0wn3d

I’m not sure if I’m one of the “six prominent webloggers” Brad mentions in his post Gmail major security flaw, but when I got a mail from him saying that I was guilty of exactly what he described, I thought it would be a good time to change my secret question and password. I guess he was really anxious to get a Gmail account. He could have asked though, I let Adam poke around mine.

My thoughts on Gmail? It’s really well-done in terms of how the interface works. It’s faster than Thunderbird for common tasks and I could see using it full-time. But I wouldn’t even consider it until they provide a good way to import and export everything. Email is the lifeblood of everything I do, and I’ve been burned too many times to trust it to a third party—even if it’s non-evil Google. When I put my address out there in a previous post I was pleasantly surprised to get emails from a number of people I’d never corresponded with. Unfortunately soon after that the spam started coming in. It’s more than I get on my “real” account, but I can’t expect a beta product to compete with a finely-tuned SpamAssassin installation and 22MB bayesian database.

Speaking of passwords, a few months I switched to using 8+ characters of random junk for everything, and different passwords for everything. You can use the random password generator to get a few of your own. Throw in SSH tunneling, a great VPN through my university, and consistent rotation schedule and I’m feeling pretty secure. (Knock on wood.) I just need a fingerprint scanner.

In other news, the place of residence has been spruced up a bit with surround-sound speakers, a cut-glass-hanging-thingy, and some additional lighting. Pictures forthcoming.

Finally, the mosaic thread currently stands at nearly 669 comments, and soon there will be more comments on that post then there are posts on this site. I don’t generally talk about traffic in public because I think it’s bad taste, but the numbers this month have been intimidating. In terms of bandwidth photomatt.net used a few dozen gigabytes last month, mostly in photos. So far this month the usage stands at 305 gigabytes for this domain alone and I’m at a loss for words, except to say it’s nice to know I have that sort of scalability. I think I’ll go back to posting pictures of my cat.

Update: Final usage for April on photomatt.net was 511 gigabytes.

On Automattic's internal BuddyPress-powered company directory, we allow people to fill out a field saying how far their previous daily commute was. 509 people have filled that out so far, and they are saving 12,324 kilometers of travel every work day. Wow!

30 Boxes

I’ve been really digging 30 Boxes, as reviewed by Mr Hawk here and Mr Malik here, I’m moving all of my calendaring (online and off) into it. They’re doing some neat stuff with profiles and sharing that I think will take people a while to fully grok. The only thing I think it needs is better timezone handling (I travel a lot). Check out their blog. (Powered by WP.) Update: I keep finding cool features like it automatically detects when you enter a birthday and offers to repeat it every year. The whole site is like a giant easter egg.

WP20 & Audrey Scholars

Today is the 20th anniversary of the first release of WordPress. None of us knew what we were getting into when it started, but we had a shared conviction that the four freedoms of the GPL combined with a mission to democratize publishing was something worth spending our time on. There will be celebrations in cities around the world, please join if there’s one happening near you.

Twenty years later, I am proud and humbled by what the community around WordPress has created, and jazzed about what we will create in the coming decades.

I’m also excited to mark this milestone by publicly launching the Audrey Scholars program. It is, like all things, an experiment, but I’m curious to see how it unfolds and perhaps one day an Audrey Scholar could even take the responsibility of leading WordPress, when my capacity to do so has passed.

WordPress & Techmeme 100

Whenever I visit a site I can usually tell whether it’s WordPress or not within an instant — there’s just something about a WordPress site that is distinctive. Super-clean permalinks are usually a dead giveaway. One thing I’ve been noticing a lot lately is on my guilty pleasure for tech news, Techmeme, it seems like almost every link I click is to a WordPress-powered site. Fortunately Techmeme provides a leaderboard showing both rank and % of space a site has taken up in headlines in the past thirty days.

The list changes almost every day but went ahead and took a snapshot of the top 100 as of January 16th and ran down the platform for each one, here’s how it ended up:

techmeme-100-cms

WordPress comes in at 43%, custom or bespoke systems at 42%, and then the others. When you take into effect Techmeme’s “presence” factor WP jumps to 48.8% of presence in the top 100 and all Blogsmith, Drupal, Blogspot, Tumblr, and Typepad combined are 8.4%. If you curious of the raw data, here’s the spreadsheet with the platforms.

This is just a snapshot, it’d be interesting to see how this evolves over time. It’s a small slice of the world of websites, but a very influential one. I’ve actually reached out to Gabe Rivera a few times to sponsor the leaderboard page, putting a W logo next to the ones that run WordPress in the table, but nothing has come of it yet.

Thanks to Krutal, Paolo, and MT for help with this.

