Today, six months in the making, we finally had our Home Depot corner kitchen cabinet installed.
Painful Home Depot Experience
1
Just Start Pumping
The chest compressions move enough oxygen to the brain, because the oxygen is already in the body. Studies have shown CCC to be more effective than traditional CPR, possibly because it is much easier to remember and administer, and anyone can do it. Just start pumping.
Marshall Brain, “How Continuous Chest Compression saves lives“, The Seattle Times, Oct 5th, 2010
The video notes not to use this on children under eight, or the rare case of respiratory failure or drowning.
WordPress does one thing very well…
…allow everyone to easily publish on the Web!
And to make that happen, WordPress must be an easy to develop and design web publishing environment.
Stop! This is comparing apples and oranges. [WordPress] is a honed, refined blogging product that does one thing very well, whereas Drupal is a flexible, extensible CMS plus a huge set of tools for building websites, web applications, and integrating with other tools.
By “jam – Senior Wr….”, “The time is right for Drupal products“
It’s frustrating that competitors are still trying to pigeon-hole WordPress. The satisfying irony is that I expect WordPress’s use for non-blog sites is growing faster than the competitors.
Sure, we have biases. We are biases towards familiarity, usability, and not stressing people — letting people be awesome!
A leading example of what you can do with WordPress 3.0 CMS features is what CBS, with the help of VOCE Communications, have already created for nearing 200 CBS Radio and CBS Local properties. Sites like:
There are countless other examples, but a few have been cataloged at wordpress.org/showcase/tag/cms/
Atheists Have Thought a Lot About Religion
“These are people who thought a lot about religion,” [Alan Cooperman, associate director for research at the Pew Forum] said. “They’re not indifferent. They care about it.”
From Mitchell Landsbert’s Los Angeles Times article “Atheists, agnostics most knowledgeable about religion, survey says“, Tuesday, Sept 28, 2010.
(Hat tip Nick Momrik.)
The Machine Punishes You
Ultimately, however, the user isn’t concerned with the causes of bugs, only that they happen. And when the bugs cause problems or crashes, users stop using new features, or the product entirely. “It teaches you shyness—[users] are afraid to try things because the machine will ‘punish you,’” [Wil] Shipley said.
‘Wil Shipley: “we tried to do too much” for Delicious Library 2‘, by Chris Foresman, September 1st, 2010
I like how Wil describes a shyness people develop with computers from their frustrations and bad experiences.
Big Brother Indoctrination at a School Near You
Thankfully, not all schools:
Some educators have rejected [Turnitin] and other anti-cheating technologies on the grounds that they presume students are guilty, undermining the trust that instructors seek with students.
Washington & Lee University, for example, concluded several years ago that Turnitin was inconsistent with the school’s honor code, “which starts from a basis of trusting our students,” said Dawn Watkins, vice president for student affairs. “Services like Turnitin.com give the implication that we are anticipating our students will cheat.”
Trip Gabriel, “To Stop Cheats, Colleges Learn Their Trickery, July 5, 2010″
WordPress Activate Theme Action
There isn’t yet a WordPress activate theme hook. In the last week, it’s come up twice where WordPress.com Hosting VIP partners wanted some code to run once on theme activation.
It’s not an unusual scenario for our customers to create a new version of a theme, install it separately, and then activate it. Often this also allows reverting to the old version of the theme if something unexpected happens at launch.
In this scenario, it’s often easy to check for the existence of a new option, migrated, or other seed data, but sometimes you want to do something like:
global $pagenow;
if ( is_admin() && 'themes.php' == $pagenow && isset( $_GET['activated'] ) ) {
// When theme is activated this code runs.
// Still be defensive if you need to be, and check if
// your baby is already born
}
Patents, Innovation Tax
So, what is [Intellectual Ventures] actually doing? Buying up loads of patents and licensing them to companies who calculate it’s not worth the fight is patent trolling 101. Yet the scale they’re operating on puts them on new ground, and opens new opportunities. It seems obvious to get corporate investors on board by promising them immunity from patent claims. With enough patents you stop trying to license them one-by-one and just tax each industry at some non-negotiable rate. No doubt they have more tricks I haven’t even thought of, but these potential devices really do make them a new breed of Super Trolls.
…
Now, I don’t really care if one company leeches off the others. But if they want to tax software, they have to attack free software otherwise people will switch to avoid their patent licensing costs. And if you don’t believe some useful pieces of free software could be effectively banned due to patent violations, you don’t think on the same scale as these guys.
Rusty Russell, “Superfreakonomics; Superplug for Intellectual Ventures.“, July 7th, 2010
I’m also opposed to software patents.
Watching Patent Absurdity: how software patents broke the system is time well spent.
Related Posts:
- My own Great Artists Still Steal, March 4, 2010
- VC and principal of Union Square Ventures, Fred Wilson has a lot of great insights and updates on patents.
ShrimpTest Starts Rocking the A/B Testing
Mitcho has posted a 0.1 version of ShrimptTest, the A/B Testing Plugin for WordPress, and a brilliant video showing the results of his month working on it:
The plugin is already looking fantastic Mitcho style, and he’s just getting started!
Go to http://shrimptest.wordpress.com/ to download, try it out, and provide feedback.
iPhone 4 Left Hand Pain
It was pointed out to me that the iPhone 4 isn’t living up to “iPhone with One Hand Comes Naturally” with it’s problems with dropped calls when held in the left hand — don’t worry, it was a lousy connection anyway.