bSuite 4 Public Beta

I’ve had a lot of features on the table for bSuite for a while, but this recently discovered comment from John Pratt (whose Smorgasboard.net is a lot of fun), kicked me into gear to actually get working on it again. The result is bSuite 4, which is probably what bSuite 3 should have been all [...]

JSON on RHEL & PHP 5.1.6

Stuck with PHP 5.1.6 on RHEL or even CentOS (and a sysadmin who insists on using packages)? Need JSON? I did. The solution is easy:
yum install php-devel
pecl install json
The pecl install failed when it hit an 8MB memory limit, and I was clueless about how to fix it until I learned that the pecl installer [...]

Happy Birthday WordPress

WordPress was released to the world five years ago today. Celebrate in SFO, Sydney, or with me at whatever bar I find myself at in New Hampshire tonight. DM me with any ideas.

Many Eyes, Bugs Being Shallow, All That

WordPress 2.5.1 added a really powerful feature to register_taxonomy(): automatic registration of permalinks and query vars to match the taxonomy. Well, theoretically it added that feature. It wasn’t working in practice. After some searching yesterday and today, I finally found the bug and worked up a fix. I made a diff and set off to [...]

Where Do They Find The Time?

Clay Shirky recently posted a transcript of his Web 2.0 Expo keynote.
…If you take Wikipedia as a kind of unit, all of Wikipedia, the whole project — every page, every edit, every talk page, every line of code, in every language that Wikipedia exists in — that represents something like the cumulation of 100 [...]

ROFLcon Turns Me On To Ustream.TV

I was amused to learn Nathan was officially at ROFLcon on behalf of his library. I wasn’t representing my work and wasn’t on the lookout for work-related tools, but I found some anyway.
Universities have been anxious to get into live video casting for a while. Our first effort eventually became PBS (NET, ETS and PBS [...]

Anglia Ruskin University Faces Criticism 2.0

Anglia Ruskin University is in Cambridge, but it’s not Cambridge University. It’s likely that none of us would even know of Anglia Ruskin’s existence if it wasn’t for Naomi Sugai, but she’s not interested in promoting the school.
She’s got complaints, she’s fed up, and she’s taking her case to YouTube.
Well, she took her case to [...]

2002 Honda Civic iPod/iPhone Install

Last weekend, while I was putting an iPod interface into my Scion I did the same thing for my 2002 Honda Civic. Using Ben Johnson’s story as a guide, I bought a PIE HON98-AUX interface and dove in.
Aside from tools (screwdrivers and 8 and 10mm sockets), you’ll need:

The interface adapter
Audio wiring — I used a [...]

2004 Scion xB iPod/iPhone Install

Based on this story about an iPod interface install I purchased a PIE TOY03-AUX aux input adapter so I could finally listen to my iPhone without using the lousy FM transmitter. Sure, I coulda bought a new car, as the manufacturers seem to have finally come to their senses and started including such inputs, but [...]

My Flickr Complaint

Some whine about movies on Flickr, others about the switch to Yahoo IDs, I simply want better rendering of transparent PNGs as JPGs.

Flickr Adds Video

I asked for it in 2004, before YouTube, Vimeo, Viddler, or Revver appeared on the scene, and before MySpace and Facebook added video sharing as a feature. Four years later they finally added it. Neil Rickards should get credit for creating the theme of “long photos” (Neil called them “moving photos”). And anybody who was [...]

Identity Management Going Commodity?

Atlassian’s Crowd SSO and IdM solution has the kind of online pricing you’d expect for word processing software. I don’t know if it’s any good, but it’s a sign that identity management getting boring.

Why Can’t I Re-Check Spam With Akismet & WordPress 2.5? (Workaround)

I recently installed WordPress 2.5 and among the changes I noticed was a loss of Akismet’s “Recheck Spam” button (or something like that. It didn’t seem like such a problem at the time, but then I got swamped with so much trackback and comment spam that the flood DOS‘d my server. I had to disable [...]

SWIFT: Another Ham Handed Attempt At Social Networking

All yesterday and this morning I’ve been seeing tweets about SWIFT, so I finally googled it to see what it was about. The service promises to help organize conferences in some new 2.0 way, but it looks to be about as preposterous a social network as WalMart’s aborted 2006 attempt at copying MySpace.
There are some [...]

WordPress 2.5 Out, MaisonBisson Upgraded

WordPress 2.5 is out (and the WordPress site got a facelift), and I’ve already upgraded MaisonBisson using SVN. The changes are exciting, and seem to reflect a tradition that’s developing in WordPress of delivering some really revolutionary features in the x.5 release.
The loss of file-based object caching was a bit of a problem, as my [...]