It’s been a gorgeous day today, highlighted by a mini-picnic with Heather, Richard, Tantek, and [forgot name] in Yerba Buena park for lunch. I’ll leave you this Friday with Ella’s version of “Blue Skies”. For extra credit compare it with Robert Glasper’s rendition.
Open Keys
I could write about many things, but instead I think I will relate the fact that for the second consecutive day, I locked my keys in the car. The details are inconsequential, and it’s a story everyone has heard before, so let’s start discussing solutions. In computing the key [pun] to failsafe systems is redundancy, so I have decided to take the same approach with the entry system to my car.
I’m going to allow anyone who thinks they would be willing to hold on to a key to my car to apply by email to receive a copy free in the mail. Only requirements are a name, phone number, and meeting my secret requirement which I will not disclose here.
Now I’m sure many of you are concerned with the security model of having numerous copies of my car keys floating around, but the manufacturer (Chevy) of my vehicle already thought of this, separating the entry and ignition functions into two separate keys. This has its advantages and disadvantages, as evidenced by the Saturday lockout when I had my ignition key but not the entry key. Access to my vehicle is something I’m willing to allow because trustees of the keys will be people I trust not to steal something from my car in the first place.
I have a number of people “pre-approved” for keys, including my parents, Grandmother, sister Charleen, Josh, Sarah, Sarah, Rachel, Rene, Rebbecca, Elissa, Iram, Mat, Chris, extended family, and selected staff at Kaveh Kanes, Tropioca, and Get Wired, but like I said before anyone is eligible. These people have been carefully selected for proximity and accessibility—at any given point in my life, I am never more than 5 minutes from at least one of these people. So there you have it! A trade-off of security versus accessibility in real life. We’ll see how this goes…
These limited edition PhotoMatt keys will be accompanied by a Certificate of Authenticity and will be available in several styles to complement any key ring. They will also be hand tested by yours truly to verify that they truly work. Get yours while they’re hot. (Limit one per person.)
WordPress Skills
The Verge has a pretty epic feature on the history of Palm, Treo, and WebOS. Not many people know this but I started and ran the Houston Palm Users Group after getting a Handspring Visor in high school. PalmOS had apps, connectivity, handwriting input, infrared beaming…
Microsoft iPod
What if Microsoft designed the iPod package? Great video and music. I’ll have to watch this again next time I’m working on a new website, less is more. Hat tip: sillybean.
Biting
When did it get so cold??? I am cold to the point of desperation there. Now I know, some of you native (or born-again) Notherners are reading and thinking “42 degrees? Ha! That’s jogging weather!” and you are probably right. But how should I get warm? I’m not conditioned to deal with this.
Pun-A-Day #7
A woman has twins and gives them up for adoption. One of them goes to a family in Egypt and is called “Ahmal.” The other goes to a family in Spain; they name him “Juan.” Years later, Juan sends a picture of himself to his birth mother. Upon receiving the picture, she tells her husband that she wishes she also had a picture of Ahmal. Her husband responds, “They’re twins! If you’ve seen Juan, you’ve seen Ahmal.”
Aix-en-Provence
Touring around Aix-en-Provence
State of the Word 2019
In case you missed it, here’s the first-ever State of the Word… designed completely in Gutenberg:
WordCamp US was a fantastic experience, as always. Thank you again to the hundreds of organizers and volunteers who made it happen, to the thousands who attended, and to the city of St. Louis for hosting us. We’ll be back there again next year.
And special thanks to this next generation of WordPress contributors. So exciting to see KidsCamps continue to expand and thrive:
As you can see, my site is now featuring the new WordPress Twenty Twenty theme. And for more coverage from my State of the Word, check out the recaps from WP Tavern and Post Status. Here’s my full audience Q&A below:
You can see my previous State of the Word keynotes here.
Inside
Have you ever driven slower just to spend more time with somebody?
Funky Greenery
What can I say, I was getting tired of blue. Really tired of blue.
“The beauty of CSS is that you can mess up your entire site in one fell swoop.”
Rob Paterson writes Why do corporation die so soon and cities don’t? Corporations are Machines and Cities are Networks. Along the way he brings it back to WordPress and the Wikipedia.
