“…every final candidate to work with us for three to eight weeks on a contract basis. Candidates do real tasks alongside the people they would actually be working with if they had the job…The goal is not to have them finish a product or do a set amount of work; it’s to allow us to quickly and efficiently assess whether this would be a mutually beneficial relationship. They can size up Automattic while we evaluate them.“
But that has changed. I’m hard-pressed to think of any paradigm shift, in terms of personnel, quite as drastic and rapid as the new role of the developer. With software being free and readily available, the sole ball and chain left shackled to the ankles of developers was hardware — but with the development of the cloud market, developers have a newfound stray-dog freedom.
What else? Humility and ownership. “It’s feeling the sense of responsibility, the sense of ownership, to step in,” he said, to try to solve any problem — and the humility to step back and embrace the better ideas of others. “Your end goal,” explained Bock, “is what can we do together to problem-solve. I’ve contributed my piece, and then I step back.”
But we can fix it, I swear. We just have to start telling each other the truth. Not the doublespeak bullshit of regulators and lobbyists, but the actual truth. Once we have the truth, we have the power — the power to demand better not only from our government, but from the companies that serve us as well.
I don’t really have any answers here—hell, I’m not entirely sure what I’m griping about. But I do wonder if our collective short-term frustrations leads us to longer-term losses. And seeing the web not as a “platform” but as a “continuum”—a truly fluid, chaotic design medium serving millions of imperfect clients—might help.
Thanks to @timothy_snyder and others on Twitter for sharing these.
This is for my wife’s awesome pet rescue – St. Louis Pet Rescue. It’s our first event of this kind and we really wanted to make it easy for folks to help us promote in an inexpensive way. This is a grayscale 8.5×11 in poster/flyer made totally in Illustrator. I’m not an Illustrator guru, but I’ve been doing more with it recently.
The margins are funny, we’ll be printing a large quantity via a professional printer which allows for smaller margins than say what you’d find on a home ink-jet printer. The top and bottom of the poster are cut off when printed on the latter – eliminating the top row of checks. Not intentionally it looks like the little mouse is crossing a finish line! Don’t believe me? Print out a few copies and take a look. Oh, and while you have a couple on hand, stick them up at work or at the local coffee shop!
I’m a big fan of Panic Inc. I use Coda daily and am an advent follower of the smart dudes out of Portland.
They have a new app out called Status Board that allows you to mix different data sources to provide at-a-glance information on your iPad. What is even better is that it can output to a HD display for big screen status board updates.
At work I help manage a MediaWiki environment that we use to document stuff.1 Lately I’ve been trying to figure out how to leverage the MediaWiki API and the External Data Extension to manipulate data from external sources and content within the wiki.
With a few minutes time I figured out how display statistics from MediaWiki on a Status Board!
Basically I use the MediaWiki API to return some XML into a wiki page. That page is then in turn included as an HTML widget in Status Board. The result is something that looks like this:
Here’s the secret sauce. First create a wiki page to house your content. Then use the #get_web_data function of the External Data extension to pull in a xml feed from the MediaWiki API. Here’s what my code looks like for query of the number of jobs currently in queue.
Some other examples, as you can see in the screenshot above, are a list of the N newest articles, most recent edits, or even additions to specific categories (at the bottom). The sky is the limit!
Sony has this nice little utility for the PS Vita that allows you to sync and backup your content. It’s called Content Manager Assistant (CMA).3 It runs as a menubar item on your Mac (or a taskbar item on Windows) and after initial setup the interaction is managed from the PS Vita itself. You can back up your entire PS Vita, sync music and photos, and the whole thing works over USB or Wi-Fi. Pretty neat.
CMA Menubar Item
As a Playstation Portable owner I was happy to hear that they have a native Mac client. Back in the PSP days we had to hike both ways uphill in the snow with third-party software to sync content to our Macs.4
However – oh, you knew this was coming – there is an issue with how the application is installed. By default, and with no way to change this setting via the application’s preferences, it will run at login for all users. Trying to remove the login item via the Users & Group preferences pane will prove frustrating.
(All? All what? Oh, All Users…
WTF Sony.
Here’s how to remove this. Note: if you update or reinstall CMA, you’ll have to do this all over again. Yay!
First navigate to the “Macintosh HD/Library /Preferences” folder and look for a file called ‘com.apple.loginitems.plist‘. This is not the same as your User directory (~/Library/Preferences). You should be able to open it with something like TextWrangler.5
If the only entry you see in the entire file is for Content Manager Assistant or CMA.app feel free to just delete the file. You’ll be prompted to enter your admin username/password to remove the file.
Update:SkatyGarcia on Reddit schooled me on a much better way to remove CMA from startup. Instead of all the mumbo-jumbo I describe above, instead click the ‘unlock’ icon in the lower left of the Users & Group preference pane. Enter your admin password and then you can remove CMA from the list. Much more logical than my directions.
Restart your Mac, check the Users & Group preference pane and curse the developers at Sony (nicely, they did make an otherwise useful app).
I hope this helps regain some control and relieve some frustration for other Mac/PS Vita folks out there in Internetland.
