It’s not that the terrorist picks an attack and we pick a defense, and we see who wins. It’s that we pick a defense, and then the terrorists look at our defense and pick an attack designed to get around it. Our security measures only work if we happen to guess the plot correctly. If we get it wrong, we’ve wasted our money. This isn’t security; it’s security theater.
Bruce Schnier on why airport security is A Waste of Money and Time in the New York Times.
DHH writes at 37signals Stop whining and start hiring remote workers. Automattic does the same, except we use P2 for our projects and virtual water coolers, IRC for our chat, Skype and Google+ Hangouts for calls and screensharing, and pretty much never email. When people read these things about 37signals their first criticism is always “does it scale?” For Automattic it has to a hundred people and growing.
It is amazing Ping-O-Matic has handled as much traffic as it has thus far, but it really wasn’t conceived with these levels even imagined. It hasn’t had a good update since it was doing 20-30 reqs/second. Time to rip it out and start from the ground up. I’ll blog about it again when the new system is ready.
As I mentioned in the State of the Word this is the year we’re ramping up marketing. There is lots to learn and much to follow, but we have our first TV ads up in six markets to test. Each shares a story of a business in Detroit, and I actually got the chance to visit one of the businesses earlier today.
Someone just reported when they visit WordPress.org it tries to download a file instead of showing the web page. Can anyone recreate this?
People who know me know I’m a fan of LOLcats, well now they have a new book! (What a website, as they say in the South.) I got a review copy and it’s delightful, sure to bring a smile to anybody’s day.
I just upgraded to the new Adium after it reminded me that my version was 42 weeks old.
I’ve got a “Vote for Pedro” shirt on my chest and baby back ribs and Blue Bell ice cream in my stomach—life is good. I can’t believe how much I missed BBQ!
I’ll be at the WordPress meetup at Latinoware tomorrow (Saturday) at 17:00. I’m speaking earlier in the day at 11:00. Been around the conference today and been really impressed with the breadth of subjects covered and the number of attendees. Confused about the logo though. (Is South America tucked into Africa?) Se você fala Português passar esta sobre a sua audiência.
Had a cool opportunity to walk up the cable to the top of the the first tower of the Bay Bridge today with folks from the Bay Lights project. You walk right up the cable/pipe to the top, it actually wasn’t that hard. Once on top the vistas were amazing. I tried to grab some photos of the hardware behind the lights at the top of the cables. The top of the tower is 526 feet high, and 280,000 cars drive on the bridge every day, making it the second busiest bridge in the world. Guest photos by Lucas Saugen.
Khaled has drawn back the curtain on Shuttle. It’s a fantastic set of work by an exceptional group of people (Khaled, Michael Heilemann, Joen Asmussen, Chris J Davis, Joshua Sigar, Bryan Veloso). There are some pretty significant shifts in there so it’ll be integrated incrementally rather than overnight, and I also plan to test out things on WordPress.com first and watch usage to make sure none of our assumptions are too far off, but I think it’s safe to say that this is a pretty significant milestone for WordPress and we have some exciting months ahead of us. Everyone should thank the Shuttle team. (Note: There will be some ongoing design work as well, especially as new features are added to WordPress. If you’re a kick-ass designer who can juggle code as well as Photoshop, drop me a line.)
Good news! The links in Vanilla that brought the rats out defending them have now been removed by Mark at Lussomo. I applaud this decision to break the text link contract they were in and to put my money where my mouth is I just donated a thousand dollars from my personal account to the project.
Transforming Your WordPress into a Tumble-Hybrid, we’re halfway there. Now someone should do a few awesome Tumblr-like styles around it. Projectionist is the first I saw and a great example of the medium.
Adam Tow got some great photos at WordCamp. Update: Here are mine. See also:
What about mine? Not quite yet.
