Asleep at the Wheel of Creative Destruction. Umair Haque’s thoughts on venture capital and the current crisis.
Erlang, PHP, WP
Persistent PHP processes in Erlang/OTP. “It’s so easy, in fact, that I now use it to debug WordPress functions from within Erlang.”
Sonos Tip
If you’re obsessed with Sonos like I am, a nice MacOS utility is the Menu Bar Controller. Hat tip to Mike Tatum, who happened to be the gentleman who convinced my parents it was okay for me to drop out of college and move to San Francisco to take a job at CNET. Mike’s now at Sonos and in October arranged for some top execs at Automattic to go to Santa Barbara to meet with their peers at Sonos, and Patrick Spence and I did a joint CEO town hall that was broadcast to both of our companies. It was I think fascinating for both sides because of a shared passion for craft, design, culture, and execution, but our companies are in no way competitive, so it allowed for a lot of transparency. I learned a ton, and I think that kind of sharing is what increases the mimetic evolutionary speed of companies.
Atoms are hard! I think I’ll stick mostly to bits.
Night in Shanghai
A night in Shanghai: Dinner at TMSK followed by jazz at the Cotton Club.
Spam SEO
How David Beats Goliath
Annals of Innovation: How David Beats Goliath, from Malcolm Gladwell. A really enjoyable read. Hat tip: Raanan.
Writing Useful Software
GPL FUD
Michelle Atagana from Memeburn posted an interview we did when I was in South Africa: Matt Mullenweg on how open source is democratising the web.
November NYC Events
I’ll be chatting with Liz Danzico at the School of Visual Arts in New York, New York when I’m there in November. I’ll be speaking in NYC three times that week: WordCamp New York, SVA, and at Web 2.0 Expo. Would love to see my Yankee peeps while out there. 🙂
Bruce Schneier on The Public-Private Surveillance Partnership. Packed with good links as well.
Plugin Mistakes
Bruce Schneier has a remarkably clear essay on Our Newfound Fear of Risk which could as easily be about corporations, finance, or relationships as it is about its chosen topic. It reminded me a lot of one of the better books I read this year, Antifragile by Nassim Taleb.
Dave Pell on building the NextDraft platform. Spoiler: It’s WordPress, but a really cool implementation of it across a blog, iOS app, and newsletter. I wish more publishers worked the same way.
Twitter API Support
You can now Post and Read WordPress.com via Twitter API, which was a pretty fun project. Everything doesn’t work yet because in some ways we’re overloading the Twitter API but it’s 90% of the way there to something really cool, and some relatively minor adjustments to the clients like Seesmic and Tweetdeck can make this a really nice experience.
WordCamp Delhi, India
Attending the WordCamp in Delhi, India with Om.
KRNFX Get Lucky
Very cool looped version.
As written about by the Electronic Frontier Foundation and Techdirt, Automattic is fighting back against two cases where we feel the DMCA has been used abusively for censorship and bullying. Read more about it here.
Why Hanukkah and Thanksgiving Will Never Again Coincide, with lots of fun calendar geek information. Colbert has a funny take too.
Have you seen the famous Automattic / WordPress shuffleboard? That and more in this excellent profile and interview by Debra Winter in SOMA Magazine.