Senior Web Engineer. Open web / music. Remote DJ. Tall Dutch guy. #3million
Hide Trackbacks is a WordPress plugin that hides pingbacks and trackbacks from your website comments.
I’ve updated the plugin to indicate it works correctly with WordPress 4.9.9 and earlier. It's now also up to PHP 7.2 compatible, and has a number of small fixes to improve code legibility and alignment with the WordPress Coding Standards.
Interesting article about developing your passion and keeping and open mindset.
The belief that interests arrive fully formed and must simply be “found” can lead people to limit their pursuit of new fields and give up when they encounter challenges, according to a new Stanford study.
Four Things Procrastinators Need to Learn - read this now or later?
Hide Trackbacks is a WordPress plugin that hides pingbacks and trackbacks from your website comments.
I've updated the plugin to indicate it works correctly with WordPress 4.9 and earlier.
We're building an artificial intelligence-powered dystopia, one click at a time, says techno-sociologist Zeynep Tufekci. In an eye-opening talk, she details how the same algorithms companies like Facebook, Google and Amazon use to get you to click on ads are also used to organize your access to political and social information. And the machines aren't even the real threat. What we need to understand is how the powerful might use AI to control us -- and what we can do in response.
This is why I run PrivacyBadger to block tracking, not ads.
Watching Trump’s presser, I had a feeling I’d seen it all before?—?while covering Vladimir Putin’s annual news conferences.
Source: A message to my doomed colleagues in the American media – Medium
New controls are arguably an improvement, but data collection remains mandatory for most.
Amazon Go, shopping without checkouts:
Amazon Go is a new kind of store with no checkout required. We created the world’s most advanced shopping technology so you never have to wait in line. With our Just Walk Out Shopping experience, simply use the Amazon Go app to enter the store, take the products you want, and go!
With the amount of recorded prior art they will find it difficult to pantent the Just Walk Out technology ;-)
Just came across an interesting perspective on frameworks by Timothy Perrett:
It is imperative to understand that the need for composability in our software tools is an absolute requirement. If we as an industry have any hope of not repeating ourselves time and time again, we have to change our ways.
I definately agree that we're doomed to keep making the same mistakes if we're building on top of frameworks and then switching them out for a different one, which I hadn't considered before.
I think we have stumbled upon the reason why there are no new Macs. Apple was wasting resources on the car.
Apple Inc. has drastically scaled back its automotive ambitions, leading to hundreds of job cuts and a new direction that, for now, no longer includes building its own car, according to people familiar with the project.
[..]
Zadesky handed the reins to his boss, Dan Riccio, adding to responsibilities that already included engineering annual iPhone, iPad, and Mac refreshes.
Source: How Apple Scaled Back Its Titanic Plan to Take on Detroit - Bloomberg
Dropbox was using a sql attack on the tcc database to circumvent Apple’s authorization policy
Another issue like this and a lot of people will switch to iCloud Drive.
I was suffering from lack of concentration later in the workday, until I stumbled upon the Pomodoro focusing technique. I've been a lot more productive and in a better mood since I started using this two weeks ago:
The Pomodoro Technique is a time management method developed by Francesco Cirillo in the late 1980s. The technique uses a timer to break down work into intervals traditionally 25 minutes in length, separated by short breaks. These intervals are known as "pomodori", the plural of the Italian word pomodoro for "tomato".
The method is based on the idea that frequent breaks can improve mental agility.
I created an AutoHotkey script that uses timers and a global hot-key I set for WinAmp to automatically stop and start the music after instructing me to work / have a break. It works really well for me.
From 2007, but a great video full of advice, and a fantastic example of pechakucha 20x20 presentation style.
Steve Gibson pointed me to a guide to setting your desired privacy level in Windows 10. This version of Microsoft's operating system follows the 'always socially connected' footsteps of smartphones and therefore makes privacy assumptions. Using this guide you can check if they match your expectations.
Hide Trackbacks is a WordPress plugin that hides pingbacks and trackbacks from your website comments.
I've updated the plugin to indicate it works correctly with WordPress 4.2.
Apple blogger John Gruber started off a new debate about these issues recently, when he noted that a 537-word text post on the website iMore.com weighed in at 14 megabytes. (Fourteen megabytes of text should correspond to about 7m words, or about 10 times the combined length of the Old and New Testaments.)
Gruber blamed iMore.com, but really it’s not the website’s fault, since to a very large degree the owner of the website you’re visiting doesn’t actually control what you see, when you see it, how you see it, or even whether you see it. Instead, there are dozens of links in the advertising-technology chain, and every single one of them is optimising for financial value, rather than low-bandwidth user experience. Many pages, if you’re on a slow connection, simply time out; they never load at all.
When you are a website owner, you are responsible for all the content on your site. If you don't have any control over the ads, then that's a process issue that should be addressed.
Why not band together with a few large sites and create a standardised ad submission and review system that advertisers can integrate into their content tools and websites can set criteria about ads on their sites.
Maybe the bigger problem is that those websites cannot afford to reject ads.
I've released another SilverStripe add-on called BugzScoutLogWriter that I have been using for several months on some of the sites at work.It supports SS 3.0 and 3.1.
BugzScoutLogWriter is a LogWriter that integrates logs with FogBugz, an integrated web-based project management system featuring bug/issue tracking made by FogCreek.
A LogWriter is attached to errors, warnings and notices that occur in a website due to programming errors or runtime errors and then sends / saves a log of this event. SilverStripe comes with built-in functionality to e-mail or save the logs to a file, however if you use a third party bug reporting system then it's nice to have all the issues collected there instead.
I've used FogBugz for years now and one of the nice features is that multiple occurrences of the same issue get collected in the same ticket. This keeps the whole process manageable. Say, in the event that a mistake that affects all pages on a website, FogBugz collects the first 50 occurrences of that error and lets you close the ticket with one click. This is an improvement to a flood of email.
Anyways let me know if you find it useful and feel free to raise issues.