Thirty-Two

Essays

My thirty-second birthday has arrived after a whirlwind year, probably my most challenging and rewarding. It went faster than any year I can remember, absolutely flew by. Luckily it was capped at the holidays with a precious few weeks of downtime in Houston. Now I’m back to work in Cape Town and just finished a lovely day of great food, wine, and conversation with colleagues who are here for a meetup starting tomorrow.

Since I started tracking, 2015 was the first year that I traveled fewer miles than the year before, clocking in at 398k, down 27k. (398,553 miles, 111 cities, 20 countries.) In 2016 I’m going to try and get that even lower. It was also one of my best years for blogging on this site, with the most posts (252) I’ve made since 2008, and the most words (24,605) since 2005. (If anyone is curious, I wrote about 60k words over the same time period in Automattic’s internal P2s.) In a weird omission, though, it’s the first year since this site started in 2002 that I didn’t post a single gallery of photos. I’ve developed a mental block around processing and posting the fancier pictures, even as I carry hundreds of gigabytes of them around the planet several times over. Hopefully this is something I can get past in 2016.

I ran 163 miles in 2015, more than I did the year before, and I think that trend will continue. Last year I talked about habits and small actions, and a daily todo list with some small items to nourish the mind, soul, and body has become central to my routine. I dyed my hair (grey) just for fun and also to show the rest of Automattic they could too, how you look doesn’t matter one iota. My restaurant quest has continued, and I’ve now been to 38% of the current top 50 list.

More so than before, I really don’t know what’s around the corner. While there is a lot in motion, there is even more still being defined and started. There’s freedom in the groove, to reference Joshua Redman’s great album, and I’m getting a lot more comfortable with ambiguity and the faster pace of life in general. More than ever, I consider myself incredibly lucky, so it’s exciting to make the most of the opportunity that the volatility, love, loss, glory, failure, inspirations, and setbacks that 2016 will bring.

All birthday posts: 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39, 40, 41.

Dubai Timelapse

Essays, Video

A month or so ago I got a tilt-shift lens (Nikon PC-E Micro Nikkor 45mm f/2.8D ED) and one of the first things I wanted to try was interval shooting to make a stop-motion like tilt-shifted video like these awesome ones from Australia photographer Keith Loutit. Haven’t quite figured out how to make them look that cool yet but here’s one of the first efforts, taken from the Burj Al Arab looking down at its car entrance at night. Watch how the lights come in and out of focus, and how fast the cars are at the intersection. The video is available in full HD if your computer can handle it just toggle it in the top-right and go full-screen.

Big thanks to Michael Pick of WordPress.tv fame for doing all the video magic here.

Ning to BuddyPress

Asides

JJJ at BuddyPress has some Helpful Resources for Ning Users. I’ve seen smaller startups rush to fill the space left by Ning’s announcement they’re getting out of their free tier, but honestly if a company with $120,000,000 in funding can’t figure that business out, I wouldn’t hitch my horse to a company with $5-6M. It’s better to get a $10/mo hosting account you know will be around forever and install BuddyPress and have complete and total control over your network, from the domain to the source code.

Out of Commission

Asides

I’m going to be a bit slow or absent on blogging and email for a few days because I’ve injured my left hand and my thumb is in a splint which makes it pretty tough to type. (One-handed mostly.) There is a ton I want to write about, but the doctor said pushing it too hard might aggrevate the injury, so it’ll mostly have to wait. To keep things interesting around here I’ll send a WP.com invite to whoever comes up with the best story about how I did it.

Rita Update

Uncategorized

Thanks everyone for your kind words. I just got through to my Mom on her cell phone, which has been tricky because the circuits are always busy. I’ve also been told people are having trouble getting to my cell which is a Houston number even though I’m on the other side of the country. Anyway she and my father are still in traffic in Houston, after leaving over 15 hours ago. When I drove from Houston to San Francisco 15 hours of driving was about 60% of the way to California. They were extremely lucky to get some of the last gas from a station before it closed, it seems everyone’s cars are dying because none of the gas stations along the evacuation routes have any fuel. They had to wait in line for 2 hours to get gas.

Thirty-Four

Asides

I am very thankful and grateful to have made it through the past year, which was a really special one personally and professionally. I learned to open myself up more to relationships, continued aspiring to be clear and direct with yellow arrows, and worked alongside some incredible people to tackle the biggest and hardest problems, whether it was getting plugin and theme support on WP.com or the start and growth of Gutenberg.

I read a lot more books, traveled 337k miles between 91 cities, spent more time in Texas, kept my health in a good balance with weight training, running, and a better diet including several months of 16/8 intermittent fasting, while still getting in some excellent meals with friends and loved ones (up to 58% of top 50 list). As I’m solidly in my mid-thirties now, and I want to continue to live by: all things in moderation. I consider what I do with WordPress and Automattic my life’s work, and hope to continue it as long as I’m useful. Some days I pinch myself.

Thank you to all of you on this journey with me. I am imperfect but trying my darndest, and I’m lucky to have friends and colleagues doing the same.

All birthday posts: 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39, 40, 41.

Facebook McAfee

Open Source

Facebook is offering its users a 6-month free trial of McAfee and promoting it heavily, and even forcing people to run a scan before they can reactivate a hacked account. They’re “not aware of another free Internet service that takes this much responsibility for helping people keep their accounts secure.” (Didn’t Google promote McAfee through Google Pack at one point?) I think this is a laudable step, more security is intrinsically good, but I have to suspect this is more about revenue than security. They will probably make many millions of dollars from their users installing or buying McAfee as a result of this.

Modern versions of Windows include free tools like Defender which are just as good and appear to have less of a performance impact on the computer. But if they really wanted to have a long-term impact on desktop as a vector for attack on web services I’m surprised they didn’t start, sponsor, or promote an Open Source equivalent of McAfee. This seems like a space very well-suited to address with an OS tool in the digital commons, much like a Windows anti-spyware equivalent of SpamAssassin, with self-updating rules and a completely transparent process.

AJAX and CSRF

WordPress, , ,

When working on some new AJAX features for bbPress and WordPress we’ve noticed that AJAX requests don’t seem to send HTTP_REFERER values. We check referrers as one level of protection against cross-site-scripting, or XSS, so when they’re not set we aren’t able to use that value. How are most people using AJAX protecting against XSS? It seems the same things we’re doing to make things easily accesible in a dynamic fashion are also opening new vectors for attack.