23 hours hours ago, WordPress 4.3 was released. It’s already had 1.6 million downloads and counting. For a look at what’s new in this version you can watch the quick video above, or check out the blog post.
Category Archives: Asides
Do you know someone who is an amazing developer or designer? Someone who is passionate about helping people? An awesome lounge manager? Or maybe that person is you. Automattic is hiring for a variety of positions, and for all except two you can live and work wherever you like in the entire planet. There are also a number of other benefits; the main downside it’s a high performance culture and expectations are extremely high. Automattic hires the best folks regardless of geography, and we are especially looking for people right now outside of US timezones.
Artisanal Water
Many of my friends know how obsessed I am with different types of water, from Badoit to Hint Water (yum) to De L’aubier. This definitely hit close to home.
Speaking of San Francisco, did you know for 20 years, the military secretly tested biological/bacterial agents there, delivered through the fog?
I had great BBQ in San Francisco last week at a new place called Smokestack. The brisket was on-point, and competitive with anything I’ve had in Texas. This review in the SF Chronicle covers things pretty well, if you’re hankering for some great Southern food in SF this is the place to check out.
Mobile web and mobile in-app behaviour are not binary. When users are in the facebook app, they spend a tremendous amount of time accessing the mobile web through facebook’s own in-app browser. The same for twitter and others. We enter social apps for discovery and then access the mobile web while still in-app. It is a mistake to conflate time spent on the mobile web with time spent in a traditional browser.
Amen. Tony Haile of Chartbeat: A correction around the death of the mobile web.
Avis GPS
After an amazing WordCamp Scranton on Saturday I was heading to a friend’s birthday on Long Island on Sunday, a few people were surprised I had flown from New York and said driving took about the same amount of time when you factor in all the airport hassle.
I Google Mapped it and it did look like it was only 5-6 hours from Scranton to where I was going. Being a born and raised Texan, I love a good drive, and I probably haven’t had a proper road trip since my sister’s birthday a few years ago when we went up Highway 1. I’ve also never driven on the East Coast, and it seemed like there were some really pretty parks and lakes in between Scranton and Long Island so I ended up going to the airport anyway because that’s where the rental cars were.
I like Avis. They try harder. 🙂 One thing they do that’s pretty cool is sell decent cables, USB wall chargers, and car chargers for a cheap price right at the check-in desk. (I always carry my own car charger, this is my current pick. It’s super-handy in Ubers as well.) Amazingly though they still try to give you one of those Garmin GPS units that’s worse than your smartphone in every possible way. I’m sure it’s a money maker, otherwise the only reasonable thing to do would be provide a smartphone mount (or have one already set up in the car) rather than saddling people with an archaic, non-networked navigation device that has no idea about construction or traffic.
I ended up going to a Walmart that was nearby to pick up a car mount (price, $12) that ended up being a life-saver for the trip. I also believe that every person in tech should visit Walmart at least once a year, and spend time in their technology section. It’s good to understand and see how people who don’t live for technology every day interact with it. It’s eye-opening, and it’s handy to know what’s in stock in case you need 50 feet of ethernet at 4 AM.
Dropping the car off in Manhattan, it looks like they charged me $20 for a GPS which I don’t even have, so now going to need to sort out both the fee and the “missing” GPS system.
tl; dr: Smart car rental companies should ditch the GPS, provide smartphone mounts instead.
Teach when you are filled with wonder, before you become a boring expert.
— Mark Pilgrim
An incredible story: Tech Firm Ubiquiti Suffers $46M Cyberheist. Notable for two reasons: I love Ubiquiti’s products, especially their Unifi line, and I’ve never heard of phishing getting so much from a single victim.
Hong Kong Morning
The upside of jet lag, like Om discovering the streets of Paris, are enjoying parts of the day you might not normally be awake for, like a beautiful sun rise. Here’s a time lapse I made of the Victoria Harbor in Hong Kong taken from the incredible view I have in my room.
Sometimes truth is worse than what you would imagine: Smoking Gun: MPAA Emails Reveal Plan To Run Anti-Google Smear Campaign Via Today Show And WSJ.
There were amazing applications for teams and cities to host the inaugural WordCamp US, a concept originally floated at the State of the Word last year. It was very hard to make a choice, but can now announce that the birthplace of the United States, Philadelphia, will host the first WCUS on December 4th–6th. They will also host it in 2016, but no dates have been chosen yet.
