New Yahoo Search

Meta,

Yahoo has flipped the switch and is no longer using Google for their search. (Some technical details.) The question on everybody’s mind: Is Yahoo’s search better than Google’s? Yes. Why do I think so?

  1. Results are given as an ordered list, or <ol>, which is a good thing.
  2. It shows 20 results instead of just 10.
  3. You have an option by each result to open it in a new window.
  4. They are somehow detecting RSS feeds for sites that have them, and linking to them directly and also allowing you to add them to My Yahoo. They seem to have gotten my RDF file instead of my RSS 2.0 file, which is prefered, but no worries. I’ve been meaning to replace that with a 301 redirect lately anway.
  5. It is much better designed.
  6. But the best reason to use Yahoo? I’m the #2 hit for “Matt”. Yes, even ahead of that Drudge clown.

What? Were you expecting me to check for any other search terms?

A quick trip to MyCroft and you can make Yahoo your default search engine for Firefox. Easy as pie.

Top Emailers 2008, etc

Personal

As an update to last year’s post:

  1. Toni Schneider — 1,052
  2. Maya Desai — 826
  3. Mom — 659
  4. Raanan Bar-Cohen — 452
  5. Donncha O Caoimh — 424
  6. Barry Abrahamson — 386
  7. Mark Riley — 222
  8. Jane Wells — 218
  9. Ryan Boren — 200
  10. Andrew Ozz — 197
  11. Matt Thomas — 193
  12. Liz Danzico — 148
  13. Mike Hirshland — 144
  14. Heather Rasley — 139
  15. Joseph Scott — 129

I’ve expanded the list to 15. A lot of the same folks at the very top, but new faces in Liz and Jane from 2.5 and 2.7 usability cycles. Also three people on the list have changed their domain in the past year, just like I did. It must have been a year for that.

Also for fun here are some yearly posting stats courtesy of Alex’s queries:

Posts Avg. Words Total Words Avg. Comments Total Comments
2002 360 139 50,190 1 390
2003 429 168 72,359 3 1,287
2004 990 54 54,257 6 6,236
2005 624 48 30,090 9 5,963
2006 313 70 22,010 11 3,503
2007 334 60 20,267 17 5,919
2008 302 50 15,206 21 6,493

As you can see I’m doing fewer posts with fewer words than ever, but getting more comments. At this rate I’ll be down to 40 words per post next year. Yay brevity. 😉

Working on collating some travel / WordCamp stats.

WP Cache

Asides

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.

Houston, We Have a Problem

Uncategorized

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.

3.6 and State of the Word

WordPress

3.6 has been released and has a groovy video to go with it:

It’s been a busy week, WordCamp San Francisco 2013 went off without a hitch. Here’s the State of the Word presentation, which covered quite a bit of material and talks about the plans for WordPress 3.7 and 3.8:

And here’s the question and answer session:

There was a pretty good summary of the presentation in infographic form. A bit more about this next week, and some more announcements in store as well.

New Blackberry

Asides,

I talked Ryan into getting the new Blackberry 8700c, and he shares his thoughts. I got mine last week and I can honestly say it’s the (second) best phone I’ve ever used, and the best PDA. This is coming from the guy who founded the Houston PalmOS Users Group. Great screen, battery life, SMS and email support, and very intuitive UI. I also have a Blackberry 7520 (the one with GPS) and it’s a real clunker compared to the 8700. I’ve been recommending the 8700c to everyone I know. Now I just need to get SSH running on this thing…

Trying Shangri-La

Asides

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.

Beyond Consumer Culture

Asides, Quote

[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.

WordPress 19

Asides

Today is the 19th anniversary since WordPress’ first release, which is especially exciting for a number of reasons:

  1. The community put together an awesome site celebrating the occasion at wp19.day.
  2. We just had an awesome 6.0 “Arturo” release.
  3. Next week June 2-4 WordCamp Europe returns in-person in Porto, Portugal, and I’ll be there and so excited to connect with the community! Tickets are still available.
  4. Nineteen seems like an in-between number, but actually it’s very salient for me because now WordPress is the same age I was when the first release came out.
  5. Which means I’ve now been working on WordPress half my life!

Cheers and here’s to many more years together. 🥂

Podsession Responses

Asides, ,

There have been two interesting responses to the podcast I did with Om and Niall the other week. The first was Scott Johnson who responded in a podcast. As I expected, most people are taken aback by my statement to “let the engineers pick” what language and enviroment you use for your product. I think there is one important assumption that wasn’t articulated in that statement: you have brilliant engineers and you trust them. As a psuedo-engineer, I find it insulting when people suggest engineers are unable to factor anything other than their selfish language preferences, things like loaded costs, hardware costs, platforms, long-term viability, hiring, etc are simple variables that can be considered by any intelligent person. If anybody in Automattic came to me that was writing a tool in Python, C, Perl (it’s happened) or whatever, I might ask a question or two but at the end of the day I know they’re able to weigh the costs and benefits just like I would. If you’ve hired an engineer that isn’t able to make these decisions as well or better than you, then you’ve already lost the battle and over time more and more of your time will be spent plugging holes in a descent to mediocrity.

The second response was on the Pronet blog which in an amazing feat of blogging acrobatics managed to mention and link every single person tangentially associated with the podcast except me, even though I’m quoted in every heading. The Google Pages example is brought up again to illustrate that all the hardware in the world sometimes solve a scalability problem, but I still think that’s faulty because none of us had any idea why Pages was slow when it launched, it could have been a faulty router for all we know. Pronet responds to “Go with what your happiest working with” with a set of points to consider for a language, but again with the right people none of that matters. Happiness, in all things not just the language, should be the number goal and metric for everything in an early-stage startup. Happy engineers work smarter, longer, more efficient, attract better candidates, and have a better quality of life. (A corollary is that if you’re already set on a language path, don’t hire anyone who isn’t thrilled with working in that language.) For an example of how this can work in a really extreme case, I suggest everyone read the story of Viaweb and Lisp. (Another talk.)In my mind Lisp is a ridiculous language to build a web application in, but to them and their engineers it was heaven and they had better products earlier than their competition as a result of their unusual choice.

(As an aside, I wonder how many people said the same thing about Ruby for web apps before David Heinemeier Hansson, Rails, and 37signals, or even about PHP before Yahoo and Wikipedia? An example (and a little bit of promotion) is better than a thousand whitepapers.)