New Mac Mini
I’ve been looking to get the two noisy linux boxes under my desk into a closet somewhere, because they’re so loud. One is a very very old PII or something running Gentoo that I had to put by the window and open because one of the fans was breaking down and the box was overheating, which caused it to make an alarm-like sound for hours at a time. AHEM. The second box is a fairly new Dell but it’s a server-class machine with TB+ of storage and it sounds like a plane taking off sometimes. The Dell is running Ubuntu, and also using the third screen on my desktop full-time. Having Linux right there (and on the same mouse/keyboard thanks to Synergy) is incredibly helpful for debugging and testing things, plus I could run X-chat full-time. When the new Mac minis came out they caught my eye — something not as dog-slow as my Powerbook, with a proper monitor and keyboard/mouse, could really be a great OS X experience and I’d still have all the command-line goodness at my fingertips. I ordered the maxed-out one online (they didn’t have any in stock at the SF store) and it arrived. So far so good! Almost as fast as my PC (AMD FX55 + 4GB).
It’s interesting to read the contrast between the presidential endorsements (for Obama) from two of my favorite magazines, the New Yorker and Economist. Mayor Bloomberg was also a surprise. The Wikipedia, as always, has very comprehensive lists of endorsements for Mitt Romney and Barack Obama.
Let’s Limit the Effect of Software Patents, Since We Can’t Eliminate Them, by Richard Stallman, the founder of the Free Software movement (and WordCamp SF 2010 speaker).
Introducing: Matt Reality TV
I know that if I don’t document it as I go along I’m never going to find the time to do it at the end, so I’ve decided to do a play-by-play of all aspects of redoing this site. The details will range from purely aesthetic to highly technical. It will cover software such as WordPress and Gallery, and the modifications I make to each, plus a little about the home grown database stuff I have running most of the rest of this site. I’ll be going through section by section until it’s all done.
Also, starting tomorrow, I am going to be moving out of the house and into a new apartment with my new roommate Josh, another event which I plan to document and photograph mercilessly, so I christen this new category Matt Reality TV, or MRTV for short. It’s not going to be overly put together, just stream of thought and code very similar to the actual process I use. It’s raw, hence the “reality” name. I invite commentary on everything, but please try to keep it constructive.
Of course at this point I should probably discuss what’s been done so far, and I’ll try to catch up, even though I’m awfully tired.
The many reasons for the redesign have been touched upon, but I haven’t really said why I kept the old one for so long, after changing every month since the site started. It was actually because it was stolen not too long after I first finished it. While I complained on the surface I was actually genuinely flattered on some level because it was the first design I had done that someone had thought good enough to swipe, as silly as that sounds now.
So far I’ve been playing around with different things. The current layout comes from a sketch I did on a piece of paper (thanks Rannie!) that I later discussed and brainstormed some things with Greg. Greg helped me come up with some colors (not the current ones exactly) and the rest was really just implementation. I had Dante in my mind from the beginning as the serif I wanted to build things around, but I didn’t have it in the format needed (OpenType or TrueType) so I ended up springing for it (a bargain!) at My Fonts. The title I put together and tweaked manually in Photoshop but the entry titles are all generated dynamically from a very simple PHP script (source). The titles are actually text with CSS backgrounds and hidden text using a modified CSS image replacement technique with the common elements in the CSS and the actual image reference inline so as to make things easy. I have just made the titles smaller than they were (32 instead of 36) and I like this better, I may make them smaller still.
I like this technique because (amoung other things) you can still use Mozilla type-ahead for links and you can still search for text within a page. Nifty. I went ahead and made the titles the permalink as well, which I’ve advocated several places before and made the default in WordPress, but never got around to doing it myself.
I just cleaned up a bunch of stale files, particularly in the root directory. That sort of thing can accumulate to an alarming degree. Now I try to put everything I used to stick in the root for convinence in subdirectories, usually divided chronologically so as to start “fresh” every year. This also lends to the permanence of everything I may link to, most of the work in keeping links valid comes from forethought. I also used a number of files that were purely for my own testing into a more appropiate sandbox area.
The background is a simple GIF image that is actually derived from that garish green that was on here the other day, faded and changed a little and then filled with a line pattern in Photoshop to get where you see it now. The colors need more tweaking, which I’m going to work on after this post, but I’m leaning away from the green look I was so partial to the other day. We’ll see where this goes.
Security Advice
Security advice from Bruce Schnier:
“If possible, don’t use Microsoft Windows.” There are some other good tips there too, like microwaving CD-Rs and deleting cmd.exe.
New Business Cards
Nothing brightens a long day (or night) like fun new business cards. If you’re in to this sort of thing, here’s mine:
If you’d like one (or two, one to pass on) let me know. In other news I heard a rumor that there may be navigation at the top of the page sometime soon. We shall see.
Fewer Bugs in Open Source
Research proves what open source folks have been saying all along: “An analysis of the 5.7 million lines of Linux source code shows that it contains fewer bugs per thousand lines of code than commercial counterparts.”