This is too crazy — Rosie O’Donnell of talk show fame has a WordPress blog in which she writes poetry-like entries daily that get hundreds of comments. (And the site is very snappy, this is why more and more high-traffic publishers are switching to WordPress.) It gets better — she’s also on Flickr. I feel like I just stumbled into an alternate universe where celebrities are using software I helped write. Hat tip: neiljmorrow via email.
As part of the re-vamp I’ve put together a 404 script that emails me whenever it’s called. This has certainly been an eye-opener as to the misguided traffic that this site gets. An email is so much different than just seeing the hits in your logs, and I would recommend anyone serious about maintaining a site do something similar.
There are a few links to my old curly quotes entry that link to a rather funky perversion of a fly-by-night URI scheme that has long since gone by the by. These links worked just fine until I deleted the file that was keeping things going, now it’s time to move things into the magic .htaccess file.
Let’s take a look at the URI in question:
http://www.photomatt.net/archives/m/200209?p=186
My first thought was to just plop latter part of the request and create a rule just for this link, as such.
Redirect Permanent /archives/m/200209?p=186 http://photomatt.net/p186
Didn’t work, never matched. Next try I decided to go for something a little broader:
RedirectMatch 301 .*p=([0-9]+) http://photomatt.net/p$1
Didn’t work, never matched. Some research found that the problem lies in the query string, and the Apache redirect directives don’t address the query string. So let’s give mod_rewrite a go:
RewriteRule ^.*p=([0-9]+) http://photomatt.net/p$1 [R=301,L]
Still no luck. (For those that wonder, the HTTP response code 301 indicates that the resource has been permanently moved. “Permanent” in the first try is just a synonym of “301”.) It looks like the magical mod_rewrite doesn’t match query strings either. Some more research turned up that while redirect doesn’t match or rewrite query strings, it does pass them all. So we are left with:
Redirect Permanent /archives/m/200209 http://photomatt.net/
Which, counter-intuitively, works. The ?p=186 on the end is just passed to the root of the site, which gives it to my index file which knows just what to do with it. I would like to eliminate the query string entirely and forward the URI to http://photomat.net/p186 but while that would be trivial in any scripting language I can’t nail down how to do it on the Apache or mod_rewrite level. So my options now are to add something to the global header to catch p=something query strings and redirect it, but I’d like to keep that file clean, so more likely is that I’ll start adding some URI management code into the 404 handler and generally make that file more sophisticated in general. We’ll see.
eBay has a new WordPress blog. Hat tip: Jonathan Dingman.
Blog Herald asks about WP plugging a commercial project, namely Akismet. One of the lessons I learned from Ping-O-Matic is that web services like this can grow far beyond what you anticipated, need a lot of attention, and can be expensive to maintain. (Akismet has to be really fast otherwise it bugs people and delays commenting.) You also have a social contract with all of your users to continue to provide a service they’ve all come to rely on. When Akismet first got started, I wasn’t at all worried about the technology — I was using it myself and it worked great. I spent most of my brain cycles planning out how the service could be economically independent and self-sustaining in the future, so it could thrive and provide a great service to the public without relying on charity. I had to balance this with my desire to just give everything away (as I usually do).
I’m happy with where it eventually ended up. The Pro-Blogger limit was set very high and the vast majority (over 99.9%) of people use Akismet at no cost whatsoever. I’m able to justify devoting my time to the service while still putting bread on the table and the larger blogger community can stop dealing with disgusting spam on their blogs. The technology has scaled incredibly well and even before the Yahoo deal Akismet had a bright future. Also the API and the plugin itself is completely open so people could clone the API or modify the plugin if they wanted. The service just hit its first major milestone, has been embraced by the development community, and I’m confident now that it will continue as a public service. I think it’s also providing something pretty valuable, as evidenced by the people who have been buying Pro-blogger licenses just to support it, not because they fall under the commercial terms.
Pictures from the party at the Automattic lounge. It got a little rowdy! If you recognize, please help caption using the “tag” feature on the photo page.