Stock icons geared toward CMS use from the great folks at Firewheel. I wish we could use something like this in WP. Don’t buy them for us! Read the comments.
Houston, We Have a Problem
Well, who would have thought that installing a keyboard and mouse could be so difficult. After my first few words, and using the mouse just long enough to start to really like it, everything has crashed and burned. One of the questions burning in my mind was if I could use the keyboard a,nd mouse with my existing Bluetooth dongle, partly because I don’t want to have to carry anything extra around and mostly because the “laptop adapter” for the Microsoft Bluetooth receiver sticks out from the laptop at least 4 inches. I plugged my old dongle in, and nothing special happened. Not surprisingly, the Bluetooth keyboard and mouse stopped working. I went into the Bluetooth software that came with the dongle to see if I could “discover” them and pair them somehow so they would work. The good news is that it was able to detect both the keyboard and the mouse. The bad news is it had no idea what to do with them. Any attempt to discover their services turned up blank.
I should have known that the operative word when dealing with Microsoft is “proprietary.” I wasn’t entirely dismayed though, I was ready to stomach carrying around the ridiculously long MS Bluetooth dongle just to be able to use the very cool Explorer Mouse; I like buttons and this mouse had them in buckets. But being able to dial up to the internet through my cell phone (T68) using Bluetooth is even more of a must, so I decided to try that with the ugly Microsoft Bluetooth adapter. It worked, beautifully. Many times when dealing with the current Bluetooth software implementations I’ve felt like it was back to the old Windows 3 days, when the interfaces were clunky, buggy, unresponsive, and ugly. The wizard that set the phone up was elegant and felt like a real part of the operating system. In fact it was apparently, but we’ll get to that in a minute.
Anyway the phone works just fine with the MS adapter, however I couldn’t get it to talk to either the mouse or keyboard now. I thought maybe this is just a software glitch, so I went through all the regular motions. Reboot, retry, un-install, reboot, reinstall, reboot, try again, uninstall other Bluetooth software, reboot, try again, reinstall, smash mouse to smithereens against head. Okay, I made that last one up, but I did all of the others, perhaps more than listed. At this point I was thinking it must be a simple hardware issue, so I changed the batteries in both devices to fresh ones that I was sure worked, and tried again. Still no go, it simply wouldn’t detect either of the devices.
Having isolated nearly every variable I could think of, I decided to try it all out on my desktop. So I went through the first step of installing the software, and it tells me that for it to work it has to have Windows XP Service Pack 1 installed. Life is too short.
As a last ditch attempt, I decided to try and pair either of the devices with my phone. I think the keyboard might have paired, even though it probably wouldn’t have worked anyway, but I’ll never know because of the proprietary and non-standard way which the keyboard and mouse pair works only with the Microsoft software. Which only works on Windows. The latest version. With the latest Service Pack. (Did I mention it un-installed the special software for my touchpad on the laptop?)
What I suspect happened is something about the way the old non-Microsoft Bluetooth adapter tried to interface with the devices messed something up, and that is what’s causing them to not work. But at this point I really don’t care.
Maybe Logitech will come out with something nice to counter this, and maybe then I’ll try it, but right now I can only think of disadvantages to using Bluetooth HIDs, such as no current BIOS supports it, it tricky, it takes up two of your seven possible Bluetooth devices, doesn’t offer anything extra, the range isn’t worth it. Also on the range note with my Logitech Cordless mouse (the original model) I was able to walk all the way across the house into the garage, and it would still move the mouse on the screen, but I think that may have been an anomaly. Still, how far do you need to go?
So I have packed everything up from the batteries to the cruddy documentation, and tomorrow I will attempt to get store credit and buy something that actually works. Oh joy.
Renting is for Suckers
Misconception: Renting is for Suckers. In Houston the market was such that it seemed silly not to buy. Here in San Francisco real estate is definitely another world, and I plan to rent for a while even though it does limit what you can do with the space in some frustrating ways.
