Category Archives: Personal

Life updates, reflections, and everything that doesn’t fit neatly into another category.

Offline

Personal

It was not long ago that we measured online time in minutes. You knew exactly how long you had been online in a given period because you were billed for the time you were connected. The first computer game I bought—One Must Fall 2097 by Epic Megagames—was downloaded on a Compuserve account (it was paid for online; ecommerce and delivery in 1994!) and cost about $10 over its price in usage charges. Connection was a luxury.

Now, I have no idea how much time I spend online. It would be easier to tally up hours I’m commuting, sleeping, and (sometimes) eating and subtract that from the number of hours in a day, if I wasn’t scared of the results. I just vaguely remember what it was like to count the online hours instead of the offline ones. I’d like to recapture that magic, and it’s a beatiful night outside.

Sting

Music, Personal

I’m in the midst of finals, so there is not a lot of time for extra-curricular writing here. Things have still been busy. Most notably, I am now a member of the Web Standards Project, and you can see where my bio will eventually go. A friend in San Francisco told me the other day that whenever I come up in conversation it’s as “Photo Matt,” partly because no one can remember my last name. This was exciting to hear because it puts me a single word away from one-word celebrities such as Sting, Prince, Common, Madonna, Ludacris, Seal, and Poe. I suppose I’m in the less-exclusive two-word celebrity club with the likes of Snoop Dogg, Puff Daddy (P. Diddy?), Big Boi, and Andre 3000. Right. The reason I think it’s all funny is that the filename of my bio is photomatt.html, breaking the convention of every other bio on the WaSP site. I guess Molly forgot my last name.

Once again, sorry for the unexpected break in posting. As my schedule settles things should return back to normal, whatever that may be. Besides, all the action is on WordPress anyway, which is fast-approaching its version 1.2 release. Version 1.0 was a big deal and made a lot of necessary architectual changes that we really needed to move forward, but I think 1.2 is the one that’s going to make waves. As a welcome side-effect of WordPress’ recent surge in popularity, there has been a lot more activity with volunteers sending in patches and working on documentation, both of which are sincerely appreciated. The official chat channel has been busy too, #wordpress on irc.freenode.net. I currently have two bots running in the channel, wpbot and pressbot. Wpbot is based on the interesting Mozbot package, which has great logging features and a few other nicities, but just wasn’t what I was ultimately looking for. What I really wanted was JiBot, and that’s what pressbot is. It was more involved installation than Mozbot—I had to download and compile Python, SQLite, and a number of Python packages—but it has been totally worth it. I have been doing a number of development-related setups lately, especially on Windows, and I can’t wait until I get a free moment to write about them. My productivity and organazation has improved several-fold as a result of a few pieces of well-connected open-source software.

0wn3d

Meta, Personal, Tech

I’m not sure if I’m one of the “six prominent webloggers” Brad mentions in his post Gmail major security flaw, but when I got a mail from him saying that I was guilty of exactly what he described, I thought it would be a good time to change my secret question and password. I guess he was really anxious to get a Gmail account. He could have asked though, I let Adam poke around mine.

My thoughts on Gmail? It’s really well-done in terms of how the interface works. It’s faster than Thunderbird for common tasks and I could see using it full-time. But I wouldn’t even consider it until they provide a good way to import and export everything. Email is the lifeblood of everything I do, and I’ve been burned too many times to trust it to a third party—even if it’s non-evil Google. When I put my address out there in a previous post I was pleasantly surprised to get emails from a number of people I’d never corresponded with. Unfortunately soon after that the spam started coming in. It’s more than I get on my “real” account, but I can’t expect a beta product to compete with a finely-tuned SpamAssassin installation and 22MB bayesian database.

Speaking of passwords, a few months I switched to using 8+ characters of random junk for everything, and different passwords for everything. You can use the random password generator to get a few of your own. Throw in SSH tunneling, a great VPN through my university, and consistent rotation schedule and I’m feeling pretty secure. (Knock on wood.) I just need a fingerprint scanner.

In other news, the place of residence has been spruced up a bit with surround-sound speakers, a cut-glass-hanging-thingy, and some additional lighting. Pictures forthcoming.

Finally, the mosaic thread currently stands at nearly 669 comments, and soon there will be more comments on that post then there are posts on this site. I don’t generally talk about traffic in public because I think it’s bad taste, but the numbers this month have been intimidating. In terms of bandwidth photomatt.net used a few dozen gigabytes last month, mostly in photos. So far this month the usage stands at 305 gigabytes for this domain alone and I’m at a loss for words, except to say it’s nice to know I have that sort of scalability. I think I’ll go back to posting pictures of my cat.

Update: Final usage for April on photomatt.net was 511 gigabytes.

23rd Page

Personal

<sheep>bahhhh</sheep>. Here’s the deal:

  1. Grab the nearest book.
  2. Open the book to page 23.
  3. Find the fifth sentence.
  4. Post the text of the sentence on your blog along with these instructions.

Depending on how you count it, my fifth sentence is either “Today they perform strenuous verbal feats to escape that fate.” or “Watch them wriggle through TV interviews without committing themselves.”

A cookie to the first person to guess the book. Hint: the author’s initials are W.Z.

In other news, Dougal hints at a secret. Don’t click. The Zeldmans finally announce their new joy.

Notables

Personal,

Some WordPress-powered blogs that have caught my eye recently:

Bill Day
“Bill Day is a Staff Engineer & Technology Evangelist at Sun Microsystems as well as Founder & Technical Guru of Day Web Development.
Bill’s J2ME Archive, writing, and speaking have helped drive J2ME adoption to hundreds of millions of devices and empowered tens of thousands to write applications for Java enabled handsets and PDAs.”
AxxLog
Joe Clark’s accessibility blog. Focusing lately on the (lack of) accesibility of a PVR.
Matthew Thomas
The same mpt, new domain. I don’t know if WordPress is the ultimate weblogging system yet, but it seems to work well for him. Matthew has given some brilliant input into the options interface which is going to be in WordPress 1.2.
Kimberly Blessing
Interesting gal I met at SxSW, Kimberly is a standards evangelist and developer at AOL.
Binary Bonsai
Great design and content. Most sites find a good design and stick with it. Micheal pulls out a brand new one just as good or better than the last every month or so. Michael is the guy who taught me how to make my XP desktop look decent.
Lars Holst
An very well-done WP site. Check out the style switcher.
Image Safari
Nicest WP photoblog I’ve seen yet. Reload for entertaining random header graphics.
Rebel Pixel
Excellent look and layout. Very interesting link styling. Nice linklog.
Debian WordPress package
Not a blog like the others, but an amazing development. Type apt-get install wordpress at your Debian command line and it’s there, automatically setting up MySQL, PHP, or Apache as needed. The packager says “I’m working on some scripts to make Debian automagically configure your blog on the next release of the package.” Awesome.

I hesitated to even start a list because this really is the very tip of the iceberg. I could write a post every day for the next 3 months highlighting someone doing something great with WordPress, and in July there would be hundreds more.

I know of a couple of projects in the oven and I can’t wait for them to (re)launch. If you’re doing something interesting or innovative with WP, let me know. Maybe I can even help out.