Locked Out

My key works but it seems the door is jammed somehow, so I’m currently locked out of my house, which is as they say a bummer. My battery runs low, but thank goodness for WiFi. I just need to wait a little while longer for someone to wake up (or answer the phone or doorbell) and I’ll be snuggled up in a warm bed. But right now I am very tired, very uncomfortable, and very annoyed.

Working backwards, earlier tonight was great. Put WordPress out, which felt great. After a little client work I hooked up with Josh, Sarah, and Ramie, whose blog we just set up so the domain might not resolve yet. (Power update: I just ran the extension cord on the side of the house to the porch, so it looks like I can finish this.) I ended up not getting out of the house until about 11:30, and after I picked everyone up we decided to go House of Pies (of course) because Ramie and Sarah were hungry, despite Sarah having already eaten twice already that night. (Having big hair must really work up an appetite.) Food was great, but after I stepped away for a phone call from Mike concerning WordPress (he had a funny PHP setup) they managed to pull the salt trick on me. This deserves a tangent.

My friend Rachel is deadly afraid of two things: mayonnaise and ketchup. So when I was eating with her, Josh, and Rene several nights ago at House of Pies (of course) I thought it would be funny to mix the two together and dip one of my cottage fries in it. When I held it up she responded with a fight or flight response and started waving two toothpicks at me in defense. It put it down and proceeded to eat my cottage fries (with just ketchup) but somehow I got persuaded into trying the ketchup/mayonnaise concoction. It was gross, and I’m told the reaction on my face was pretty amusing. (Actually I think that’s why most of this stuff happens, because I’m told that I tend to respond “animatedly.”) I went to the bathroom to wash my mouth out a little. Tangent time again.

I don’t know when, but at some point, most likely after I started hanging out with Josh a lot, I started putting a lot of sugar in water at restaurants. It’s cheap, which is nice, but it’s actually gotten to the point where I prefer it to soft drinks sometimes. I don’t always do it though, for two reasons: one, I use a lot of sugar, not as much as Josh does, but still enough that it freaks some people out; two, if the restaurant has the sugar in packets, it’s unusable because of said amounts of sugar required to make it good. (My Dad just left for work, and in coming out of the house ungummed the door for me. The morning has become rather pleasant though so I think I’ll stay out here and finish this up.)

This brings be back from the bathroom, and when I sat down I took a big gulp of my water, sticking my straw all the way to the bottom where the sugar was to help get the taste out of my mouth. I put a lot of sugar in my water, so the white at the bottom of the glass didn’t surprise me. What surprised me was the salt.

Anyway tonight I fell for it again, but it was just a minor gulp from the middle of the glass so not nearly as potent as the last time. I had chocolate cream pie to get the salt taste out, so overall it wasn’t that bad, but I thought it was pretty funny that I fell for it again. (My Dad just looped back home, donuts in hand. How nice is that!) Dinner was a lot of fun, and it was neat catching up with Ramie who I haven’t seen since winter when she left again for New Haven (she attends Yale). We discovered there is no spoon.

Ramie had never seen the Red Button so that was the natural next step, and Ramie pushed it. I don’t think she has yet felt the full repercussions of the experience, but she will. During the meeting with the Button Guy we were told there was another hidden treasure we hadn’t discovered yet, namely a motion detector that set off a horn when you walk under the bridge. So we did all we could to set off any motion detectors in proximity but to no avail.

Somehow that turned into wrestling though, and two questionable characters accosted me by the bayou and even though they never got me close to it, I think everyone had fun trying. Josh had his turn too. I think at some point during the night (maybe a Josh tackle) I managed to scrape my knee; I don’t remember the last time I scraped my knee, which means I need to get outdoors more.

We ended up in a internet café type place in Sarah’s Dad’s apartment building (which was quite swank). There was some IM mischief, I set up Ramie’s blog, but most of the night was spent showing Sarah all the hilarious memes she missed because of her dial-up connection at her house. She got to know the Chubby Jedi, Angrybot, dancing and rapping plushies, and a few others I can’t remember.

The hour was late, and so we parted ways and went to get some rest.

Which brings me back to this porch, this door, which I think I’m going to go in now. It better not have jammed again…

Imposter

There is some joker wannabe hacker pretending to me and asking others for sensitive information. Here are some tell-tale signs: IMing from a misspelled version of my IM addresses, like “saxmat02”; emailing from a gmail account with my name; using bad English (more than I normally do); asking for passwords, etc. These are all things I’d never do. If you ever have any doubt that the person you’re talking to might not be me, just call me on my cell or use one of the other contact methods here.

Blo.gs Sold

So blo.gs has been sold and there are no details as to who it’s going to (or for how much), which is odd. As a user I feel sort of blinded by oncoming headlights, but hopefully more information will be available shortly. There were 12,207 users when I first got the announcement, the number seems to be going down. I hope the new owner is cool. Update: I heard the new owner is cool.