Scaling Megaservices
Great interview of the guy running Hotmail, he talks a lot about the scaling of megaservices and some of the concerns of managing tens of thousands of boxes. What would you give to hear a similar interview by his counterpart at Google or Yahoo? Fascinating read.
Random Paris
Reading, hot dog, Hermes windows, Restaurant Oscar, funny sweater.
Bloggies
The bloggies are now open, and for the first time ever WordPress is a nominee. However there is very good company like Blogger, Flickr, and Delicious. Flickr! My fav thing about the bloggies has always been the discovery aspect, finding blogs I had missed somehow. This year contains quite a few gems and I’d recommend going through everything and exploring a few you haven’t seen before.
WordPress in its Terrible Threes
Mike Little points out that WordPress is three years old today. 🙂 Who woulda thunk it? Mike and I met in person for the first time just a few weeks ago, here’s a picture Khaled took of the event.
BlogTalk Reloaded
I’ll be keynoting at BlogTalk Reloaded in Vienna, Austria on October 2-3rd. Hopefully I’ll meet a few WordPress users while I’m over there.
How Facebook is eating the $140 billion hardware market — I’ve always said that open source eventually dominates every market it enters, and with enterprise hardware it’s in the very, very early stages but this article is chock-full of examples of the economies of scale when companies start collaborating on shared problems. The problem is one company’s inefficiency and wasted cost is another company’s revenue. Cool to look at in the context of yesterday’s post on government.
Google Irony
John Battelle – The real irony…. Alex Bosworth – Google’s Doublespeak. (Isn’t Alex their CTO’s brother? That’ll make for an interesting Thanksgiving dinner discussion.) I loved Google not just because of their great technology, but because they sold me a dream. Something bigger and better than just another company. Something inspiring and with soul.
The Parisian taxi drivers are partly protesting against economic regulations in cities where taxi drivers have to pay for expensive medallions while Uber drivers do not. But, in a larger sense, they’re actually protesting against our increased impatience.
Om Malik: The Long History of the Fight Against Uber.
Interview with John Battelle Video
Free Sun Server
I put in an application for a free Sun server to try out for either WordPress.com or Ping-o-Matic, depending on when/if it arrives. Everything we’ve done on WP.com has been Dell thus far, and honestly they’ve been pretty good with the exception of one box that they’re going to replace soon. Our biggest DB server (a Dell 6850) does north of 300 queries per second, but it weighs as much as me and uses a crazy amount of power, which is expensive. Of course as more and more of our infrastructure becomes distributed, high performance boxes don’t matter as much.
Features Don’t Matter
Why Features Don’t Matter Anymore. I think similar things when I hear “But CMS X has hundreds more features than Y! Why don’t we have more users?”
Front Row
WOW. The new Front Row remote control feature is amazing. I can’t believe this hasn’t gotten more coverage. If I had a TV, this would make a fantastic digital hub. Actually it looks pretty darn good on a regular monitor.
Dell vs. Sun
The Sun Doesn’t Shine for Me, or why Dell is kicking Sun’s butt. I can attest to a similar experience, except that I gave up long before Jason did.
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.
Akismet for Movable Type
We’ve released a Akismet for Movable Type plugin and the response from testers thus far has been very good. John Battelle blogs about it here: Akismet for MT: Death to Spam. Also check out this post by Jeff Nolan. “I was spending up to 45 minutes a day cleaning it up.”
bbPress Desmond
bbPress 0.8 “Desmond” Released! bbPress is starting to pick up the things we found worked best in WordPress.
Thomas Dolby, Hot Air, and Southwest
Tons of people have been writing in about some new WordPress blogs, so to roll them into one post: Thomas Dolby the noted musician has a new WP blog, a new conservative video blog from Michelle Malkin called Hot Air, and finally closest to my heart is Southwest Airlines new one.
Conventional RSS
Alex from Textpattern has started putting thoughts down on what we’re calling “conventional RSS.” It’s not a spec, profile, or anything like that. It’s just a documentation of the things we do in our RSS 2.0 feeds. There are some minor differences with what WP currently does, but at least in the beginning WordPress and Textpattern will have a shared set of conventions and assumptions.
XFS vs ZFS
Kevin Burton looks at XFS vs ZFS, and feels XFS is a better choice.