Standards Jokes

Humor

You’ll either find this incredibly funny or find it incredible that anyone could find this funny. From the HTMLDog Dogblog:

Q: Why did the XHTML actress turn down an Oscar?
A: Because she refused to be involved in the presentation.

Q: Why was the font tag an orphan?
A: Because it didn’t have a font-family.

Q: Why do CSS designers have too many children?
A: Because they employ lots of child selectors.

Q: Why was IE5’s 3-metre wide cell in the insane asylum smaller than IE6’s 3-metre wide cell?
A: Because the width of the cell included the padding…

Q: Why was the XHTML bird an invalid?
A: Because it wasn’t nested properly.

There are a few more in the comments over there. This made my day.

WP Cache

Scaling, WordPress

I’ve linked it before, and it’s worth doing again: WP Cache makes WordPress perform as well as a completely static-file site, able to handle hundreds of requests per second without breaking a sweat. It also maintains with the conventions that were introduced in Staticize for making selective portions of a page completely dynamic, regardless of caching. Think how much performance would scream if combined with something like lighttpd. We’re going to be looking at rolling in this advanced caching into the core in the future.

The Internet measures everything. And I am a slave to those measurements. After so many years of pushing much of my life through this screen, I’ve started measuring my experiences and my sense of self-worth using the same metrics as the Internet uses to measure success. I check my stats relentlessly. The sad truth is that I spend more time measuring than I spend doing.

Fantastic read over at Tweetage Wasteland : I Don’t Care if You Read This Article. Or put another way “Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted.” Hat tip: Mark Riley.

Cease and Desease

Meta, Personal

I just got a “CEASE AND DESEASE” order by another braindead person thinking that WordPress, or “WORLD PRESS” as the email says, has anything to do with sites that run it. (The reference to “WORLD PRESS” means he must have known about my plans for world domination.) The most interesting of these was when I was contacted by the FBI about a fugitive on the run that had a WP blog under an alias.

WP2 Thoughts

Press, WordPress

WordPress 2.0 “Duke” is available! Like 1.5 when it first came out I expect it will take a few months before the full implications of this release are realized. There are some surface changes (see 5 little things I like about WP 2.0) that still need some polish in places, but I think the underlying architectual changes are really rock solid. Interface changes are easy to iterate on in future versions. WordPress.org also has a rocking new design from Matt Thomas, and there will be some more action there in the coming months.

Microsoft CodeCamp

Events, Google, Microsoft, Video,

I’m still in Vienna, but this Saturday morning I’ll be at Silicon Valley CodeCamp speaking on How to say no. My Mom would be so proud. Extra: my keynote from Blogtalk is online at Google video. You may or may not be able to tell, but I was fighting keeping my eyes open (it was 5 AM for me). Next time I speak overseas I’m going to factor in an extra day ahead of time to adjust my sleep fully.

New York and Durham (Houston?)

Education, New York, Personal

Two reminders for upcoming appearances: This Saturday I’ll be presenting a 24-hour art collaboration with Evan Roth at Seven on Seven at the New Museum. On Monday I’ll be in Durham, North Carolina to speak at Duke University. If you’re interested in the latter, leave a comment and I’ll make sure you get the details. We don’t have a ton of room but I’d like ma.tt readers to be able to attend. After that I’ll be in Houston briefly if anyone wants to do a meetup.

About.me and Wakemate

Audrey, Links

Today has been a very exciting day. First off, About.me has been acquired by Aol, as good friend Tony Conrad writes about on his blog. A great deal on both sides, I think Aol got a steal and a great team here. Second, one of Audrey’s earliest investments Wakemate has finally shipped their first version, which I’ve been using the past two nights and has been great. (I’m averaging 60 so far.) Reserve your Wakemate here.