Having it the same place two years in a row allows us to keep logistics a set variable and really focus on the rest of the event in the second year. I also want to use it to facilitate experience transfer: We’ll choose the 2017 + 2018 host city in between the first and second event, so that team can volunteer on the ground the second year Philadelphia hosts it to learn from their experience. Hat tip: Cool graphic by Andrew Bergeron.
There is No Such Thing as a Split License
There’s a term that pops in the WordPress community, “split license”, that we should put to rest. It’s sloppy at best, misleading at worst.
First, some background. WordPress is under a license called the GPL, which basically says you can do whatever you like with the software, but if you distribute changes or create derivative works they also need to be under the GPL. Think of it like a Creative Commons Sharealike license.
In the past people weren’t sure if themes for WordPress were derivative works and needed to be GPL. In 2009 we got an outside legal opinion that cleared up the matter saying that the PHP in themes definitely had to be GPL, and for CSS and images it was optional. Basically everyone in the WP community went fully GPL, sometimes called 100% GPL, for all the files required to run their theme (PHP, JS, CSS, artwork). The predicted theme apocalypse and death of WordPress didn’t happen and in fact both theme shops and WordPress flourished, and best of all users had all the same freedoms from their themes as they got from WordPress. It was controversial at the time, but I think history has reflected well on the approach the WP community took.
As I said the PHP has to be GPL, the other stuff can be something else — many people started to use the term “split license” or “split GPL” to describe this. The problem, especially with the latter, is it leaves out the most important information. “Split GPL” doesn’t say whether the theme is violating WordPress’ license or not (maybe it’s proprietary PHP and GPL CSS), and more importantly doesn’t say what the non-GPL stuff is, which is the part you need to worry about! It also makes it sound like a split license is a thing, when all it really means is there are different licenses for different parts of the work. If something has a “split license” you have no idea what restrictions or freedoms it provides.
If someone decides to have different licenses for different parts of a theme they ship in one package, it’s probably worth taking a few extra words to spell out what the rights and restrictions are, like “GPL PHP, and a restrictive proprietary license for all other elements included with the theme.” This is really important because if you’re a smart WordPress consumer you should avoid proprietary software, there is always a GPL alternative that gives you the rights and freedoms you deserve, and probably is from a nicer person who is more in line with the philosophy of the rest of WordPress. Vote with your pocketbook, buy GPL software!
At an airport in Frankfurt airport security asked famous jazz saxophonist Joshua Redman to prove it was a real instrument.
https://twitter.com/Joshua_Redman/status/619144413369909248
Hilarious! I can’t find any recordings of Joshua playing that classic bebop song, but here’s a Charlie Parker recording:
How Sleep Deprivation Decays the Mind and Body. Crazy story.
and now you, who are the father of letters, have been led by your affection to ascribe to them a power the opposite of that which they really possess. For this invention will produce forgetfulness in the minds of those who learn to use it, because they will not practice their memory. Their trust in writing, produced by external characters which are no part of themselves, will discourage the use of their own memory within them. You have invented an elixir not of memory, but of reminding; […]
A few thousand years ago Plato predicted how Google would make us less able to remember things.
Hat tip: Chris Rudzki.
I haven’t been following the Hacking Team story too closely. If you’re the same, here’s a quick catch-up: an Italian company that sold hacking tools, often to questionable governments, had all of their internal company data including emails, source code, everything released. Engadget has the best summary I’ve seen so far of how they got hacked, which was apparently done by a hacker vigilante who did something similar to another organization called the Gamma Group. The Intercept also has a good look at some of the more egregious behavior. Bruce Schneier calls this new trend Organizational Doxxing and considers its ramifications.
Neil Gaiman Speech at University of the Arts
“Make good art.”
As was just announced, I’m going to make a not-surprise appearance at WordCamp Scranton next Saturday. It’s their first year doing a Wordcamp and I was able to find some space in my schedule to swing by in between business meetings in New York and Philadelphia, so very much looking forward to meeting the Scranton community.
https://twitter.com/WCScranton/status/619508207283625984
I used to think that paired opposites were a given, that love was the opposite of hate, right the opposite of wrong. But now I think we sometimes buy into these concepts because it is so much easier to embrace absolutes than to suffer reality. I don’t think anything is the opposite of love. Reality is unforgivingly complex.
— Anne Lamott
From her great book Bird by Bird.