WordCamp, WordCamp, WordCamp

9 July, 2008 – 10:44 am

WordPress Logo in United Kingdom Coat of Arms

WordCamp UK 2008

WordCamp UK is on Saturday the 19th and Sunday the 20th of July, 2008 and the organisers have made it “over the hump” after some indecision about the venue. They have ended up with a very appropriate venue in Birmingham, enough generous sponsors to secure the event financially and a decent programme too.

You can buy tickets online now.

I’ll be there presenting two topics:

Not sure I’ll need a full hour for either, maybe I can give everyone early marks when I’m done.

I’ll also be on a discussion panel. Attendees should be well sick of me by the end of the conference.

WordPress Logo in United States Great Seal

WordCamp San Francisco 2008

WordCamp San Francisco is on Saturday the 16th of August, 2008. [Update: It's only one day but contains two tracks]

This is the original WordCamp on it’s third time around, but it will be my first. Should be a hoot. I’ll possibly be presenting one or both of the topics I’m preparing for WordCamp UK.

It’s looking like it will be pretty popular again this year if Upcoming is any indication.

WordPress Logo in United States Coat of Arms

WordCamp Australia 2008

The first WordCamp Australia has just had it’s dates announced. It will be held on Saturday the 6th and Sunday the 7th of December, 2008, somewhere in Sydney.

It’s early days yet, but you can register your interest on Upcoming now.

If you are flying in from out of town it is a good idea to book flights sooner rather than later.

By Sam Bauers | Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , | Comments (6)

“Star Soup” – Quartz Composer screen saver for Mac OS X

30 May, 2008 – 6:38 pm

Star Soup

I’ve been sitting on this one for a few years. Mind you, for most of that time I thought I had lost it amongst my many backups and migrations from machine to machine.

This is a Quartz Composer… um… composition that I put together back when Quartz Composer was only new. Today I fired it up under Leopard’s newer shinier Quartz Composer and it still seems to work. I played with it for a minute or two and then added a couple of extra settings for people to play with.

Click “Read More” to see some screen-shots and videos showing what various tweaks to these settings can do.

Read More »

By Sam Bauers | Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , | Comments (10)

Alternative uses for your WordPress Mug

17 April, 2008 – 6:16 pm

A WordPress mug makes a great vase

If you’re like me and don’t drink coffee or tea very much, or even if you just don’t drink coffee and tea very much, then you must be wondering how you can justify buying a fantastic WordPress mug for your home or office.

Well, today I’m here to help you lighten your wallet with my first suggestion for alternative uses for your WordPress mug…

Who doesn’t like receiving flowers? What’s more, who doesn’t like WordPress? Nobody! So let’s juxtapose those once disparate concepts in a WordPress handled posy vase (pictured above).

A perfect Mother’s Day gift!

Keep checking back for more of this enthralling series of posts in the coming days.

By Sam Bauers | Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , | Comments (7)

bbPress 0.9 has landed

3 April, 2008 – 3:45 pm

w00t!

Today mdawaffe hit the big red button and released bbPress 0.9.

bbPress 0.9 is a considerable improvement over the previous release with lots of bug fixes and some handy new stuff that should make installation and integration with WordPress a lot easier.

By Sam Bauers | Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , | Leave a Comment

What does Matt Mullenweg do all day?

30 March, 2008 – 10:52 pm

He goes here, and hits the reload button many times.

Congratulations to the WordPress 2.5 team.

By Sam Bauers | Posted in Asides | Tagged , , | Comments (4)

Behold my eleventh hour contribution to WordPress 2.5!

12 March, 2008 – 11:11 am

Axis of evil timezones

Behold my eleventh hour contribution to WordPress 2.5! With which I bend time using sheer willpower and win the love of the people.

To the people of the mountainous nation of Nepal, I salute you! I will not let your blogging be incorrectly time-stamped by fifteen minutes. As much as the hounds of assimilation (in the form of half-hour incremented time-zones) may bark at your personal publishing door!

To the great blogging warriors of Kiribati, whose expansive nation sweeps across the ocean. Your wish to keep your fellow citizens crossing the same day off your calendars at the same time by breaking the international date line standard will be honoured in WordPress 2.5!

