And you just thought it was a myth

The Skype outage on August 16th

And there my friends, we have the first proof of the technological equivalent of the coordinated toilet flush.

Quote of the Day

From Kevin Gamble:

There is a lot more to building and supporting communities than installing software.

Amen to that.

More on how closed Facebook is

Dear Facebook,

What James said

Hotel California is particularly appropo I thought.

You lose nothing implementing feeds and an OpenID consumer – and you gain a lot. You’ve already shown you had a modicum of sense – but going only part way doesn’t cut it.

Now get with the program.

p.s. This will also be my last post on the matter. Not that you particularly care. But I think the platform is promising enough that I’ve wasted two posts on you – but I’ll move on. Without feeds and open authentication – you won’t.

Quote of the Day

From Terry Chay:

Be honest about the consequences of your actions: whether it is the programming language you choose, a framework/no-framework you adopt, a design pattern you apply, or the choice to simply download someone else’s application and install it. Choose wisely. A lack of self-reflection leads to a poor choice and spells disaster.

I soooo wish I could get this across to more people. My experience in higher education is that we’ll form task forces and work teams over graphics and documents – but there’s way too much “just write this application” or “just install this software” or “there’s this extension that does this…”

The Dinner Table Rule

I’m in complete agreement with The Dinner Table Rule

Getting It

From Christopher Blizzard:

Learning requires the transparency that free and open source software provides.

People – and companies – that don’t get this have some learning to do. People – and companies – that purposefully fight against this idea aren’t just ignorant and ill-informed. They are corrupt.

Because Kittens (and Cows) are Cute

I just saw twitter error 500 on me – and saw their 500 error – which made me look for their 404 error too.

We so need to emulate these.

Only with cows with holes in their sides:

Warning! Warning Label Affixed

Clearly this is the best blog warning system yet (via Rui Carmo).

Of course, there’s still the badgers – which got James’ vote today

Fascinating Story

This article in the Washington Post might be one of the most interesting stories I’ve read in quite some time.

On that Friday in January, those private questions would be answered in an unusually public way. No one knew it, but the fiddler standing against a bare wall outside the Metro in an indoor arcade at the top of the escalators was one of the finest classical musicians in the world, playing some of the most elegant music ever written on one of the most valuable violins ever made.

Highly recommended reading.

wp-atom and wpLicense

Thanks to a couple of line changes in the wpLicense plugin – namely after line 384 – adding:

add_action('atom10_head', 'cc_atom_head');

and because of what is likely an output buffering issue somewhere – I had to change line 84 from:

link rel="license" type="text/html" href="'.licenseUri().'"

to:

link rel="license" type="text/html" href="'.get_option('cc_content_license_uri').'"

(yes, I need to debug this – it’s kind of a hack)

I now have the wpLicense plugin working with Benjamin Smedberg’s atom 1.0 plugin

All this so that Conversations with Plastic Dinosaurs is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 license.