Web 2.0 company or Star Wars character?

We’ve been taking breaks at night here in La Paz by playing a bit of Wii Tennis, which is one of the best multiplayer games ever. Barry decided to organize a double-elimination tournament where everyone had to link to the winner. That ended up being me and so they’ve requested this post so they can properly pingback their entries to this one.

I almost forgot to blog it here, WordPress 2.1 is out and everyone should upgrade. We have shiny download buttons. It has been downloaded 52,216 times in about 24 hours. Now the real fun starts in development, for example I just checked in Atom API support to the 2.2 trunk, and other goodies around APIs and syndication.

Wikipedia has decided to nofollow all external links to help offset people spamming the service. In theory this should work perfectly, but in practice although all major blogging tools did this two years ago and comment and trackback spam is still 100 times worse now. In hindsight, I don’t think nofollow had much of an effect, though I’m still glad we tried it.

Anatomy of MySQL on the GRID. “A number of these users came running to (mt) Media Temple with the promise that their applications, despite all of their deficiencies, would be accepted and not turned off. These users are radically different, by orders of magnitude, from anything we had previously analyzed or benchmarked.”

Is it important, or is it the color of the bikeshed?

WordPress Limited Edition Pillow.

WordPress 2.1 Release Candidate 1.

For the Spanish speakers in the crowd, noted blogger Enrique Dans has switched to WordPress. The switch was done by Blogestudio, whose Luis Rull was my host in Seville. They’ve done something neat with redirecting old links on Blogspot, I hope they publish more about that. (I wonder if they could use Blogger’s new Custom Domains feature to make it automatic.)

In defense of simplicity.

Some Hands-On Time With the iPhone.

WordPress Ultimate Gamer’s Pack, supports Wii, PSP, and DS Lite.

Since everyone is talking about Macs today — did you see the iPhone — I thought it would be a good time to pose to my highly intelligent readers a question that has vexed me for months. I have a Dell 24″ monitor attached to a Mac Mini, my preferred configuration for this is vertical (you can turn the Dell on its side) but I can’t find the setting in OS X that lets you put the screen into portrait mode. Any tips? Update: It was right under my nose. System Prefs -> Displays -> Rotate. Thanks to Daniel and Barry.

One thing I’ve found in the past year is there is sometimes a huge disconnect between people who make noise on blogs, or might have impressive blogs themselves, and productivity in the real world. It’s unfortunate, because it makes it that much harder to find good folks.

Tomorrow I’m going to be on the web radio show Net Income. That entry mentions my Wikipedia page, which oh-my-goodness has an awful picture.

FlatPress is like WordPress but using flat files instead of a database? Hat tip: Lorelle.

Michel Camilo & Tomatito – From Within, from a fantastic CD given to me by Luis Rull when I was in Spain. It starts off slow and then becomes really intense, a beautiful song.