Blogging may be light as I’ll be at the Web 2.0 conference and the surrounding activities the next few days. Since I couldn’t afford to attend it last year (a couple of grand is high for a college kid in Houston) I’ve been really looking forward to everything this year. I’m part of a workshop on “Open Source Infrastructure” at 9:45 AM, Wednesday. If you’re going to be at the conference I would love to meet you, so please don’t hesitate to introduce yourself!
Category Archives: Asides
Web 1.0
I got a pass to Web 2.0 this year (Open Source Infrastructure workshop) but I’m also going to check out Web 1.0, which looks like the most promising conference of the year.
Nano Scratches
I got an iPod nano a week or so ago and I’ve been very happy with it ever since. I even got it engraved with one of my favorite jazz quotes because I thought that this would be a device I would keep for a long time. However it has gotten pretty badly scratched, and I haven’t been too hard on it. Kind of a bummer. Update: Just to clarify, I’m fairly hard on electronics but I haven’t treated this iPod any different then the last one and yet it still looks pretty bad. It scratched when I wiped it with a microfiber cloth.
Small World
A few hours ago I was walking out and I ran into Adam Curry in the lobby of my building. I had forgotten that the “Curry Condo” is upstairs from me! We caught up for a few minutes and exchanged numbers, it sounds like Podshow is doing some pretty interesting things and it’ll be good to have Adam in SF.
Webzine Approaching
Webzine is this weekend and looks like it’ll be a blast. It’s only 22 bucks (!) but I heard they might sell out so it’s worth ordering your ticket online soon. I’ll be on two panels, Making Media with Open Source Tools and “Blog Wares Dance Off,” the latter of which I promise not to dance. (Too much.)
Stop Spam Better
Got enough testers for now. Thanks! I’m looking for a few people who do (or used to) get a lot of comment spam who are willing to turn off all of their other spam prevention methods and try a new plugin I’m testing out. Drop me a note on my contact page with details about your blog and how much spam you get. I’ve been dogfooding it for the past few weeks and it’s been working great.
Simon on Dvorak
Simon Willison is switching to Dvorak. I switched years ago and haven’t looked back since. People claim it’s a hoax, but they haven’t used it over a period of years. My QWERTY chops are still pretty good too, mostly thanks to the Treo. It’s not hard doing both, it’s just like learning a new musical instrument.
Entrepreneurs
Tulane University
Tulane University in New Orleans lost their servers and website in Katrina, and on their new temporary site they’re using free, open source software to keep people updated. Note: If you’re trying to contact someone, it’s best to go to Tulane’s official website.
Blogspot Spam Cleanup
Next blog now with less spam, which is great to hear! However I was spending a few minutes every night on nextblog flagging blogs (like the other Matt) in the hope that it would help them out, does this fix the problem (spam blogs) or just the symptom (showing up in nextblog)?
Photolog Fixed
To the (literally) hundreds of you who wrote in about the broken photos the past few weeks, I’m happy to say that the photolog is back online. It broke because while 95% of Gallery works fine with register_globals off, apparently some bit of code somewhere doesn’t. If you haven’t been to the photolog in a while there are some fun pictures from Dallas, Seattle, and New York.
Bar Camp Wrap-up
As I recover from the rush that was Bar Camp I just wanted to thank everyone who was a part of it, because I think the success of the event was directly because of all the amazing people who came out. A special thanks to SocialText for offering the venue that brought so many people together.
BBS Slide
At the Blog Business Summit the next few days we’ll have a graphic in the slideshow that they have on the screen during downtime. Check it out. It’s care of the extremely talented Khaled.
BAR Camp
Blog Business Summit starts today, but what I’m really looking forward to is BAR Camp this weekend. I think this is the start of something very exciting.
Odeo Microformats
Odeo adds support for Microformats, which I consider to be more important than their subsequent post on funding. 🙂 More about microformats »
Yet another pinger
YAPOMR, or yet another Ping-O-Matic ripoff. I’m seeing at least one of these a week now. “1,004 pings served.” The road from a thousand to 268,879,563 (the current PoM count) is very rough, I wish them the best. Everyone is trying to get in this space now, but each is like an open proxy for ping spammers.
In Dallas
I’m going to be in Dallas this weekend for a wedding, any suggestions for things to do when I’m in town, besides avoiding melting from the TX heat?
Mosaic Photography
The famous Mosaic jazz label has some amazing photography for sale though it seems a bit pricey. They do have some smaller Francis Wolff prints for $75 though.
EMIC Clusters
Has anyone used any of EMIC’s cluster systems? I hate it when websites make you contact them to get any useful information. Defeats the purpose of the web.
Turing Upgraded
Just a service announcement: for those of you on the Turing server the memory has been upgraded so it should be more stable now.