To the Tongans your theoretically impossible +13:00 timezone is safe and sound.

To the coastal dwellers or south-east Western Australia, what on earth were you thinking?

And finally, to the residents of the Chatham Islands, both of your unusual timezone offsets will be supported! Yes, that’s one timezone for every 300 people on your fair isles.

To one and all in these proud nations, I remain your humble non-standard timezone champion.

By Sam Bauers | Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , | Comments (6)

Fast switching your /etc/hosts file in Mac OS X

6 March, 2008 – 11:08 am

My little sandbox

UPDATE: This method has been extended and superseded, find out about the “new improved” method here.

Web developers often have reason to fake a host name’s associated IP address by editing their /etc/hosts file.

The peculiarities of the development environment we use here at WordPress.com mean I find myself switching back and forth between two /etc/hosts configurations quite frequently. It started getting annoying to manually go into the /etc/hosts file and uncomment or re-comment entries all the time, so I came up with a quick and dirty solution to shortcut the process.

This solution involves creating two (or more) /etc/hosts files and writing a very short script for each which activates them.

Read More »

By Sam Bauers | Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , | Comments (12)

MacBook Air, the next Mac Cube?

16 January, 2008 – 6:07 am

So I followed the various feeds of the MacWorld 2008 keynote to find out what’s new and count the “booms” (there was only one I believe), but mostly to find out about the new Apple laptop. I’m looking to replace my partners aging G4 iBook so I was particularly interested. But I’m afraid I’m not won over by the new MacBook Air.

Quite simply it is too expensive and featureless. It has nothing that the cheaper MacBook’s don’t have already. In fact it has less… less I tell you. The only thing going for it is teh sexy and that’s about all that the cube had going for it too. Of course, everyone loved the Cube, everyone wanted the Cube, but nobody bought the Cube. It’s possible Apple might have done it again.

Here’s what you don’t get when you buy a MacBook Air that comes with a MacBook:

  • The ability to upgrade to 4GB of RAM
  • The ability to upgrade to larger hard drives – the SSD option is insanely expensive
  • About an additional 0.4Ghz of processor speed
  • A built-in optical drive
  • Wired ethernet
  • An Apple Remote included in the price – unbelievable, they must cost all of five dollars to make
  • A firewire port
  • Two USB ports – I don’t fancy carrying around a USB hub?
  • By the looks of things, a removable battery – because we know how much people appreciate not having one on the iPod/iPhone

Here’s what you get when you buy a MacBook Air that doesn’t come with a MacBook:

  • A backlit keyboard
  • Multi-touch trackpad

If that weren’t enough, then the pricing difference between the US and Australia is practically extortion. The US price is USD$1799, while the price in Australia is AUD $2499. At the current time that’s about $450 more expensive after conversion. Check for yourself at Google.

So I’m probably going to go and drop some cash on a new MacBook instead. They are faster, cheaper, do more and quite honestly are just as pretty.

By Sam Bauers | Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , | Comments (15)

Why you shouldn’t hire me

11 January, 2008 – 5:17 pm

Last year I had the chance to go to San Francisco to attend the Apple WWDC. I won’t talk about the conference itself, except to say that one thing struck me about it that I still think about. In a conference with about 5,000 attendees, there must have been a maximum of maybe 250 women attending, about one-in-twenty. I think that’s being generous too.

Of course this bias amongst software engineers is no surprise to anyone in the industry, but I think addressing this deficit should be given some sort of priority. I have my reasons and it has little to do with principles of equality. Simply put, software engineering needs a gender balance so that we can get better at what we do. I’m going to use gender balance to generalize my points, but the argument applies to just about any division that we apply to ourselves as humans; race, socio-economic status, etc. as software engineering is basically dominated by white males.

Read More »

By Sam Bauers | Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , | Comments (7)

I can’t imagine 2 million of anything

18 December, 2007 – 9:20 pm

2,000,000!

Today WordPress.com passed 2 million blogs, which is pretty amazing. I’ve only been working with Automattic for about a month and a half now – so I can’t take any credit – but the rest of the team deserve a pat on the back… *pat*

By Sam Bauers | Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , | Comments (3)
Follow

Get every new post delivered to your Inbox.