder in my home folder filled with logs and a “data” subfolder.
Java has come a long way from the “write once, debug everywhere days”, but still almost any Java application I try, poop in my home directory.