Beyond Consumer Culture
[P]sychological evidence suggests that is is close relationships, a meaningful life, economic security, and health that contribute most to well-being. While there are marked improvements in happiness when people at low levels of income earn more (as their economic security improves and their range of opportunities grows), as incomes increase this extra earning power converts less effectively into increased happiness. In part, this may stem from people’s tendency to habituate to the consumption level they are exposed to. Goods that were once perceived as luxuries can over time be seen as entitlements or event necessities.
By the 1960s, for instance, the Japanese already viewed a fan, a washingmachine, and electric rice cookers as essential goods for a satisfactory living standard. In due course, a car, an air conditioner, and a color television were added to the list of “essentials.” And in the United States, 83 percent of people saw clothes dryers as a necessity in 2006. Even products around only a short time quickly become viewed as necessities. Half of Americans now think they must have a mobile phone, and one third of them see a high-speed Internet connection as essential.
Emphasis mine. From the State of the World 2010: Transforming Cultures. They also have a nice, WordPress-powered blog. (A necessity.) You can see the context of the quote in Google Books.
Getting Dark
Boston is so weird, it’s only 4 in the afternoon and it’s already almost dark.
Comment Spam Kills Sites
The Daily Whim asserts that MT Plus Comment Spam Equals Dead Site. Pretty scary stuff.
SxSW Pool Team
There’s going to be a pool (billiards) competition at SxSW this year in Austin benefiting charity and I’m thinking about putting together a WordPress team for it. Are you a world-class pool player, WordPress user, and going to be in Austin the night of Sunday March 15th? Leave a comment saying why you should carry the WordPress banner and I’ll pick the two best to represent the WordPress community at the event.
Automattic Grand Meetup 2014
Although Automattic is a fully distributed company with most people working from home in 197 cities around the world, we think it’s really important to meet in person as well and we bring the entire company together once a year. This year we went to Park City, Utah, and were blessed with amazing weather all week. We were right at the base of a mountain so there were beautiful trails for hikes and runs and gorgeous views no matter what direction you looked.
There were all sorts of activities people did throughout the week from paintball to skydiving to a Magic: The Gathering tournament (I played for the first time in about 15 years) and morning running classes every day at 7 am. I went to a Crossfit class with about 15 colleagues. My body is sore but my heart is happy.
I’m really grateful that I get to work with the people I do, and on the problems that we work on together. It’s far from easy, in fact each year brings new challenges and I make mistakes as often as not, but it is worthwhile and incredibly fulfilling. A few hours ago I gave a closing toast and teared up looking around the room. So many folks that give their passion and dedicate themselves to jobs both large and small, visible and unseen, to help make the web a better place. A web that we want to live in. Here’s a vignette from when we were taking our annual family photo, it’s a goofy and crazy group of incredibly unique individuals that I hope to know and make things with for many decades to come.
French Phrases
After reading about Andy’s adventures I decided I better Google up a French phrasebook for study on the flight. The first hit looks like it would get me in to a little more trouble than I’m looking for. 
Lockergnome Happy Ending
Chris Pirillo has floated another Lockergnome redesign that embraces web standards and looks good to boot. I couldn’t be happier. Here’s Chris’ post on the matter:
Boo-yah! I’m going to keep nagging Jason until he applies this weekend’s test code site-wide. No legacy tags, beyotch! Oh, and… “This Page Is Valid XHTML 1.0 Transitional!” I’m not sure if I wanna play with a fixed-width or stick with the variable. Doesn’t look great on anything less than 1024×768, but those folks are in the minority. Hey, I got it to look fantastic in all the major browsers on all the major platforms – that’s gotta count for something. Props to glish for the guidance. So, what did I use for my editor? Notepad, baby. Metapad, actually (the best clone around). Thanks to everyone else for the virtual ass-kicking; you accelerated the inevitable.
