Attending the WordCamp in Delhi, India with Om.
Alexandra Tremayne-Pengelly writes for the Observer, WordPress Founder Matt Mullenweg Is ‘More Energized’ Than Ever Amid WP Engine Battle.
KRNFX Get Lucky
Very cool looped version.
It’s kind of a sobering thought that mobile communications, the cornerstone of the modern world in both developed and developing regions, pivots around software that is of dubious quality, poorly understood, entirely proprietary, and wholly insecure by design.
Thom Holwerda writes about the second operating system hiding in every mobile phone.
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.
Marco Arment on Long-Form content.
Boom & Deepseek
What an exciting time to be alive. I was hipped to Deepseek by Andrej Kaparthy’s tweet the day after Christmas, it was clear then that something big had happened and that it was truly open source and open weights (not this fake Llama stuff). It’s been fun to see the rest of the world catch up to it, and how radically accessible and deployable these models will be for people to hack on. I don’t have any comment on public markets or stocks.
The other super inspiring thing today was Boom’s first supersonic flight. It’s worth watching the video. We’re 4-5 years away from halving flight times with supersonic flight. In that same timeframe we might have something even more dramatic from SpaceX, like Houston to Tokyo in 30 minutes. Really cool to see the spirit of entrepreneurship and innovation around all of these things. It’s tempting to get distracted by drama (WPE and legal battles), but there’s such freedom and joy in just continuing to build, to engineer, to solve problems. I’m so grateful I get to do so every day with such incredible colleagues at Automattic.
Socket.IO 1.0 is available with a number of new features, including binary support. Socket.IO is one of the most useful tools in the Node.js world.
Last week in the New York elections my friend who was running for Lieutenant Governor, Tim Wu, lost. However, the New Yorker has a great look at how close the race was. As John Cassidy puts it, “The strong showing by Teachout and Wu was a victory for progressive voters who warmed to their message about tackling rising inequality, political corruption, and corporate abuses.” Hat tip: Cody Brown.
Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind. On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone. You are not welcome among us. You have no sovereignty where we gather.
John Perry Barlow’s classic A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace.
XML Content Sink
“The XML content sink is non-incremental, so, all XML documents start laying out only after the entire content model has been constructed.” That includes XHTML documents sent with application/xhtml+xml. You just can’t win. Hat tip: Henri Sivonen.
No Recording
Well it looks like I won’t be recording with the Calvin Owens Blues Orchestra in two weeks. The person I was replacing in the band showed up to the rehearsal and it turns out there had been a misunderstanding with he band leader. I’m still going to be joining the band in a few weeks, but I won’t be on their upcoming CD.
Sterling Party
Bruce Sterling on his post-SxSW part. I was there, but now feel like I missed a lot. Hat tip: Joe Clark.
The CEO of Automattic worked with the co-founder of WordPress directly, mediated by the head of the WordPress Foundation. Matt Mullenweg said the meetings were very productive.
As inside-baseball WordPress-focused April Fools go, this one is pretty funny: WordPress to be bundled in Jetpack with mission to power 50% of the web.
Seattle Meetup Location
Okay so it looks like the best place in terms of size, price, and location of those suggested is The Pike Pub & Brewery which sounds like a fun, laid-back place perfect for a meetup. Thanks to Scott and Jane for suggesting it. Still going to meet at 1 PM. It looks like there are going to be some great people attending, so it should be a lot of fun. Oh, and the tag for today is “wordpressmeetup“. 🙂
Adam Trachtenberg
Stewart Ugelow writes in that “Adam Trachtenberg, eBay’s technical evangelist and author of O’Reilly’s
“Upgrading to PHP 5”, has switched to WordPress.”
Geek Lunches Dangerous
Scoble got in trouble for the very long geek lunch/meetup last Saturday in Seattle. He also relates a funny story from the afternoon. We had about 15 people come and go during the meetup and it was a lot of fun — thanks to all who came out.
Pulse of Freedom
“The Pulse of Freedom is a site published by the protesters at Martyrs’ Square, Beirut, from a tent city.” This is an inspiring story: “A group of Web masters, graphic design artists, writers, and photographers stayed up all night for several nights in a row putting the Web site together.” They chose WordPress. “As far as I’m aware this is the first Web site of its kind anywhere in the world. The leaders of a democratic revolution are openly blogging about their experience from the center of the action.” Echoditto writes about their part in Blogging from Beirut. “I am writing this post from a tent city in the Martyrs’ Square in central Beirut, a place which is filled with the energy and excitement of a burgeoning democratic movement.” Hat tip: Mike Carvalho via email.