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.
Schneier explained how, initially, NSA Director General Keith Alexander claimed in 2013 that he had disrupted 54 terrorists plots. A few months later, this was revised down to 13, and then to "one or two." Eventually, the only success that the NSA could point to was the prevention of a San Diego man sending $8,500 to support a Somali militant group.
Doesn't sound like a worthy trade-off.
Manton Reece has been having very interesting discussions about microblogging and content ownership recently. He's working on an unannounced project in this area and I've been following his progress.
A few days ago he wrote a post about Microblogging with Wordpress in which he describes most of the process of writing your status updates on your own blog first. As I had to adapt his process for it to work with my configuration of WordPress and as I am using Twitter instead of App.net I thought it would be useful to detail how I went about, based on Manton's write-up.
Requirements
In order to post only the status updates to twitter, we have to identify them in both WordPress and for IFTTT.
In Wordpress, if you do not have a category for status updates, create a Snippets category (with the slug snippets). Note the category ID. In addition, create a new category called ifttt-status if you plan to post to Wordpresss from your mobile device later, as I did (this is a workaround to allow WordPress to convert from this category to the status post format).
With the category ID, we can now create a new feed by editing the .htaccess file in your WordPress installation directory, see my gist comment on manton's configuration. I had redirection issues with Manton's original setup so I amended it. What we do here is create two endpoints, one for posts without status updates (rss.xml); and one for only status updates (snippets.xml). We then point any requests to /feed (the default WordPress endpoint) to the first endpoint.
Update (26 June): I updated the gist comment after identifying issues in initial configuration. Please reread the gist if you had problems using the initial configuration.
Now create a new recipe that is triggered from the snippets RSS feed, with the action to post a tweet with the tweet text EntryContent.
You can now blog from WordPress to twitter (just leave the title empty).
I'm using DoNote to post to IFTTT which then posts to WordPress.
Login to your WordPress blog and in the users section create a ifttt user with the role of Author (this allows the user to create posts).
Install the "IFTTT Post Formats & Post Types" plugin, it will convert posts with the ifttt-status category to the status post-format. It will also hide the ifttt-status category from showing up in your template for example.
Back in IFTTT, In the My Recipe's DoNote section, create a new recipe for WordPress (you might get asked to provide the WordPress username and password you created for this purpose) with the action to create a post with the following values:
You are not limited to using DoNote if there is a trigger for your service, and you are not limited to usin IFTTT at all if there are WordPress plugins for your status update service and WordPress support for your writing app, but these will require similar configuration as detailed in this post.
Hope this helps!
Wesley Yin-Pool, writing for Eurogamer:
You will become a digital god, Molyneux proclaims in the video, of 22Cans' next game, Godus. And, you will receive a cut of the money made by Godus from the start of your reign to its end.
18 months later, as Bryan Henderson approaches his 21st birthday, he has yet to become God of Gods, he has yet to receive the "riches" Molyneux promised him, and it's looking increasingly likely he never will.
The core issue with promising such a fantastic reward is that it depends on a future that hasn't materialised:
"But we can't have the God of Gods role without the ability for people to challenge the God of Gods role, and the God of Gods role can't be challenged without combat, and we can't implement the combat without sorting out the server issues, which are being sorted out as of last week. It's just a maelstrom."
It looks to me that the whole team is continually rushed into firefighting the next feature development, with never enough revenue coming in to take a breather and plan things out properly.
He confirms the Godus development team has shrunk considerably to just a few people as resources are diverted to a new game, called The Trail.
Trust me, by the time the server issues are sorted; the combat is implemented; the multiplayer is developed and the God of God feature is finished there will be no players left to make any money from. 22Cans would do better to offer some kind of goodwill gesture to restore the morale of its staff and its fans before this PR opportunity turned completely toxic.
The aim for wordpress-basetheme is a bare bones, well structured, easily customisable WordPress base theme.
You can build on it to speed up your own theme development. It's so minimal that I wouldn't recommend it as your final site theme. Instead it makes it trivial to apply your design to a WordPress blog, or to build out from this starting point. This site is build on top of the project for example.
Version 1.1 is now available
Download | View on GitHub
Changes:
Your feedback is welcome.
I've released a first look at "Wordpress Base Theme", a bare bones base for your own themes:
You can build on this to speed up your own theme development.
DisplayAnything3 is a file and image gallery module for SilverStripe 3.0 with a big list of features. I'm looking forward to trying the module on a future project.
PHP 5.5 will no longer support Windows XP and 2003. Those systems are around a decade old, so PHP is pulling the plug on them.
Today a problem came up where the files on my Samba fileshare did not indicate to my Windows system that they were changed. Software that relies on this information such as TortoiseHG and SimpleLESS would not know that the file had changed. This was especially obvious with SimpleLESS which should take the .less file and process it, but wouldn’t.
Gervase Markham’s writes about the changes to your Facebook profile, where now by default a @facebook address is shown instead of your own email address:
The email instead goes to my Facebook inbox, and I don’t get a notification email to say it’s there.
So this is why Facebook introduced it: They want you to go to their site to check for email. They don’t want to send the messages to your email and have you interact there, they don’t want you to use a search engine to find content, and they don’t want you to use forums and instant messages to talk to people. They don’t want you ever to get the idea to leave the site.
If you are looking for guidance on how how to format your code, you could do worse than to base it this coding standards styleguide.
