Category Archives: Technology

Commentary about what happens across the country from me in Silicon Valley and other technology news.

WordPress 3.3 is available

WordPress 3.3 “Sonny” is out. I haven’t upgraded here just yet and might wait a few days to see how the plugin situation shakes out. There are some fantastic improvements in this release, including a drag-and-drop uploader and improvements for multi-user editing. Here’s the full changelog. I’ll let you know how my multisite installation here goes (I also run Somnambulonimbus on this instance).

Update 8:16pm EST: WordPress 3.3 is installed and running. Fast upgrade as always. If you’re using W3 Total Cache and hosting your wp-includes files on the CDN, you’ll probably run into trouble with the new toolbar (formerly known as the Admin Bar) if you’re caching aggressively. It took a few minutes for my new files to finish pushing to CloudFront, but after a couple refreshes, the proper CSS was in place and everything looked good.

Update 10:21pm EST: The WordPress download counter is always fun to watch after a new version is released. At the time of this update, it’s already been downloaded over 64,000 times. This includes in-place upgrades and .zip/.tar.gz downloads from the site, but not Subversion checkouts or one-click installs on web hosts.

8.02.11

Today is August 2, 2011 — or 08.02.11, which geeks the world over are proclaiming as “Wi-Fi Day,” paying homage to the IEEE spec 802.11 which defines wireless networks.

I vividly remember the first time I used a wireless network. In the spring of 2003, I was working as a student worker in a computer lab at Lander University in Greenwood, SC, and our lab had gotten a test access point and PC Card adapters (remember those?). Imagine my amazement when I put in the card, installed the drivers, and was online. It was, in a sense, magical. No being tethered to a network cable (or a modem, for that matter). It was so incredible that when I left for the summer I demanded my parents get a cable modem and wireless equipment for the house — and the rest was history. I haven’t lived in a Wi-Fi-less place since — who would want to?

I challenge you to think of another technology that’s had more of an impact on our culture than Wi-Fi over the last 10 years. Without Wi-Fi, mobile adoption of social networking would likely have been stunted. Wireless connectivity — especially Wi-Fi — has likely been a huge part of why Apple is successful again. (Imagine the first EDGE-only iPhone without the Wi-Fi option — yuck!) The tablet computer is likely not even a thought without wireless networking.

Many of us take Wi-Fi for granted now, but it has brought us — and will continue to help bring us — wonderful new technologies that build on top of it. So here’s to you, Wi-Fi, on 08.02.11. Thanks for being there for me (most of the time, when I’m in range).

A few things I’m looking forward to in Lion

I’ve been eagerly awaiting the release of Mac OS X Lion for the last few months — thus, I’m pretty excited for today’s release and plan on acquiring it as soon as bandwidth allows. I’m looking forward to many of the user interface changes in Lion, with full screen apps and Mission Control the things I’m looking forward to the most. I am an obsessive user of Spaces, so anything that can make that feature more intuitive and powerful I’m all for, and being able to take apps full screen will be incredibly beneficial to my as-yet-undiagnosed case of ADD. It’s not all golden: I could probably care a bit less about Launchpad, which arranges apps on the screen iOS-style, I think I will immediately turn reverse scrolling off and will make sure that the lights indicating running applications in the Dock are re-enabled. What are you looking forward to?

This is unhelpful to Sony’s tarnished security reputation

Via Googler Andrew Hintz comes an embarrassing revelation for Sony, where their developers apparently are embedding CAPTCHAs in HTML and using CSS to distort them. While I generally hate CAPTCHAs (especially since most of them have been broken for a long time, now), this is an incredibly foolish and hilarious mistake and, given recent events, par for the course.

Fantastic Mac power Twitter client: YoruFukurou

If you consider yourself a power Twitter user and you use a Mac, I strongly recommend looking at YoruFukurou. I’ve been using it exclusively for the last few days and it has made using Twitter much more manageable. In addition to the usual ability to support searches and lists, it can filter my timeline in real-time by users, keywords, and/or regular expressions into their own tab, which is particularly useful when trying to separate the wheat from the chaff in fast-moving breaking news. It integrates extremely well with Growl (which TweetDeck can’t do in either the AIR or the HTML5 versions) and is a Mac-native client which sips memory and CPU. The only dings against YoruFukurou: No support for multiple windows (recently re-added to Twitter for Mac) and no identi.ca/StatusNet support (which, admittedly, is kind of an edge case but I still don’t know why more developers don’t implement support for this, as I really want to use rockin’ clients with a more open network). I’d also like to see it log my favorites and retweets in my Mentions tab as TweetDeck does. Other than that, this has become my client of choice for now — and I suspect it will be for a while. Incredibly, it is free in the Mac App Store and available as a standalone file for those not Mac App Store-inclined.

Where have all the custom themes gone?

Who out there still fully customizes (or even totally writes from scratch) their own theme for their CMS or otherwise themable software? More and more this seems to be a dying art, especially on personal blogs, and it’s kind of a shame. I find a lot of joy in rolling my own code. Are theme frameworks just that good now that writing from scratch is foolhardy? Genuinely curious.

A few days with the iPad 2

iPad 2 homescreen.

iPad 2 homescreen, with effects applied by Camera+ for iPhone.

I finally broke down and got an iPad. I spent part of my Sunday at South by Southwest Interactive in line at the ad-hoc Apple Store in downtown Austin, TX awaiting an opportunity to get my hands on the iPad 2. They only had 64 GB Wi-Fi models available that day, which was a bit depressing to my budget but I am certain that I will fill the space regardless. I’ve had a few days with this, my first iPad, and while I very well could have continued to live without it, I’m also finding that it is quite fun to use and — yes — I can work very effectively on it. In fact, a lot of this post is written from the WordPress for iOS app. Continue reading →

SuperHappyDevHouse Charleston 2

The second SuperHappyDevHouse Charleston on Saturday was loads of fun and well worth the drive. I got to catch up with old friends, meet a ton of Charleston’s brightest coders, and at least think through a few problems (even if I didn’t write too much code — I’ll rectify that next time). Plus, Spark! Charleston, a startup incubator on East Bay Street near the aquarium, was a fantastic venue. If you’re a coder in the Charleston area, I strongly recommend looking out for the next one. Check out Eugene Mah’s recap for pictures.