Most of you will be happy that it looks like a page from this century, but I know some of you are wondering about the markup. It’s decent. Eric Meyer actually covered the Lockergnome debacle and their redesign in his part of the panel on CSS and said it suffers from “classitis” — using too many class declarations. Example:
<ul class="menulist">
<li class="menuitem">
<a href="http://www.emtec.com/mailbell/index.html?lgnm" title="POP3/Hotmail and IMAP Email notification and mail preview">Mailbell - be notified about new email</a>
</li>
<li class="menuitem">
<a href="http://www.vypress.com/" title="Instant messaging and conferencing for LAN">Vypress Chat</a>
</li>
<li class="menuitem">
<a href="http://www.emtec.com/pyrobatchftp/index.html?lgnm" title="Perform automated and unattended ftp file transfers via scripts.">PyroBatchFTP - Scripted FTP v2.08</a>
</li>
Instead of explicitly addressing the menuitem class you could just use the CSS selector .menulist li which would apply to all list items under an element with the class of menulist. I forget the name for this type of selector, but it’s the most useful technique I use daily in CSS.
What’s great is now we are discussing what Lockergnome is doing well and how they could tweak it to make it better rather than wondering how the hell they went wrong. I commend the group at Lockergnome for doing the right thing.
Previous articles on the same subject:
- Invalid Gnome — the post that started it all.
- Transitional Layouts — Dave Shea comments.
- Why Go Backwards? — Paul Scrivens comments.
- More on the Gnome Regression
- Almost April — April fools joke?
- Lockergnome Reverts — Simon Willison comments.
- It’s Worse Than You Can Imagine
- Code is Food — 70 comments and counting.
- Lockergnome Critique — From Paul.
J.K.Rowling’s Site
Compare the flash and text-only versions of J.K.Rowling’s Official Site. Separate but equal, right? Hat tip: Jakob.
Yahoo, Microsoft, PHP
If Microsoft were to buy Yahoo, I wonder if it would have an impact on PHP?
Wired Joins the Family
I wanted to take a moment to welcome Wired.com’s 12 blogs to the WordPress family! (They just completed their switch from Typepad.) I thought this completes my prediction from January that WP would reach over 40% of this list of top blogs, but when I went to the Technorati 100 today everything has changed! First, they only show ten blogs at a time now (lame!) and second there appears to have been huge churn on the list,so we’ll have to wait until next January to do an apples-to-apples comparison.
WP Meetup and WordCamp 2007
March 9th in Austin we’re going to have a WordPress meetup at BarCampAustin. I heard the fighting robots caught on fire so there’s no competition at that timeslot anymore. Also, you heard it here first, WordCamp 2007 will be on 7/21 and 7/22 in San Francisco.
WordPress.com now accepts payments via Bitcoin, possibly the largest internet service yet to adopt it. I find Bitcoin intrinsically interesting as a crypto-currency, but it also might open up our premium services to folks who couldn’t use them before. It’s been fun to watch the store engine of WP.com evolve behind the scenes. In other WordPress.com news, there are now verticals for municipalities and bands, and we compiled an incomplete list of best-selling authors on WordPress.
Hosting
Announcing the new WordPress hosting page. Update: I forgot to thank Chris Messina for helping out with the design of the page.
Groupon WP
Groupon has been in the news lately as a rumored 6 billion dollar acquisition target, and of course their blog is powered by WordPress. On that fact alone I’d say, go for it Google!
WP Cache
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.
Trying Shangri-La
So I’m going to take a whack at this “Shangra-Li Diet” thing I’ve read about on several blogs, most notably here. I’m not having a weight crisis, but I think 5-10 pounds would put me in a healthier class for my height. I bought the book and read it this morning, it basically just repeats itself a lot and seems to have a lot of filler, but it may be useful to some folks as a motivator. You can get all the important details from various blogs. Mostly I’m interested in it to see if the mind hacking really works, and I’m willing to endure Glenda making fun of me about trying something out of a diet book for the sake of you guys ;). Apparently I don’t own any sugar, extra light olive oil, or a scale, but I’ll post updates as I get going. Update: The author has a WordPress blog.
It Is Time
The live redesign has started. There will be constant and possibly dramatic changes to this site’s structure, layout, and design until it is done. Check back often and feel free to comment at any stage of the process.