WordPress (and Tumblr) got a name check by Jon Stewart on the Daily Show the other night. 🙂
Exclusive: Microsoft and Nokias Plans for Marketing Windows Phone in 2012.
I dont want to reveal more, and Ive been sitting on this information for weeks so that Microsoft can make its big announcement at CES this coming week. But with these leaks, as with the equally inaccurate LTE leaks last week, I felt the need to set the record straight. The way tech blogs work these days is that any information, no matter how inaccurate, is simply parroted between all the gadget blogs and then, inevitably, to the increasingly lazy mainstream news as well. So lets at least get it right.
Mr Thurrott, perhaps if you didn’t sit on stories for so long other people wouldn’t break them. Your responsibility is to your audience, not Microsoft’s CES launch plans.
“Distraction is the only thing that consoles us for our miseries,” the French philosopher Blaise Pascal wrote in the 17th century, “and yet it is itself the greatest of our miseries.” He also famously remarked that all of man’s problems come from his inability to sit quietly in a room alone.
I’m turning 28 next week on January 11th. My friends and family always complain that I’m impossible to buy for, and it’s true, I don’t need any more stuff. (Exception is a mixtape / playlist, I eat those up.) The most important luxuries in my life are time, friends, and time with friends. The thing I covet is impact. So this year going to try something different: I’m giving up my birthday to raise money for charity: water and provide clean water to people that need it. 100% of money donated goes directly to projects in the field. Please donate — let’s build some wells. 🙂
Introducing Jazz-Quotes.com
I attended an interesting high school called the High School for the Performing and Visual Arts, or HSPVA for short. More than computers my main passion when I joined was the saxophone, particularly jazz, and that’s what I studied for 4 years alongside many talented friends who would later become professional musicians.
As a result of this interest, almost from the beginning of this website (then photomatt.net) I had a section of my site for jazz quotes. It’s actually remained frozen in that old design for four years or more, and it was one of my resolutions for 2011 to relaunch it.
Well, with minutes to spare, I’m happy to share with you guys the new Jazz-Quotes.com.
There is a lot of work left to do on it to turn it into the more of a community-driven site that I envision, but there’s no reason the few hundred people a day that come to my site looking for jazz quotes shouldn’t get to enjoy them in this fresh new design on a dedicated domain. (Powered by WordPress, natch.)
Happy new year, everybody! I think 2012 is going to be an amazing year. Now to put another log on the fire.
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.
One-click Restores
VaultPress now supports one-click database restores direct server-to-server so you don’t need to download or upload anything.
I ended up on the Forbes 30 under 30 for Social / Mobile this year, which is good because I only have two more years to make this sort of thing before being demoted to less exclusive “100 under 100” lists. For something more meaty check out this in-depth interview with Japanese devleloper magazine Gijutsu-Hyoron, by Bart Eisenberg, which included some pretty thoughtful questions.
Check out the new WordPress for Android 2.0, it’s a bottom-up redesign of how our mobile apps can work.
If I were going to start a gadget site, it’d look and work just like The Wirecutter from Brian Lam. Review sites like CNET review stuff when it comes out, and don’t update old reviews when new stuff comes out, so the best printer in March when they did the review might not be still the best printer in December when you want to buy one. Wirecutter picks one thing, and one thing only, and constantly updates their recommendations to keep the context of new products. And, of course, they’re powered by WordPress. 🙂
Where are they now? The Vancouver riot Kissing Couple. Crazy story, and apparently not a hoax like I had heard before.
Dave Kashen on building a values-driven startup on GigaOM.
“But with the Zuccotti Park encampment removed, and the opera closing on Dec. 1, is that it for Gandhi in New York? Or is it worth asking, what would Gandhi do in the world today?” What Would Gandhi Do? in the New York Times.
The problem lies with the business schools which are at fault. What we’ve done in America is to define profitability in terms of percentages. So if you can get the percentage up, it feels like we are more profitable. It causes us to do things to manipulate the percentage. […] Christensen even suggests that in slavishly following such thinking, Wall Street analysts have outsourced their brains.
Clayton Christensen: How Pursuit of Profits Kills Innovation and the U.S. Economy in Forbes. Hat tip: Lane Becker.
Automattic just reached 100 people. On Monday we’ll be 102. 🙂
The three biggest myths about women in technology, by Allison Scott and Freada Kapor Klein. Hat tip: Mitch Kapor.
The Art of Right Now by Hiten Shah.
“Apple Lossless, also known as ALAC, is a lossless audio codec Apple developed some time ago for digital music. The codec compresses music files anywhere from 40-60 percent of their original size with no discernible loss in audio quality or fidelity.” —Â Apples ALAC codec is now open source. About a year and a half ago I started re-ripping all my music in ALAC, it’s fantastic, especially now that iTunes can down-convert when syncing to iPhones / iPods.
Programming and Writing
I really enjoyed this quote from Brent Simmons in an interview with John Gruber.
I’ve always thought of it this way: a good writer reads a lot of books. They see how other writers solve problems. They pay attention to what’s happening now as much as they pay attention to the classics. Good writers are readers first, but eagle-eyed, careful readers.
I think good developers are the same: they look at other apps. They “read” those apps, the problems they have and how they solve them. They notice trends, they notice new solutions, they notice when things work and when they don’t.
It reminds me of some passages from a book I’m reading right now, Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott:
However, in the meantime, we are going to concentrate on writing itself, on how to become a better writer, because, for one thing, becoming a better writer is going to help you become a better reader, and that is the real payoff. […]
Writing can give you what having a baby can give you: it can get you to start paying attention, can help you soften, can wake you up. […]
Because for some of us, books are as important as almost anything else on earth. What a miracle it is that out of these small, flat, rigid squares of paper unfolds world after world after world, worlds that sing to you, comfort and quiet or excite you. Books help us understand who we are and how we are to behave. they show us what community and friendship mean; they show us how to live and die. They are full of all the things that you don’t get in real life — wonderful, lyrical language, for instance, right off the bat. And quality of attention: we may notice amazing details during the course of a day but we rarely let ourselves stop and really pay attention. An author makes you notice, makes you pay attention, and this is a great gift. My gratitude for good writing is unbounded; I’m grateful for it the way I’m grateful for the ocean.
That’s how I feel about software.